بهبود بهره وری: زمان حیاتی رابط برای وظایف پروژه ها

The paper discusses the management of time-critical operations and their dynamic interrelations in project environments. It is well known in theoretical literature that delayed operative tasks generate a cumulative effect, which delays the overall delivery time making efficient time management difficult. However, practising managers seem to be helpless with this phenomenon if judged by the often reported poor performance of project management. To control the use of time, managers tend to plan safety buffers in their operations, which bias the overall planning of projects. The result of all this is uncontrolled and unknown outcome of the whole operation and, even worse, it inherently makes development efforts very difficult to implement, as the true performance of the organization is hidden in the realization of airy plans. Based on case studies in various industrial environments, we propose that project schedules need to be managed by putting special emphasis on the time-use within individual tasks and by ensuring that work proceeds smoothly along the critical chain of tasks. To enable this, high transparency is needed on how time is used in project organizations.

The main message of this article is to emphasize the importance of ensuring work to proceed efficiently in the individual tasks and to make tasks interface with related tasks fluently. The obtained results for better time-based performance in project management, sharpen our understanding of the applicability of time-based management in the project business environment. These cases were complemented with one non-project industry case, which showed that an analogy between operations management in supply chains and project tasks can be established. In both realms of business the emphasis is on better interfacing between connected tasks through good transparency of time use across the organization. The following propositions are suggested as a result of this study for further research: 1. focusing project management on time-use of critical resources in critical tasks improves the overall performance in project management; 2. time-based management means fundamentally the management of interfaces between tasks and the passing of work from one task and resource to the next one. Transparency in the use of time makes timesaving possible in project schedules; and 3. removing uncertainty from individual tasks into one project buffer enables better overall time control in the project.