Project Management and Scheduling

Technische Universität München School of Management, Germany

PMS is an international conference series devoted to Project Management and Scheduling. It was inaugurated by the European Working Group on Project Management and Scheduling (EWG), coordinated by Prof. Jan Weglarz from the Poznan University of Technology (Poland). The EWG gathers together more than hundred members, primarily from various European countries. 

The EWG decided to organize a workshop every two years. The workshops provide an ideal opportunity to discuss recent and important issues in the field of project management (planning, scheduling, control) and machine scheduling (single and parallel machine problems, flow shop, job shop, etc.). This year, the conference is held in München under the guidance of Prof. R. Kolisch. More information can be found at www.pms2014.wi.tum.de.

The Operations Research & Scheduling group is well presented in this year's conference with five presentations.

In "Using real-life baseline schedules for evaluating project control techniques" by Jordy Batselier and Mario Vanhoucke, a new classification model will be presented to collect project data on scheduling, risk and control using ProTrack. More information on the data collection approach can be found here.

In "A novel approach to solve various resource-constrained project scheduling problems" by José Coelho and Mario Vanhoucke, a new solution method to solve various classes of the multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling problem will be presented using SAT solvers. 

"The behaviour of combined neighbourhoods for large scale multi-location parallel machine scheduling problems" presented by Louis-Philippe Kerkhove and Mario Vanhoucke builds further on a recently published paper discussed here. It will provide technical details and extensions on the search mechanism to solve parallel machine scheduling problems.

The presenation "Payment models and net present value optimization for project scheduling" by Pieter Leyman and Mario Vanhoucke presents an optimization algorithm that solves resource-constrained project scheduling problems to maximize the net present value under different classes of payment models.

Finally, in "Expansions for the resource renting problem" by Len Vandenheede, Mario Vanhoucke and Broos Maenhout, the resource renting problem is investigated and extended with different features to meet the demands and requirements in practice.

Integrated Project Management and Control

First comes the theory, then the practice

The new book "Integrated Project Management and Control" has been presented to the audience at the Technical University of München within the presence of Christian Rauscher, senior editor of Business/Economics at Springer.

New book release in München (April 2014) with Christian Rauscher (Senior Editor, Business/Economics at Springer)

About this book

This book presents an integrated approach to monitoring projects in progress using Earned Value and Earned Schedule Management combined with Schedule Risk Analysis. Monitoring and controlling projects involves processes for identifying potential problems in a timely manner. When necessary, corrective actions can be taken to exploit project opportunities or to get faltering projects back on track. The prerequisite is that project performance is observed and measured regularly to identify variances from the project baseline schedule. Therefore, monitoring the performance of projects in progress requires a set of tools and techniques that should ideally be combined into a single integrated system. The book offers a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand the theory first and then to use it in practice with software tools.

Written for students, professionals and academics with an interest and/or experience in running projects as well as for newcomers in the area of project control with a basic grasp of the Earned Value, Earned Schedule and Schedule Risk Analysis concepts.

Published by Springer (www.springer.com) in 2014 (ISBN 978-3-319-04330-2).

Download folder here.

The Art of Project Management

A Story about Work and Passion, Edition 2

Somewhat more than a year ago, the first edition of "The Art of Project Management" has been put available as a free download (see the blog of March 14, 2013). While last year, the book has been made available on my 40th birthday, today, it's my father's 65th birthday. An ideal occasion to put the second edition online with updates and new articles. And just like last year, the book is freely available on the OR-AS website. Just pay with a tweet.

What's new?

11 new articles on collaborations, products, research and education has been added to the book:

• With Walt Lipke: From emerging insert to best practice
• With College of Performance Management: Joined forces between Europe and the US
• ORASTalks: The app for and by students and professionals
• Bookstore: Written communication with a targeted audience
• Classifying Research: Stimulating future research avenues
• Towards Big Data: Empirical validation on real projects
• Project Contracting: A prescriptive analysis of inventive contracts for project management
• Constructing Schedules: Optimizing cash flows
• Blended learning: Enhancing student learning and engagement
• Teaching Abroad: A class with only students, and no teacher
• References: Quality control using a peer review mechanism

Updates

4 articles have been updated with recent news.

