Team Coordination Based on Causal Nets with Synchronous Channels

A project consist of a partially ordered set of tasks that need to be performed to reach the project's goals. Ordering the tasks and coordinating the individual actors are prerequisites for the success of a project. The sub-teams (groups) may be distributed in terms of space, time or organization. The groups have to plan their local (intra-group) tasks and coordinate their inter-group tasks while avoiding global deadlocks. Today, centralized approaches with a single diagram for the entire team are used to model the global task order and calculate its critical path. We propose that each group models its intra- and inter-group tasks in a single diagram. Causal nets represent the precedences in an ideal way. Inter-group tasks require a special treatment that we provide by extending causal nets with synchronous channels. These can be executed within the Renew IDE. We consider time aspects based on a mapping between those extended causal nets and Network Planning Technique (NPT). Supported by a Renew plugin we aggregate the separated groups' diagrams to a global NPT diagram to calculate the project's critical path. Beside the tool support for general project management, we present and discuss the support for agile and distributed software development projects. Our extensions preserve the efficient checking for consistent, partially ordered global project plans.