IN THIS ISSUE

Effectively and efficiently allocating scarce project resources continues to challenge most organizations—even those with advanced project management capabilities. Conventional project management generates a baseline schedule at the start of a project, assuming all aspects of a project are known with certainty and remain static during the project’s implementation. When projects encounter changes such as scope, underestimation in project activity durations, or unexpected risks, disturbances occur causing the actually realized activity times to differ from the planned ones. This leads to unstable schedules and, oftentimes, undesirable and unexpected project outcomes including project completion delays. In the article, “Robust Resource Allocation Decisions in Resource-Constrained Projects,” Filip Deblaere, Erik Demeulemeester, Willy Herroelen, and Stijn Van de Vonder propose a reactive scheduling policy in the presence of activity duration variability that requires the resource allocation to remain constant. These authors present three integer programming–based heuristics and one constructive procedure for making the resource allocation decisions in such a way that schedule stability is achieved. Compared to other activity uncertainty project scheduling approaches, baseline schedule stability has been enhanced through proper resource allocation rather than insertion of time buffers. Not only can their robust approach provide stability when projects are subject to disruptions, deploying their methods can enhance the stability of multiproject schedules in organizations desiring stability in the assignment of their most critical resources to projects. In many ways this research extends the well-established project scheduling research to new directions for researchers interested in innovative project management approaches that can directly impact managerial practices through improved execution of dynamic projects.