Combining contemporary and traditional project management tools to resolve a project scheduling problem

In this paper we examine a construction project involving the building of large concrete slabs for three buildings in an office park complex. There are finish-to-start (FS) as well as start-to-start (SS) and finish-to-finish (FF) precedence relationships among the project activities. We prepare an initial project schedule using Microsoft Project and manually validate the results using the precedence diagramming method (PDM) procedure. When the client informs us that the schedule must be shortened we find that Microsoft Project does not have the capability for resolving our particular time/cost tradeoff issues. So we revert to the traditional approach for resolving time/cost tradeoffs in projects and develop an original linear programming formulation for the time/cost tradeoff problem when a project is modeled as a precedence diagram. By combining contemporary (Microsoft Project) and traditional (a linear programming time/cost tradeoff model) project management tools we are able to successfully resolve the scheduling issues associated with the slab construction project. Further, we demonstrate the anomalous effects of start-to-start (SS) and finish-to-finish (FF) relationships via our construction project example in which the solution to the time/cost tradeoff problem requires that certain activities be lengthened in order to shorten the project duration.