Enabling Dynamic Analysis of Project Plan through Transformations into Business Processes

After winning a request for proposals and closing a deal, a business transformation services project is transitioned to the delivery team so that the delivery work can start. In an effort to minimize the delivery costs and schedules, companies are standardizing the way projects are defined and delivered. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to verify whether these standard best-practices will be successful before using them during real engagements. Project managers use tools such as Microsoft Project to build their project plans, schedules, baselines, and resources, these tools provide a rich set of functions for static analysis of project plans (e.g., discover critical path, resource contention), but little support for running dynamic "what-if" scenarios. This paper proposes two methods of enabling dynamic analysis of project plans by transforming a project plan into a business process, these business processes can be loaded and simulated into tools that support the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). For the purpose of this study, IBM Websphere Business Modeler (WBM) was used for running simulations. The evaluation highlights the complexity of these transformations and shows that automated tools are indeed necessary to assist people in their analysis.