Scheduling the Activities of Distributed Teams

Project objectives can often be achieved in many different ways. The tasks involved can be done by different people at different locations, can be sub-divided into subtasks in multiple ways, can be done synchronously or asynchronously, collocated or distributed. Different options lead to different timing considerations, risks, costs, durations and quality of outcomes. Allocating people and resources to tasks is difficult. We discuss why the problem is computationally hard, and present an overview of a system to help users manage their tasks. We discuss the lessons learned from extensive simulation evaluations and a field test.