Planning, Interface, Decision Making and Sustainability: Common for Engineering, Project, and Production Managers

Planning, Interface, Decision Making and Sustainability: Common for Engineering, Project, and Production Managers

Programme duration, constraints criticality, managing diverse stakeholders, strategic decision making, and sustainability are common areas of interest in Engineering management, Project management and Production Management. This journal's edition offers a contribution to knowledge and/or novel arguments or ideas, models, methods and procedures to contribute to the fields of research in each of these fields. Czarnigowska and Sobotka suggest that there are many methods that use cost records of completed projects to predict cost of new schemes, unfortunately there seem to be limited similar methods for predicting duration of new schemes especially at the very early project stage. Their paper identified the factors affecting duration of public road projects and established the potentiality of utilising historic data to forecast durations of similar projects by using simple regression models. Nguyen and Chua revealed that criticality in a network should not be limited to the critical path alone; there could be a criticality of constraint in the sequence that may lie between non-critical activities. These sequence-criticality occurrences should not be overlooked for effective project schedule controlling. They argued that constraints management must involve activity-critical constraints and sequence-critical constraints but it could disregard non-critical constraints which they consider as redundant constraints. The paper developed a constraint criticality identification procedure that provides a deeper understanding of criticality of schedule constraints to enable project planners choose appropriate strategies to achieve better project performance.