As time-to-market reduction drives organizations to shorten their schedules, managers strive for optimal scheduling of people and other resources to keep project duration to a minimum. Recent developments in scheduling theory have provided managers with new techniques to find the best schedule for each project. These techniques take into account such factors as tasks of varying duration, precedence constraints, resource capabilities, resource loading, and business objectives. This course presents several scheduling techniques that can be used for various projects including techniques for scheduling simultaneous projects in a matrix organization. Students are shown step-by-step examples of each technique and then work through several exercises in class. Participants learn how to select the best scheduling technique for a particular business objective and how to use schedule performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the optimization techniques.
For Online Sections of this course: Online courses are largely self-study with instructor support through threaded discussion groups, email and sometimes scheduled online chats. Some instructors may allow students to pace themselves following the published syllabus, enabling them to accelerate through the material and finish early. However, all students must complete and submit all assignments by the schedule end date. Grades are issued for the entire class approximately two weeks after the scheduled end date.
