Organizational program management for multiple maintenance projects under multi-trade capacity constraints

In a large owner organization, program management of multiple maintenance and remodeling (M/R) projects confronts with increasing scale and complexity of coordinating current/future projects under capacity constraints of multiple trade shops. Moreover, the complexity is further increased by internal and external uncertainties of dynamic M/R environment. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop and implement a program management strategy for organizational productivity, flexibility, and long-term stability. Under the principle of management by objectives, this research proposes a program master plan (PMP) in the long-time horizon and a master construction schedule in an operational scheduling window (MCS). To deal with the external uncertainty of dynamically arriving projects requests, a rolling horizon approach to PMP is proposed. A resource-constrained scheduling algorithm is developed to generate MCS in a scheduling window. During development of the algorithm, more emphasis was placed on long-term organizational resource continuity, especially flows of the program constraint resources (PCRs), than ephemeral events of individual activities and projects. The simulation experiments of three scheduling windows were used to evaluate the relative performance of the proposed PCR scheduling heuristic against three popular heuristics of resource-constrained multiple project management. The principle of management by self-control is implemented by periodic PCR buffers in organizational PCR flows. The periodic PCR buffer allocation (PBA) strategy provided coordination and cooperation mechanisms for technicians and supervisors of trade shops to adjust the progress of M/R projects within buffer periods of MCS, when unexpected delays of activities were developed. This rhythm-based PCR flow management can stabilize the program by terminating propagation of an internal disturbance at periodic buffers. Monte Carlo simulation experiments compare the performance of the PBA strategy to the individual buffer allocation (IBA) strategy. Based on the results of the simulation experiments, the dissertation proposes the period-based PCR buffer management as an instrument of improving stability of MCS and flexibility of program progress with better productivity than IBA. The contribution of the dissertation is to present a management framework that integrates macro-perspective organizational strategy with decentralized adjustment procedure in dynamic construction environment.