Steering projects through simulation: an innovative tool to improve projects guidance efficiency

A project plan hardly reflects what actually happens during the project mainly because it tends to be static, while nowadays projects are extremely dynamic. Moreover, the strong integration between the executing and the planning phases makes the projects guidance very hard, especially under strict time boundaries. The existing project management techniques are quite inadequate to handle these features. For this reason, the paper proposes an innovative tool able to guarantee an improvement of projects guidance efficiency by introducing the simulation into the time-cost trade-off analysis. The model on the basis of which the tool has been developed uses in an integrated manner different operational software: Microsoft’s Project, Visual Basic for Application and Rockwell’s Arena. The tool has been tested on a construction project in progress and has already proved its usefulness in the planning as well as in the executing phases