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projects: buying the land; soliciting bids; breaking ground, constructing the facility, furnishing the building, and contracting utilities; ordering inventories; hiring, staffing, and training employees; etc. It normally takes nine months from the beginning of the project until the doors of the facility are open—nine months of money flowing out of the firm. By using the systems perspective and recognizing that the goal is to make money on the project (i.e., the completion of the project is to have a money-making machine in place producing), they might restructure the network as a single project by running several activities in parallel—building, ordering furnishings, setting up utilities, etc.—and complete the project in three months. The project end is defined as opening the door for business instead of completing construction. This recognition of the type of project and its real scope allows the business to generate profits after three months instead of after nine months.

Cause: As traditionally applied, PERT/CPM does not recognize all of the activities required to achieve the goal of a project and the organization.

This is addressed by Guideline II.

The Project Management Dilemma

Williams (2001) states that scheduling presents a dual challenge in project management. On one hand, there is the need to match capacity to the demand placed on it—the resources must be available for use. On the other hand, idle capacity will cost the firm money—the resources must be fully utilized. The overall goal of most organizations is to be successful (to make more money in most cases), and all managers in the organization share this goal. A project manager is usually assigned to plan and execute a project successfully (on time, on budget, and to specifications). To ensure that the resources are available at the proper times, the project managers develop detailed schedules for each resource manager.

These resources, however, are not controlled by the project manager but are managed by resource managers. For the organization to be successful, the resource managers are charged with minimizing the operating expenses associated with using the resources. This directive to the resource managers usually translates into keeping the resources busy at all times. The resource managers are given a budget and measured against the budget and the efficient use of their resources. The dilemma is then between “The resource managers must have the resources available for the projects” and “The resource managers must keep their resources busy.” There is a constant tug of war between project managers trying to complete projects within time, budget, and specifications and resource managers trying to make efficient use of resources.

In a multi-project environment, the resource managers being pulled across activities on different projects exacerbates this dilemma; each project manager believing that his or her project is the most important, most late, most critical, etc. In practice, the environment worsens. A product line manager might have a number of projects underway as does another product line manager. In a given time period, we can have a few projects in each product line competing with other projects in the product line or projects from different product lines competing for common resources. The resource manager is pulled from one activity to another, possibly without completing the first activity. The resource manager usually responds to the squeaky wheel, the project manager who yells the loudest, instead of having a formal mechanism for prioritizing activities within and across projects. In most situations, the resources also multitask (start one activity, stop, start another, stop, start another, stop, go back to the first, stop, go to the third, etc.) across activities, which generally extends the activity and completion times of each activity significantly and possibly delays the completion of one or more projects. This multitasking undoubtedly affects project quality as well.

Cause: The resource and project managers are unable