Project Management Alternatives to Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT)

Project Management Alternatives to PERT
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The Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) is an effective tool for project risk assessment. Project managers and other professionals use the tool to plan projects and determine how much time and money would be needed to complete them. As a result, PERT is a tool for graphically representing a project's schedule and displaying all individual activities required to finish a task. PERT typically take the form of charts because their nodes, which can be either circular or rectangular, are used to represent project milestones and events. The many tasks and their dependencies are then represented through nodes' connections via lines or vectors. PERT is a practical and affordable method for project management, making it a helpful tool for managers. Executives can employ it to keep track of the assets needed at any given point in the project's production cycle. By understanding the flow of resources and a project's milestones, managers may create an effective project route with PERT analysis, which makes it simple to combine data and information from every department inside a company.
However, the PERT has a few drawbacks that make it less helpful in tracking the progress of pertinent projects. Its shortcomings include being extremely subjective. This would imply that it incorporates erroneous information or irrational time and expense estimations that could lead to inaccurate findings. Additionally, it tends to be deadline-driven and may under-communicate the financial situation of a project. The PERT chart creation process is also highly labor-intensive, and updating and maintaining its information would take more time and resources. In addition, task durations are assumed as independent random variables in PERT analysis. Although classical PERT offers helpful estimates, its presumptions introduce some potential sources of bias, which can result in an underestimating of a project's completion time and a high degree of mistakes when the mean and standard deviation are calculated. Due to the difficulties connected with PERT, researchers have offered different substitute approaches that project managers might use to produce an objective project schedule.
According to Klastorin & Mitchell (2020), other options include the application of contracts, whereby managers can decide to engage in specific forms of contracts with clients to guarantee that a project, once it has begun, is effectively finished. Since project management prioritizes cost management and cutting expenses wherever possible, c...