The Practical Needs of Integrating

The primary goal of tracking scope, cost, and time throughout the construction process is to facilitate the early detection of problem activities that are running over budget or falling behind scheduled progress. Current practice tracks this information using separate processes, which leads to inconsistencies between the information and inaccuracies when determining the cost and schedule status. Project managers need an integrated suite of project management tools so that the project's scope, cost, and time are in sync and the work in place is accurately reflected in the project control system. In this paper, we will provide a case study that demonstrates the practical needs of project managers to support integration throughout the life of a project. We will also demonstrate how those needs are not being addressed by existing software tools, by standards developed for the project management domain, and by information models that have been developed in research. This paper will show that the following issues must be addressed to enable the integration throughout the construction process: the information must be integrated at the start of construction; the mapping scheme between the different hierarchical representations of scope, cost, and time must be defined; and the shared information must be defined.