Title: An Innovative Approach to Teaching Project Resource Leveling
Abstract: This paper presents an innovative approach using an integrated example for teaching students effective schedule creation and resource management using Linear Programming.This approach is designed to deepen student understanding of the various factors that should be considered for effective project decision making.Successful schedule control requires an understanding of important project elements to include requirements, schedule, budget, assumptions, constraints, and objectives.These elements can compete against each other and makes resource allocation difficult to address without using optimization techniques.Engineering students in introductory project management courses are typically taught how to identify and sequence activities to develop a project schedule using simple example problems.These examples tend to be composed of only a few activities and resources which support development of an initial schedule and often do not address the impact of scope changes that require reallocation of resources and revisions to the schedule.Successfully adjusting resource allocation to address project scope and activity duration changes requires a solid understanding of project crashing.Project crashing involves shortening project duration by reducing the time of one or more activities.Crashing is done by increasing the resources to the project, and involves cost and schedule trade-offs.The integrated example focuses on minimizing the total cost that results from (a) resource allocation, (b) activity dependencies, (c) timing of deliverables using the available spreadsheets.The method has been introduced in both undergraduate and graduate introductory project management classes.Student feedback shows that the method supports concept mastery by demonstrating how to achieve balanced solutions.