Program Evaluation and Review approach (PERT) is a undertaking network analysis approach used to plan and control large building undertakings.
PERT focuses on the relationship between the time each activity takes, the costs for each activity and the resulting time and cost for the expected completion of the entire construction undertaking. This helps in understanding the performance of the work throughout the course of the undertaking.
The method does not show any kind of inter-dependencies. PERT is an event oriented project scheduling methods. It only shows an event, which is represented in terms of the time and the resources that are necessary for the completion of that event. It does not possess any historic chain.
But it also shows certain disadvantages that must be taken into consideration by the project supervisors. The pros and cons of PERT techniques are mentioned in the following section. PERT gains a lot of benefits, that helps the project administration team.
Use of PERT in building undertaking has following advantages:
The program evaluation and review technique enables the undertaking manager to schedule the undertaking very easily. It is mainly active in the case of a large undertaking.
To be more precise, it such requires three elements to define the event. What is the time required to do that event, what comes after the event and what comes before the event? This makes the scheduling easy and clear
The PERT approach shows the critical path in a clearer manner. The critical path is the path whose activities cannot be delayed.
An easy understanding of slack values with limited conditions of dependencies make the undertaking supervisor take a fast and good decision which would favor the performance of the undertaking.
A project manager views information about the likely completion of a project on time and on a budget by viewing PERT activities and events independently and in combination.
PERT helps integration and data submission from various department of the construction organization. This will improve the planning and the decision-making capabilities of the project team.
This help in good communication between different departments, as lack of communication, is one of the crucial factor affecting the development of an organization. This clearly helps in identifying the responsible roles of everyone in the whole team. A Large amount of data which gains qualitative, as well as quantitative values, are combined which helps in proper coordination of the undertaking.
A what-if analysis identifies possibilities and uncertainties related to project activities, which is read from the formation of critical paths.
Many sets of permutations and combinations are performed differently with the activities and the most useful possibility selected. The set with minimum cost, best result and economy is chosen. It also helps us to identify the activity that is a risk.
For a new undertaking, the method needs data to identify the activities. This is found to be difficult because the new undertaking chosen are not repetitive in nature. It would be a rare or fresh undertaking idea. This makes the data collection to be subjective in nature showing lesser accuracy in the time or cost estimated.
The source of data obtained, have chances of biasing and are found unreliable. As mentioned, because of the not repetitive nature of the project, there is no guaranty in bringing information from a past historic record with similar cases in certain situations and implementing it.
PERT is a time oriented approach. It just makes use of the time that is required to complete the activity. Hence the determination of time for each activity and its allocation is of great importance. It’s based on an assumption and will work well if it is right. Else problems arise.
When a project with no past records or assistance exists, predictions play a role in the movement of the project. This cannot be done by trial and error with the assumptions. Inaccurate decisions and predictions would make the overall project to a total loss.