NETWORK PLANNING IN IT PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Today, the scale and complexity of IT projects are growing, which in turn requires improved management of these projects in order to timely and fully implement them. Many companies do not use IT project management, do not have the described processes, and cannot control or change the status of the project without interaction among the project participants in order to solve emerging problems jointly. As a result, the IT industry has lost hundreds of billions of dollars, fines for failed projects, and so on. Recent open access publications related to network planning in IT project management were reviewed. Modern projects are often rather complex and include hundreds and thousands of works performed by various specialists and contractors; in these cases, the management of works is complicated by the novelty of development, the difficulty of accurately determining the terms and costs of resources at one stage or another. Therefore, highly effective tools for solving these problems are network methods and models. Network planning has a number of advantages, namely it provides clearness of technological sequence of works, allows to make up operational and current plans, as well as predict complex processes and identify hidden resources of time and material means during production processes. Today, there is a large number of software tools on the market of software products that help to manage projects more effectively. Each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. However, a number of scientific and methodological issues related to the problem of network planning using MS Excel spreadsheet have not yet been widely used. Considering the above, it is necessary to justify the use of network planning as one of the methods of IT project management. The main aim of this article is to use a powerful tool for data visualization and analysis such as MS Excel spreadsheet in studying the issue of network planning in the management of IT projects, in particular in the calculation of time parameters and determining time reserves of work performance.