Planning, Scheduling and Controlling Long Term Projects

Abstract

The challenge that major projects face is that from design to start-up, the mega infrastructure projects can take up to 10-20 years, maybe even longer. The same applies when we need to control the whole life cycle cost of a project: in research of cost overruns, the general opinion is that these projects are out of control. Even long term project can be duly kept under control, but we must consider the fact that controlling a short term and a long term project has a different meaning. The paper will show how a long term project can be controlled using dynamics or stochastic methods and taking into consideration that the meaning of controls can vary according to the project characteristics and duration.(This paper has been presented for the first time at the ICEC World Congress in Milano, 2014, and has then been revised and updated).

Keywords

• long term
• project
• planning
• controls
• stochastic