An integrated project planning and control system approach for measuring project performance

Existing Project Management Systems (PMS) that uses commonly standard scheduling and project control techniques have been proven to be valuable in assisting today's project teams with some of their management core functions. However, many researchers, formal and informal studies, surveys of practitioners and industry experts identified several PMS limitations which viewed as deficiencies rather than faults. These limitations causes many to still continue to rely on their intuition in addition to relevant project information provided by existing PMS to form judgments, which result in having project performance evaluation and analysis to still be considered as mostly done in an ad-hoc manner.; Our hypotheses, is that existing PMS capabilities could be improved by building on their exiting functionalities to make them more effective. Therefore, provide a consistent integrated systematic approach for project performance measurement and meet end users practical needs.; This research introduces an Integrated Project Planning and Control System (IPP&CS) to provide the needed recommended improvements and/or modifications addressed by other researchers and industry experts' to better assist the project team in managing their project Schedule, Cost, and Integrated Cost/Schedule throughout their project life cycle, specifically in the areas of project performance analysis trends analysis and explanations.; Our research methodology included: Investigating existing PMS (current usage, trends and limitation); Conducting formal and informal interviews with selected experts who acted in an advisory role to validate research needs and requirements; Building an integrated systems to overcome existing PMS limitations; Informal and formal validation and verification to demonstrate and evaluate IPP&CS capabilities; Development of a test case study to simulate implementation scenario (testing different potential end users with different level of experience) to measure their performance with and without the system and see if our IPP&CS produce the results intended by answering the research hypothesis.; The results were quite positive and overall improvement over existing PMS was recognized as significant especially for end users with less experience. The research addresses advantages and limitations of IPP&CS as well as recommendations for future research.