Grant: Engage Grants Program

Project scheduling concerns the assignment of resources to the requirements in projects. It plays an important role in a business. A pertinent scheduling creates benefits by saving the budget and meeting the requirement of the deadline at the same time. However, conventional project scheduling is normally done manually or at most with some assistant tools, e.g., Microsoft Project Manager. Although with such kinds of tools, people make plans or schedules look better than with manual jobs. For example, filling tables, drawing the PERT charts or the GANT charts, and printing reports are good functions of them. Some other tools may be able to let users assign resources to requirements manually. However, it is impossible to obtain an optimal allocation of resources with such tools. On the other hand, such planning or scheduling is based on static information, such as human resources, budget, and time. It is difficult for such tools to provide instant re-scheduling when changes occur. In reality, situations are always changing in the clients of Collective Minds Consultant Inc. (CMCI). For example, a staff has to leave the company; a new project is initiated; one phase of a project is done and the people involved in this phase are released; one project is aborted because of the client's budget, etc. These unanticipated situations during the execution of a company significantly affect the working efficiency and the profit. A company requires instant and optimal rescheduling when changes require so. The decision maker needs to know a new optimal schedule for the projects affected by the changes in order to predict the budget and time of these projects. Therefore, dynamic scheduling is more than required. Currently, CMCI offers management services to clients with a software product Project Manager Office (PMO) with which resource allocations are done manually by managers. It does not support automatic resource allocations. This proposal is to add a new software package with efficient algorithms to optimize the project resource scheduling. This package is a right add-on for PMO. With this new addition, the value of PMO will be increased significantly.