How a change-up of a Planning tool can affect the Project Management Performance : A case study on project planning

Abstract: The continuous strive for improvement and achieving higher efficiency for the ability to keep up with the market, as the competitors increases with the newer technologies that becomes available for the world leading companies. Project performance approaches as an aid towards project success is thus an important topic among organizations as a subpart for increasing their project planning efficiency. This case study is performed at a company within the industrial manufacturing where the profits has been decaying for decades. The efficiency regarding project planning has been heavily reduced. Evaluate and estimate the performance measurement effects caused by the current planning tool compared with another major planning tool used world-wide by a vast majority for project activity scheduling. The goal is to evaluate the differences a change-up can do in the three variables such as cost, time and quality but this study brings an additional variable –client satisfaction –that has an effect on the total project efficiency, and if a change-up could be necessary for the project managements. This has been done by collecting data in forms of interviews with people from different areas involved in the project planning process and people with who have experience in using two different major planning tools. The data were then analyzed and comparisons between the planning tools were made. The final part of the master thesis concludes the results of the research question and hypothesizes and that these were significant to the study as it reaches its purpose with additional variables such as communication, visualization and client satisfaction.