Project Tracking in action 

Study, experiment, understand.

ProTrack is a Windows-based project management and tracking tool developed by OR-AS as part of award-winning research on dynamic scheduling and project control. Originally released as a commercial tool, ProTrack was designed as a simple and effective alternative to traditional project management software, grounded in both academic research and extensive practitioner feedback.

The core strength of ProTrack lies in its focus on dynamic scheduling, integrating baseline scheduling, risk analysis and project control into a single learning and experimentation environment. Its concepts are rooted in established best practices in scheduling and Earned Value Management, complemented by innovative ideas such as Earned Schedule.

Together with the last release of ProTrack, the PM Knowledge Center was developed to provide a rich environment for exploring project management and dynamic scheduling. While ProTrack is no longer commercially available, the PM Knowledge Center remains accessible via this website, offering researchers, students and practitioners an effective platform for learning baseline scheduling, risk analysis, and project control..

Using ProTrack to analyse and collect empirical project data

ProTrack is a legacy research tool, originally presented at the award ceremony of the International Project Management Association World Congress in Rome (Italy) in 2008, and later featured in the book Measuring Time (2010). Much has changed since then, not only in the research itself, but also in the underlying IT infrastructure needed to run ProTrack. While the software is no longer commercially maintained and some features may be outdated or buggy, it remains a valuable resource for exploring empirical project data, studying dynamic scheduling concepts, and understanding project performance research.

Below, you'll find a short summary of how ProTrack can help you read our empirical project data (known as the DSLIB set) or collect new project data to expand it.

• ProTrack user tutorial: The tutorial "Dynamic Scheduling on Your Desktop" gives an overview of all software features. Warning: be careful with the tool: Reading project data is easy, but adding new data is somewhat buggy.

• Data collection package: The DSLIB database can be expanded by adding your own project data. The package includes a guideline on how to collect and report data in an MS Excel file, an example Excel file, and a converter to convert the collected Excel data to ProTrack format (and vice versa). (in progress, coming soon).

• Project Card: Each project in the DSLIB is accompanied by a Project Card, a format first proposed in the paper "Construction and evaluation framework for a real-life project database" published in the International Journal of Project Management.