• With EVM Europe: The yearly conference where research meets practice
• Software in the classroom: If something is worth doing once, it's worth building a tool to do it
• Project Management case studies: A student should be an active participant, not a passive consumer
• PMI Belgium’s University Contest: Praise youth and it will prosper

YouTube Movie

A summary overview of the book can be found on YouTube.

New publication: Managing Cost and Earned Value

In the fifth edition of the book "Gower Handbook of Project Management" edited by Rodney Turner (Lille School of Management and The Centre for Project Management, Kemmy Business School, Limerick), a new article entitled "Managing Cost and Earned Value" has been published. The article gives a summary overview of Earned Value Management and Earned Schedule, but also gives a basic summary of the top-down EVM project control approach and its efficiency as originally tested in "Measuring Time". Obviously, references to ProTrack have been made since it still is our tool to analyze project data and to carry out research on this data.

The Handbook gives an introduction to, and overview of, the essential knowledge required for managing projects. The team of expert contributors, selected to introduce the reader to the knowledge and skills required to manage projects, includes many of the most experienced and highly regarded international writers and practitioners.

Machine Scheduling

OR-AS' main focus is on Integrated Project Management an Control, but there is more. For example the research on hybrid (meta-)heuristic optimization for single machine, parallel machine and job shop scheduling problems.

1. An overview of genetic algorithms for the single machine scheduling problem
2. Single machine scheduling with release times and family setups
3. Single machine scheduling with precedence constraints 
4. Unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem
5. A hybrid single and dual population search procedure for the job shop scheduling problem
6. The parallel machine scheduling problem: A case study
7. The flexible job shop problem: A case study
8. Comparison of priority rules for the job shop scheduling problem under different objective functions

Click on the beautiful picture below to enter our machine scheduling page.

Master in Operations Management

It isn't big data but big algorithms that is going to change the world.

Operations Management

Courses

• Project Management provides an understanding of key issues and applied methodologies relating to Integrated Project Management and Control. It provides the essentials a project manager should have when faced with preparing the work necessary for managing and controlling projects in progress, with a clear focus on integrating scheduling, risk and control to set up a project management and control system using the available tools and techniques and best practices.
• Production Strategy. In order to achieve the flexible, cost-effective production systems required to survive in today's volatile, global markets, a thorough understanding of the basic dynamics of factories/services and their link with the competitive strategy of a firm is essential. 
• Total Quality Management deals with questions on how to produce high quality goods or services, discusses ways to discover the reliability of suppliers, presents techniques on how to decide whether or not to accept the raw materials received, assesses software tools to monitor production systems with high quality standards, and much more.

• Applied Operations Research is a decision making for business case study in which students are responsible for a real business problem. They should act as a consultant and must analyze and define the company problem, suggest a novel solution, think about an implementation strategy as well as validate the return of investment for their suggested approach. 
• Supply Chain Management. The objective of this course is to make the students aware of the importance of supply chain management and logistics and to teach them the concepts and techniques necessary to analyze and optimise a supply chain. This way companies are in a position to respond to the increasing pressure to shorten delivery times, enhance flexibility and reduce costs.

Blended learning

Who

Lecturers

Guest lecturers

Why

The Value of Project Management

The course "Project Management" given at Ghent University, Vlerick Business School and University College London relies on expertise and the OR&S research group and products from OR-AS. But why do we teach Project Management to these students?

The answer is given in the movie below. Get to know your learning outcomes, the topics covered, the essential readings and why you should subscribe and follow this training.

PM at UGent: They did it again

University Contest 2014

When: Tuesday 20 May 2014
Where: FoMu (Fotomuseum) -  Waalse Kaai 47 - 2000 Antwerp
What: The chapter evening of PMI Belgium titled "Coach, how do we win this game?"

For my Project Management (PM) course at the Business Engineering Programme (Handelsingenieurs) at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration from Ghent University, all students have to submit a written manuscript and have to give an oral presentation about a PM topic. The three best manuscripts are selected and sent to PMI Belgium. An international jury of PMI Belgium members, an American and an Australian professional selects the most relevant and inspiring manuscript and awards it by the PMI Belgium University Contest prize.

And now, today, May 20th, the university contest winners will receive their award.

