Since the initial release of ProTrack V3, we received some questions and suggestions from our users. A short overview of modifications in this release:

• There were some problems with PMKC Updates. ProTrack could sometimes be completely unresponsive.
• There was some confusion with regards to the resource unit label. We have restricted the valid input to prevent this confusion.
• The ProTrack file format is extended to include more resource information.

We are looking foward to more feedback to further improve our products! 

We are on twitter...

follow us for the latest news and updates! Go to your Twitter account, search for @ORASTalks and follow us.

At @ORASTalks, you will find regular tweets on Project Management topics, including dynamic scheduling topics, risk analysis, project control, earned value management and statistical project control, with references to new research projects, state-of-the-art best practices and ways to get in contact with academics and practitioners.

Since a few weeks, the book "Project Management with dynamic scheduling: baseline scheduling, risk analysis and project control" written by Mario Vanhoucke is published by Springer. The content of the book can be summarized in five main parts:

The 13th International Conference on Project Management and Scheduling was interesting and inspiring.

Yesterday evening, Wednesday April 5, 2012, the biyearly conference was closed with a network dinner at the Brabanthallen in Leuven (Belgium).

The 13th International Conference on Project Management and Scheduling took place in Leuven, from April 1 till April 4, in the buildings of the Faculty of Business and Economics and was organized by the Operations Management Research Group of the Faculty of Business and Economics (KULeuven).

At the chapter event of PMI-Belgium held on March 7, 2012, five students of Mario Vanhoucke have received the PMI-Belgium University Contest prize for their written manuscript titled "Windmolenpark Maldegem"

Last week, we introduced a new licensing model for our Project Scheduling Game (PSG), especially targeted towards Project Management lecturers. The new PSG Suite license is valid for one Project Management course and includes:

Researchers tend to be very demanding when it comes to the amount of data they want to process and the complexity of algorithms they use. Ghent University accommodates the most demanding research by providing a super-computing infrastructure (see http://www.ugent.be/hpc/en/vsc/tier1/tier1 for details).

Schedule Risk Analysis is one of the three main features in ProTrack 3.0. Its relevance has been discussed widely in literature.

A recent article shows what it is is and why one should do it. Check it here. 

For a more detailed analysis on how, why and when, two articles have been published in the Omega journal. Find them here:

After another weekend of intensive teamwork, we managed to identify and solve a problem with the p-factor calculation¹ in P2Engine.

Our P2Engine solution is used for academic research. During this research, hundreds of projects are simulated and all EVM data are analysed. In certain cases, there seemed to be an unexplicable glitch in the p-factor curve.

The problem was this: EVM calculations strongly depend on costs (= value) assigned to activities. Some projects did not earn value from their start, so the p-factor was not correct.