A multicriteria decision support approach for project compression

When projects fall behind schedule, executives and stakeholders look to the project manager to implement a process that compresses the project schedule, a process that may involve using different technologies, reallocated resources, and reduced scope. This article examines a systematic decision-making approach for managing this effort as a multi-criteria problem that integrates subjective and objective information, an approach known as the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). In doing so, it summarizes the literature on schedule compression--also called crashing--and explains the purpose and method of using AHP. It then describes--via an example application--how to use AHP to select a schedule compression scheme that examines multiple project criteria and how to analyze the information generated by AHP to make informed project decisions.