And the winners are…

This year, the students Astrid De Keyzer, Jolien Dobbelaere, Shana Raes, Lisa Vandevoorde and Dorien Van Steenberge have been awarded for their paper titled "Managing Product Innovation: A study of product innovation in project management" in which they present their PM analysis of risk management and earned value management on a project from Daikin by integrating the principles and best practices from the course with ProTrack and P2 Engine. 

First the award, then the action (presentation)

The five girls of the winning group in full action!

Congratulations to the five students! ... well done! Everybody was enthusiastic about their presentation, the "impress me" mission was a success and the interviews afterwards tasted like their 15 minutes of fame. 

• Download their winning manuscript.
• Download their presentation.

By the way, Stephan and me were looking at those young girls while they were giving a presentation, saying to each other "we're getting old". That is slang, you know, for "look how proud we are!"

Relevant article: University Contest 2013.

Meet our other students at the OR&S group (in Dutch).

Project Management Book Performance Report 2013

Only recently, I received a book performance report from Springer for my first two books I have written on Project Management, Measuring Time (2010) and Dynamic Scheduling (2012, second edition in 2014). Obviously, my third book, Integrated Project Management and Control, is not in the report yet since it has been published in 2014, which is not included in the report.

It should be noted that the report concentrates on the electronic version of the publications, so the numbers below only reflect the number of chapter downloads for ebooks, and do not include any data for printed books.

Measuring Time

ISBN 978-1-4419-1014-1 (ebook)
ISBN 978-1-4419-1013-4 (print book, not included in the report)

Since its online publication on October 09, 2009, there has been a total of 5,215 chapter downloads for this book on SpringerLink. The table shows the download figures for the last three years. This means that this research book on Earned Value Management was positioned at the median in the list of downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2013. Not bad for a (not very easy) research book.

2011	1,010	n.a.	n.a.
2012	1,021	2,832	n.a.
2013	2,031	9,701	n.a.
OR-AS webpage	link	link	link
Springer brochure	link	link	link

Dynamic Scheduling

ISBN 978-3-642-25175-7 (ebook)
ISBN 978-3-642-25174-0 (print book, not included in the report)

Since its online publication on February 10, 2012, there has been a total of 12,533 chapter downloads for this book on SpringerLink. The table shows the download figures for the last two years. This means that this overview book on Dynamic Scheduling was one of the top 25% most downloaded eBooks in the relevant Springer eBook Collection in 2013.

Conclusion

The relevance of ebooks in addition to the printed books is clear: The electronic version reaches a broad readership and provides increased visibility for the work done. This is especially noticeable in the long run: statistical data show that the usage of electronic publications remains stable for years after publication, so I truly hope that the figures above are representative for what I can expect for my books in the years to come. Next year, my latest book Integrated Project Management and Control should also enter this list.

Thank you, Springer…

Optimization at the Mediterranean coast of Spain

A delegation of our Operations Researchers from the OR&S group at Ghent University are now in Barcelona, Spain for the 20th Conference of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies (IFORS).

The full conference schedule can be downloaded here but of course, what's really really interesting are our presentations, and that's why I have summarized them along the following lines:

Presentation 1. Introducing Overtime in the Resource Renting Problem
Len Vandenheede, Mario Vanhoucke, Broos Maenhout
Abstract: The use of overtime has frequently been studied in literature. Furthermore, it is applied in real-life for several reasons. However, research on the project scheduling problem (PSP) in combination with overtime are scarce. We aim to introduce the use of overtime in the Resource Renting Problem. We have developed a method to study the trade-off between stricter deadlines and a higher cost due to scheduled overtime. A computational experiment will demonstrate how the use of overtime and resource scheduling can lead to a more efficient use of resources and a better human resource management.

Presentation 2. Payment Models and NPV Maximization in Project Scheduling
Pieter Leyman, Mario Vanhoucke
Abstract: In project scheduling literature several payment models exist. Although the goal is always to maximize the project NPV, these payment models have different characteristics which typically require distinct approaches to maximize each model’s NPV. We propose a general local search capable of handling the different NPV profiles efficiently. This local search consists of several parts which can be turned on or off, depending on the payment model. Specifically, this methodology is applied to the resource-constrained project scheduling problem with discounted cash flows.

