Development of a Scheffe’s Model to Predict the Duration of Project Tasks

This study was aimed at applying Scheffe’s approach to determine task durations with a three-component design, to a second degree. The PERT approach was adopted to estimate the durations of three tasks for a small construction project. The study further applied Scheffe’s simplex theorem to develop a linear regression model to predict the task durations using the durations from the PERT approach. The model-predicted results were found to be very close to those estimated by the PERT approach. The model was tested with a two-tailed student t-test and was found adequate and fit with an R2 value of 0.9986. This proved that Scheffe’s approach can also be used to estimate or predict the durations of project tasks for projects with up to 3 tasks.