Methoden en regels voor de Projectplanning: een toepassing van beslissingsondersteunende systemen

An organization is a set of procedures for argumentation and interpretation as well as for solving problems and making decisions. The functioning of organizations requires decision­making at different levels and positions in the organization. Decision­making is the major activity of management. Decision­making involves three phases. The intelligence phase aims at the identification of a problem. The problem description phase consists of the description of the problem and the generation and evaluation of alternatives. The choice phase addresses the selection of one of the available alternatives. In the different phases, decision­makers use decision rules to solve problems. These rules can be divided into formal and informal rules. The formal rules are documented and prescribed in an organization. In contrast, the informal rules are not prescribed and are not necessarily documented in an organization. Planning is a special kind of decision­making. In this study, we define planning as a formalized form of decision­making. Planning requires the specification of procedures concerning how to execute the different phases of the decision­making process. Due to the fact that planning is a special form of decision­making, planning also consists of the phases intelligence, design and choice. Formal procedures should be specified for each of these phases. These formal procedures can, for example, prescribe which tasks should be performed at which moment in time, and how these tasks should be executed. One specific field of decision­making concerns decision­making with respect to projects. This field is the central focus of this study. A project is defined as a group of tasks performed in a definable time period in order to meet a specific set of objectives. A project consists of a number of activities, resources, and interdependencies between these entities. Decision­making with respect to projects is a complex task. Given this complexity, an urgent need arises for the support for this decision­making process. The organization wants to make sure that the decisionmaking is done properly. Delayed delivery of a system can have a major impact on the contractor and the client. The foregoing shows that decision­making with respect to a project is an important though difficult cognitive task. A number of methods exist to support the planning of projects. Examples of these methods are the critical path method, the program evaluation and review technique, and more specific techniques such as function point analysis. The availability of these planning methods provides an opportunity to support the project planning. The planner applies these methods in order to structure and improve the decision process. Which methods should be used,and how they should be applied is not prescribed, but left totally to the discretion of the human decision­maker. Research shows that these methods are often not used, or are not fully utilized. Lack of knowledge and lack of experience are often cited for this. Furthermore, even when the methods are used, the decision­making process cannot be fully conducted with methods only. Even if the planner is familiar with the methods, there are still many smaller problems when applying these methods for which the decision­maker needs to apply his own knowledge and experience. Domain knowledge is thus rather important in the planning of projects. This knowledge consists of informal decision rules, procedures, norms, etc. The aforementioned methods do not provide the possibility to model this domain knowledge. A method like Constraint Satisfaction Programming does provide some opportunities to model domain knowledge, but this knowledge is limited to the search for a solution. The knowledge is mainly restricted to the choice phase of the decision process. These methods fit into the algorithmic rationality framework. From our point of view domain knowledge is also important in the other phases of the decision­making process. We therefore use the notion of procedural rationality. Knowledge based systems provide the ability to model human knowledge. Production rules are particularly suitable for the representation of inferential knowledge of the type that experts use. The foregoing results in the main research question of this study. Is it possible to model the methods and knowledge used in the decision­making process in an information system, and what is an appropriate structure for such a system? This research question is operationalized in a set of questions. These questions involve the methods and rules applied in the decision­making process, an appropriate structure for a support system, design principles for the design and development of such a system, and the actual development of a prototype of such a system. Models play an important role in decision­making. Models provide the opportunity to describe a problem situation and assist in the development and evaluation of alternatives. The type of model affects the support a model can give.