Abstract:
In today's highly competitive business world, it is not enough for organizations to only be good at producing some product or service. An effective Project Management can bring benefits to the organization, that go beyond just creating a product or service, but can also help achieving their long-term objectives. Such long-term goals are for example achieved while doing Business Process Management (BPM) projects, where important business processes are optimized, in order to improve the overall way the work is done within the organization. The Project Management makes use of different techniques, tools, methods and best practices, in order to guarantee that projects have fulfilled their objectives and are done in the predefined time and budget.
Since organizations are doing many projects, some of which are similar (or at least some parts of them are similar), it is of huge importance for them to learn from the experiences from the past projects, and use this knowledge while doing new projects. This will ensure that the organization will constantly improve its work and stay competitive on the market. Case-based Reasoning is a method that uses old experiences in order to find better solutions when similar (or the same) problems occur. It can be used to support Project Management, in order to make better decisions when planning and executing projects. Having additional knowledge within the domain can further optimize this process and an ontology on Project Management can be a great means in that direction. Ontologies contain knowledge (usually about a specific domain), including different concepts, their hierarchy and interrelations and a lot of additional metadata. It can be further expanded, in order to cover specific types of projects, such as software projects or BPM projects. Creating such an ontology can support the Case-based Reasoning process in all of its phases, helping the Project Manager making more informed and more optimal decisions.