Presentation 3. A Forecasting Approach for Project Duration and Cost based on Exponential Smoothing
Jordy Batselier, Mario Vanhoucke
Abstract: In this paper, the earned value management (EVM) project control methodology is integrated with the exponential smoothing forecasting approach. This results in an extension of the known EVM and earned schedule (ES) time and cost forecasting formulas. The enhanced EVM performance factor depends on only one smoothing parameter, which facilitates calculation. Moreover, this parameter can be dynamically adjusted during project progress according to information of past performance and/or anticipated management actions. The novel method is evaluated based on extensive real-life project data.

Presentation 4. Strategic Incentive Contract Design for Projects
Louis-Philippe Kerkhove, Mario Vanhoucke
Abstract: The agency problem between the owner and the contractor in a project environment is often resolved using multidimensional incentive contracts. This research evaluates the design of such contracts from a quantitative perspective, presenting several guidelines for strategic contract design. The analysis is based on high-level models of the cost/time/scope and incentive pay-offs. Using these models, computational experiments are carried out on both real and simulated data. The presentation will focus on the preliminary results of these experiments and the managerial implications thereof.

Presentation 5. Case-based learnings for configuring custom packs
Brecht Cardoen, Jeroen Belien, Mario Vanhoucke
Abstract: A custom pack combines medical disposable items into a single sterile package that is used for surgical procedures. In this paper we propose a mathematical programming approach to guide hospitals in developing or reconfiguring their custom packs. A computational experiment, based on real data of a medium-sized Belgian hospital, compares the optimized results with the performance of the hospital’s current configuration settings and indicates how to improve future usage.

Coming soon in academic papers near you!

PMI Belgium's University Contest

Remember the first edition in 2011

In 2011, the collaboration between myself, Stephan and PMI Belgium that already existed for years was extended by involving my students of the Project Management course module. It has led to the first University Contest with the winners Alexander De Cuyper, Jan Dierckx, Peter Van Vooren and Hristo Petrov for their paper entitled "Impact of methodology and software on the planning of a construction project".

In this paper, a comparison between a number of software tools was made based on project data from a construction project in Belgium. The software tools FastTrack and MS Project were used in the benchmark, and of course, our own ProTrack tool was also included. An analysis on the use of resources as well as a detailed risk analysis has resulted in a number of strategies to optimize the time/cost balance of the project.

Since then, this university contest has been repeated every year, and blogs have been written about every edition. Since this first edition has not received any blog summary (the OR-AS blog has started after 2011), a small YouTube movie is now available to see the students of the very first PMI Belgium's University Contest edition again.

^{A summary of the first University Contest in 2011}

Did you know...

That the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration has a second collaboration with PMI Belgium? Every year, the best PM master's thesis is awarded at the graduation ceremony of our faculty. Within a few weeks, the winner of this award for 2014 will be known. Keep an eye on the OR-AS blog, or just join us at the graduation ceremony (Sept 27, 2014 10:00 at the Universiteitsforum (UFO)).

New publication on Statistical Project Control

Finally, after years of hard work, our first paper on Statistical Project Control has been published in the flagship journal Omega - The International Journal of Management Science.

The peer-reviewed process

An important aspect of our research is to provide valid answers on the criticism we receive in the peer review process of our paper submissions. The importance of the peer review process cannot be underestimated. It is an essential and critical part of the functioning of the scientific community, of quality control, and the self corrective nature of science. To that respect, the non-peer reviewed articles are nothing more than a way to spread some ideas to a bigger audience, which is an essential goal of research. But only a peer review mechanism has the necessary component of the essential quality control of research.

The current paper on Statistical Process Control is an excellent illustration of how hard this process can be, but also how it finally results in a much more improved version of the initial manuscript. Our paper has been initially submitted on 10/01/2012, and three additional revisions were necessary, leading to literally almost 100 extra pages of material and terrabytes of additional data to run new tests, before it could be accepted. Finally, the paper has been accepted in the third revision round in June 2014 under the title "Setting tolerance limits for statistical project control using earned value management" authored by Jeroen Colin and Mario Vanhoucke.

