Project monitoring and control with an empirically grounded budget-release model
利用97个真实项目数据校准活动持续时间分布和依赖关系，构建了融入预算释放时间约束的改进项目监控模型，并引入两种赶工和快速跟进策略，通过计算实验验证其有效性，为项目经理提供实用启发。
Project monitoring and control (PMC) is a process of measuring a project’s progress and taking corrective action when necessary to ensure successful project completion. However, most existing models lack empirical validation of their assumptions and effectiveness, which limits their practical use. We fill in this gap by using empirical data from 97 real projects to calibrate activity-duration distributions and assess activity-duration dependencies, integrating these empirical foundations into an enhanced PMC model. We further improve the model by incorporating budget-release timing constraints and introducing two new policies for crashing and fast-tracking based on a project’s specific time and cost characteristics. Extensive computational experiments using empirical and artificial data evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. Because the budget-release policies and corrective action types depend on project characteristics such as activity-duration dependencies and topological network structure, key insights from this study can be usefully applied by project managers as heuristics even without a detailed model of their project.