Project Planning and Control

Abstract

With projects growing in complexity and size, their planning and control becomes an increasingly important project management function. Elementary methods and tools for accomplishing this task are described in this chapter. Basically, project planning consists of developing a schedule and a budget for the execution of the project. Most commonly, this is done by applying network based planning methods. Due to their importance, a large number of publications describing and discussing such methods are available. Among the most popular approaches are CPM (critical path method) and PDM (precedence diagramming method). Comprehensive introductions into these methods can be found in Küpper et al. (1975), Elmaghraby (1977), Wiest and Levy (1977), Moder et al. (1983), Shtub et al. (1994), Badiru and Pulat (1995), and Domschke and Drexl (1998, chapter 5).