^{The peer-reviewed paper process: click on the picture to access the result}

This process is often unknown or not well understood by practitioners (non-academics) who write articles in the more business-oriented journals without much rework. Therefore, you must know that every academic paper is the result of years of hard work, literally months of testing on fast computers using a sound and proven methodology, additional months to years of working on the revisions and of course also a little bit of luck. Every little detail matters and the smallest ambiguity can lead to a rejection. There's no need to mention that we are proud on the outcome.

The paper

In the latest version of the book "The Art of Project Management: A Story about Work and Passion", a short overview of the research paper has been written as follows: Project control systems must indicate the direction of change in preliminary planning variables compared with actual performance. In case the project performance of projects in progress deviates from the expected planned performance, a warning must be indicated by the control system as a trigger to take corrective actions.

Research

A new Statistical Project Control (SPC) approach based on the principle of statistical process control charts is presented in order to improve the discriminative power between normal and abnormal project progress situations. Based on the existing and commonly known Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, the project control charts will have an improved ability to trigger actions when variation in a project's progress exceeds certain predefined thresholds.

Methodology

A large number of simulation experiments has been set up using P2 Engine running on Ghent University’s super computer infracture, leading to gigabytes of data in order to test the ability of the statistical project control charts to discriminate between random and assignable variation. An intensive analysis of the generated data is done to compare the use of statistical project control limits with traditional earned value management thresholds and to validate their power to report warning signals when projects run into danger.

Results

The results of the computational experiments show that:

• The use of SPC outperforms the best practices in EVM.
• The Earned Schedule (ES) approach performs better than the traditional EVM approach.
• A combined use of X-charts and XR-charts allows to detect a variety of project problems.
• An extended multi-variate analysis control approach leads to control efficiency improvements.

New publication on Machine Scheduling

Using heuristics and exact methods in a hybridized way

There is a close link between machine scheduling and project scheduling, and the expertise in one field can often be used for the other. This is certainly true for the solution methodologies to solve these scheduling problems, and the new publication is an excellent example of the use of Operations Research techniques that we use for scheduling projects, but now apply to solve machine scheduling problems.

Most of the papers in our research field solve problems with either exact methods (that are often slow but guarantee the find the optimal solution) or heuristic methods (that are often lightning fast but can only produce a high-quality near optimal solution), but there are few examples where both are combined.

In our new paper, both methods are used. A metaheuristic solution approach is used to solve the problem in a fast and efficient way, and an exact branch-and-bound procedure is added on top of it to calculate bounds. The paper is entitled “Hybrid tabu search and a truncated branch-and-bound for the unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem” written by members from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (Ghent University, Belgium) and the University of Lisbon (Portugal). It has been in the review process for a while (almost two years with 3 revisions) but finally, it has been accepted by the journal “Computers and Operations Research”.

^{Click on the picture to access the journal paper}

The abstract of the paper is as follows: We consider the problem of scheduling a number of jobs on a number of unrelated parallel machines in order to minimize the makespan. We develop three heuristic approaches, i.e., a genetic algorithm, a tabu search algorithm and a hybridization of these heuristics with a truncated branch-and-bound procedure. This hybridization is made in order to accelerate the search process to near-optimal solutions. The branch-and-bound procedure will check whether the solutions obtained by the meta-heuristics can be scheduled within a tight upper bound. We compare the performances of these heuristics on a standard data set available in the literature. Moreover, the influence of the different heuristic parameters is examined as well. The computational experiments reveal that the hybrid heuristics are able to compete with the best known results from the literature.

The use of metaheuristics for machine scheduling is not new at the Operations Research & Scheduling group and we have blogged about this topic before:

• Overview: Introduction to machine scheduling and a link to our machine scheduling research page.
• Case study: Publication of a procedure to schedule the production for knitted fabrics in Belgium). This study has been awarded by Arcelor Mittal.
• Book: The use of a genetic algorithm for machine scheduling, published as a book chapter.

Teaching Project Management

Enhancing student learning and engagement

A new article has been published in the new Journal of Modern Project Management and describes how students can learn by doing, how they can get involved in the professional community and how the teaching material is adapted to the ditigal age.

Blended learning is an ideal way to design course modules that mix different kinds of teaching methods and course material to engage students and bring them closer to the relevance of the course content, hereby stimulating engagement, involvement and even enthusiasm resulting in a better learning experience.

