A critical chain based multi-project planning approach to software development projects

Many companies aim at rapidly delivering new products to the market and reacting to customer demands in order to achieve and sustain competitive advantage. To accomplish this, they are trying to implement many new projects simultaneously. The multi-project environment (MPE) creates challenges in project management that need to be addressed; in particular, the allocation of resources which is burdened by higher uncertainty. In a MPE the planner needs to consider the influence of uncertainty factors and different objectives to achieve completion rate on time of the whole projects. To respond to this need, a composite multi-project management method is proposed in this study. The paper introduces the composite multi-project scheduling method that is generated with critical chain project management, which is self-complemented with agile methods, such as Scrum, DevOps, Kanban, Lean software development. The proposed method can be used to manage all projects simultaneously under resource constraints and uncertainty. The method was implemented to a big ATM software project for a bank, which had a modular structure. After the prioritization of the modules, we prepared a schedule based on critical chain. To avoid occurring a bottleneck, we used agile methods which increase communication and collaboration. Also, we prepared a questionnaire for resources to measure the performance and satisfaction. The performance comparisons show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous management method. The study concludes with a discussion and the managerial implications.