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The rapid growth in demand on information systems and the uncertainties associated with the development process for such systems has revealed problems such as inappropriate human resource management, poor quality, and serious delay. Traditional project management approaches emphasize the importance of scheduling, while careful allocation of resources across projects is critical and has a direct influence on the project quality and time management. According to the report on Concurrent Engineering (CE) implementation, it has significantly improved the time to market, quality, costs, etc. in the manufacturing industry. This research attempts to introduce the philosophy of CE into software project management and proposes a Concurrent Project Modeling Method (CPM-M) to realize concurrent software engineering tasks. CPM-M consists of two components: Concurrent Information Sharing Framework (CISF) and Concurrent Project Modeling Diagram (CPM-D). The CISF is a conceptual framework that facilitates concurrent cross-functional sharing of information among product, activity and resource pools, while the CPM-D inherits capability from the Petri Net and further expands so as to guide the project management by simultaneously considering the three pools at each decision point of the development process. The proposed approach was illustrated and simulated on the development of a web-based campaign system for the marketing division of a bank.

Keywords: software development, Petri net, project management, concurrent engineering, PERT

Retrieve PDF document (200507_07.pdf)

Received February 8, 2002; revised March 13, 2003; accepted May 31, 2004.
Communicated by Michael R. Lyu.
^* This research was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C., under contract No. NSC 88-2213-E-324-003.