Jason Evans is the Business Development Manager at TimeCostCurves, a specialist provider of innovative tools for project management professionals. With over two decades of experience across project controls, business development, and client engagement, Jason plays a pivotal role in expanding the reach of TimeCostCurves’ flagship product—a dynamic embedded file for Microsoft Project that enables users to generate visual time-cost curves with ease and precision.
Jason’s approach combines technical understanding with a genuine passion for helping project teams improve their planning and decision-making processes. He works closely with project managers, schedulers, and PMO leaders to demonstrate how TimeCostCurves can enhance project planning, align teams around key milestones, and support more effective risk and performance management.
Beyond product sales, Jason leads strategic partnerships, product education initiatives, and customer success efforts. He is developing the company’s presence on online learning platforms.
Prior to joining TimeCostCurves, Jason held senior roles in the medical manufacturing industry, gaining first hand insight into the challenges of project delivery and the gaps in existing toolsets. His hands-on experience enables him to relate to the practical needs of his clients and offer solutions that make a meaningful difference. Jason is driven by a continuous improvement mindset and a commitment to helping organisations achieve better project outcomes through smarter tools and data-driven insights.
The impetus for originally developing the critical path method was as a way to plan a project’s duration that minimises the project’s overall cost (and the cost for all other feasible durations).
The steps and trade-off calculations required to solve this inherent time-cost problem, despite being of primary importance to the project and a topic of ongoing academic interest, are yet to become widespread. This unfortunate situation means that in project planning practice, the time-cost problem is ignored and unsolved, allowing this gap to be filled by subjective and isolated answers to questions of project duration and cost.
It is proposed that by revisiting this previously established workflow, planners can relearn how to setup a project plan as a solvable time-cost problem, thereby fulfilling CPM’s original promise.
IN THIS PRESENTATION we shall describe how CPM software’s scheduling engine that produces the familiar bar chart can be modified to also enable the solution to a project’s time-cost problem, by compressing the bar chart. The end result is a graphical solution showing the duration and cost for all the feasible schedules between the ‘all-normal’ schedule and the ‘fully-crashed’ schedule. This provides a quantified reference for the selection of a baseline schedule.
The key steps to achieve this are:
– develop a valid network model, using the typical bar chart, but checked for validity using the activity-on-arrow chart format.
– inputting ‘utility data’ that describes the normal means for carrying-out any given activity, as well as the alternatives available that MAY accelerate that activity’s completion at extra direct cost.
– estimating the time-related project indirect cost.
– compressing the network model to plot the time-cost curve.
