Method for solving the problem of planning jobs in an IT project and assigning specialists to it

This article is devoted to the development of an iterative approach that provides a simultaneous solution to the problem of planning individual works of an IT project with the assumption of their possible correction and assignment of specialists to these works. At present, the class of project management problems has been studied in sufficient depth, and various methods for forming schedules from the point of view of various criteria (fastest completion, cost, etc.) have been obtained. However, IT projects differ from standard projects in the periodic revision of tasks (error correction, clarification of the result with the customer, etc.), which requires changes in the mathematical apparatus of the problem. In addition, the time of execution of a particular work will depend on its performer. This feature is taken into account extremely rarely, which allows the decision maker to solve the planning problem and the assignment problem separately. However, the analysis of the subject area shows that not only the duration of a specific work will depend on the specialist, but also the probability of its error-free execution the first time. Therefore, it is advisable to take such features into account when simultaneously solving the planning problem and the assignment problem. In this regard, it is necessary to develop a method that allows taking into account these nuances of the problem under study and ensures the best solution to both the planning and assignment problem from the point of view of the objective functions. The method is based on a combination of basic approaches to solving the assignment problem with the critical path method and PERT. As a result, an iterative algorithm for solving the problem of forming a project schedule and assigning performers to all work was obtained, taking into account the stochastic nature of the time of execution of individual works, as well as their possible correction.

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