A Simulation Study of Project Management and Collaborative Information Technologies

Communication plans are intrinsic to project management. However, the time and cost effects of communication plan choices have largely been overlooked. Herein, we study the impact of three types of communications plans that implement collaborative information technologies (CITs) (i.e., asynchronous, synchronous and both) on the key project metrics of communication cost and project schedule performance across projects of different complexity. We use simulation and virtual experiments to gather data for a two-way ANOVA analysis. Our results indicate that the communication cost and schedule performance significantly differ based on the communication plan choice of CITs and complexity. Also, some communication plans carry more cost or schedule risk (i.e., variation) across project complexity than others. As such, project managers should strategically consider the nature of the project and the choice of CITs as important inputs when generating a communication plan.