In a previous article in the same journal, I wrote about the link between research and teaching at our OR&S group. In the new article, I focus on the Project Management course module and describe the teaching material used in class that includes:

• Business games, including our Project Scheduling Game.
• Software tools, including ProTrack.
• Online learning using PM Knowledge Center.
• Project Management books
• Case studies available at PM Game Center.
• Interaction with EVM Europe.
• Awards given by e.g. PMI Belgium.

The articles in the JMPM journal are not free of charge, but the journal editor gave me the opportunity to put the new article online. You can download it here for free. In return, we just ask you a little favour: share and promote the JMPM on facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, the ProTrack Community, ...anywhere!

Message to the Master students

Course material available for sale at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (FEB).

* Course Project Management:
A book with all slides as well as the handboook: “Project Management with Dynamic Scheduling” are available for sale on Thursday 25/09, from 18h45 to 20h15 in the Foyer (FEB, Ghent).

* Course Applied Operations Research:
A book with all slides is available for sale Wednesday 24/09 from 17h15 tot 18h45 in the Foyer (FEB, Ghent). There is no handbook.

^{Click on the picture for more information about sales dates}

Arcelor Mittal loves Project Management

The students Bert Aelter en Jules Branswyck have received the ArcelorMittal prize for the best thesis during the graduation ceremony for the Business Engineering students (Handelsingenieurs) on 27/09/2014. The thesis was supervised by Mario Vanhoucke and Len Vandenheede, members of the OR&S group at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration from the Ghent University. The award was given by Mr. Erik Roelandts from Arcelor Mittal.

Congratulations to Jules and Bert, and thank you to Erik from Arcelor Mittal!

The picture below is not very clear, but you should see, from left to right: Jules Branswyck, Erik Roelandts and Bert Aelter

In their thesis “Het introduceren van teamrotatie in een projectomgeving”, the students have investigated a combination of a traditional project scheduling problem and a team composition problem. Both problems have been studied extensively in the literature, but a combined approach has not been proposed yet. The focus on the scheduling part lies on minimizing the time and cost of the project, taking into account very case-specific resource constraints into account. More precisely, the optimizer calculates the so-called social cohesion between resources (people), and tries to build teams that consist of people with similar needs and/or preferences. They have used scatter search and genetic algorithm techniques to solve the problem. Currently, we are working hard on writing an academic paper that will soon be submitted to an international journal. Congratulations to our two students!

It's not the first time that Arcelor Mittal recognizes the importance of Operations Research and Project Management. In previous editions, they have awarded our master thesis students for similar topics, as can be seen in the list below:

• 21/09/2013: Pieter Beeckman and Kenny Vanleeuwen: “An accuracy study and improvement of a time-dependent EV model using Monte Carlo simulation”
• 22/09/2012: Louis-Philippe Kerkhove: “A study of exact and meta-heuristic planning techniques for unrelated parallel machines with common servers in the textile industry”
• 07/07/2011: Len Vandenheede, “A case study for multi-project planning”
• 15/07/2010: Frederic Steen: "Applying the shifting bottleneck procedure for a real-life production problem”
• 07/07/2007: Bruce Fecheyr-Lippens, “Personnel scheduling in the airline sector: Case Brussels Airlines”

PMI Belgium awards young potential

The student Annelies Martens has received the PMI Belgium Master Thesis Award for the best thesis on Project Management during the graduation ceremony for the Business Engineering students (Handelsingenieurs). The thesis was supervised by Mario Vanhoucke from the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration from the Ghent University.

In her thesis "Statistical Project Control", Annelies has tested various new ideas on how to improve the efficiency of project control using advanced statistical techniques. Using the simulation methodology presented in "Measuring Time" and the software tool P2 Engine, she has analyzed various ideas that will certainly be continued at the OR&S group.

Annelies will continue to work on this topic at the OR&S research group and will therefore contribute to the future research on statistical project control as well as to the future development of OR-AS' software tool ProTrack.

Summary

Download the press summary of the PMI Master Thesis Award for Annelies here.

