Design and development of project planning and monitoring software

Abstract

The ever increasing importance of Project Management is justified for the necessity of companies to manage the real change in a timely and cost-effective manner. This fact has been reflected in the main Business Schools, which emphasize it in their educational programs. In this context, it is necessary to have available software based on the main concepts and techniques taught to the future business leaders. The purpose of this project is the development of a project management simulator, adapted to the educative and academic necessities of IESE Business School. The software will be used in a Master in Business Administration (MBA), but is also easily adaptable to executive programs. The design of the application is aimed to make its use easy and intuitive, supported by MS Excel graphical environment and by Visual Basic for Applications programming dynamics. The user will be capable to do project planning with unlimited resources (Critical Path Method or CPM) and limited resources (Critical Chain Project Management), incorporating project uncertainty and task duration estimations. In addition, project budget and resource leverage in the CCPM case, can be obtained. Once the planning has finished, the software will allow the current project monitoring by different techniques: visually using a Gantt diagram, the project buffer penetration and the Earned Value Management.