A Better Tool for Planning and Development: the Project Development Scheduling Wizard
Nabeel Khwaja
Nabeel Khwaja, a Research Associate at the Center for Transportation Research (CTR), has the role of managing a $1.4 million interagency cooperative services contract (IAC) between the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) and The University of Texas at Austin.
“One of the major components of the IAC was to develop a comprehensive system to track the process of planning and developing a complex transportation project,” he said. “As transportation projects have become more massive, they require extensive planning due to many factors including environmental issues, permitting, construction issues, and economic impacts of the project. Care is needed during the planning cycle, but planning must move forward efficiently in order to keep projects flowing.”
The Dallas District had over 500 projects in the active development stage in FY2006. In order to manage such a large amount of transportation projects, Khwaja proposed to use the Critical Path Method of scheduling (CPM), a very well established method of schedule management and well-known to TxDOT.
In order to help develop such a large number of “Project Development Schedules (PDS)” Khwaja created a simple wizard, using the computer programming language Java®, called PDS-Wiz, to automate part of the process. The wizard guides the user by asking a series of simple questions and prepares a baseline PDS. The PDS schedule created is easily readable by the industry standard CPM software, Primavera.
Approximately 300 schedules have been created using the wizard in the Dallas District and about 150 in the Austin District.
The wizard is presently capable of producing schedules compatible with the Primavera 4.1 and 5.0 software. Primavera Software has posted an article about the wizard at: http://www.primavera.com/files/customers/TXDOT.pdf.
The information about the PDS wizard was presented at the CTR Annual Symposium in April of 2006 by Brian Barth, Director of Transportation Planning and Development TxDOT Dallas District and John Walewski, Austin IAC Field Manager for the Center for Transportation Research. http://www.utexas.edu/research/ctr/symposium/2006/barth.pdf
Khwaja has another wizard under development that will automate the process of creating a contract-time determination.