Future

The work of Annelies is currently under further development and an academic article will be written on this interesting topic. Annelies will therefore spend the coming 4 years on this topic and write a PhD thesis. The recognition of PMI Belgium is therefore not only a recognition of young potential but is also an investment in the future. It is an ideal start for future research projects and it helps us in narrowing the gap between sound academic research and practical relevance. As far as we are concerned, this collaboration may continue for many years to come. More information on previous awards can be found at the 2011 and 2012 links.

New master thesis topics for Business Engineering

The new topics for the students of the first master Business Engineering - Operations Management are now available online on the OR&S website. The students have to select a topic of their choice with one of the many promotors of our faculty, and they have almost two years the time to work on this thesis.

Here is the timeline for the students who wish to perform a study on Project Management:

• Final decision of topic: 15/12/2015
• First report with intermediate results: 8/05/15
• Final report with all results: 18/05/16
• Oral defence: June 2016

In 2013, 13 of our students have presented their preliminary work on EVM Europe with great success! If you want to know more about the various topics, visit our OR&S website. This website is unfortunately (for the foreigners) in Dutch. As small English summary of the requirements of a Master thesis can be viewed at the movie below.

Driessnack Distinguished Service Award

EVM Europe Ambassador, Mr Walt Lipke attended the EVM World Conference held in San Antonio, Texas where he was presented with the Driessnack Distinguished Service Award by the President of the College of Performance Management (CPM), Mr. Gary Troop.

Walt was nominated for this award (which is the CPM’s most prestigious award for distinguished service) by the President of the EVM Europe Association, Prof. Dr. Mario Vanhoucke and Treasurer, Ing. Stephan Vandevoorde in a letter to CPM in September 2013.

Gary Troop’s introductory speech highlighted the award criteria which are:

Awarded to individuals who have made major contributions to project performance management policy, concepts, and practices, which have national and international implications.  This recognition is awarded to individuals who have provided critical contributions to the evolution of Earned Value Management and project planning and control standards, research, and education, and have promoted the exchange of theory, development, and application among project management professionals.
Gary then focused on Walt’s contribution to the project performance management community which met the criteria of “national and international implications” from the development of the Earned Schedule which Gary also noted has been validated by academic research at Ghent University in Belgium and the US Air Force Institute of Technology in the United States.
 

In Walt’s response, he said that when he was notified of his:

“selection for the award by CPM’s President, Gary Troop. I was thrilled. The Driessnack Distinguished Service Award is one for which, in my wildest brain storms, I never thought I would be, even considered.”

Walt then spoke of his personal dilemma in deciding whether or not it would be necessary to receive the award in person when he had an “epiphany”:

“I came to realize that individual awards aren’t solely for the named person. It is more so a recognition of an idea or an ideal. Yes, of course, the named person has a significant role … but, there is a much larger recognition.”

before concluding:

“And so …I am here. I am here to accept this prestigious award. It is an award …not only for me …but for all who have participated and made the investment to apply, research, and support Earned Schedule. It is a validation of the idea. With this thought, thanks to all in their support of Earned Schedule …and me, as well. Finally, I am reconciled. …Thank you CPM for this recognition. It is a great honour.”

The Board of the EVM Europe Association is very pleased that CPM accepted the nomination submitted from Europe for Walt to receive the Driessnack Distinguished Service Award.

We look forward to a continued collaboration with Walt on the research projects we are conducting in Europe and ways we can achieve our mission of “Research Meets Practice” in the years ahead.

More than 10 years ago,

Two people with an interest in Project Management met each other on a workshop in Antwerp. 

Ever since, these two, Mario Vanhoucke and Stephan Vandevoorde, have done work in various companies and have presented their results at workshops all over the world. They work closely together on tightening the bridge between research & practice. They worked in Belgium, London, Spain and Switzerland, but also in Lisbon, Malaysia, and the US.

On Saturday, October 4, 2014, Stephan has given an overview of the research done at Ghent University at PMI Belgium’s BeLux day.

Click on the picture to see the presentation slideshow

This video gives an overview of the research done at Ghent University at the Operations Research & Scheduling group. It is a presentation that starts with a short introduction on the collaboration between Mario Vanhoucke and Stephan Vandevoorde, followed by a research overview given by Stephan at the PMI BeLux day in 2014. More information can be found at www.or-as.be or download the ORASTalks app in the Apple Store or Google Play Store.

Tags: Project Management, Earned Value Management, Dynamic Scheduling