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Improving the competitive advantage in the global marketplace is one of the major goals of any organization where the development of the information technology and associated services plays a significant role. Today, many improvements and optimization initiatives are managed through information technology projects, thus relying on the success of the projects to reach the goal. One of the most important aspects of the project management in the information technology is the uncertainty in estimating the duration of activities that usually require the involvement of human resources who are rarely working on a single task. In this situation, the human behavior can have a major negative effect on both the duration and cost of a project if inadequately managed. One area of the human behavior is called the Student Syndrome which is a phenomenon where doing things is delayed until right before the deadline. In an information technology project this means that programmers postpone their project tasks until the deadline, while before it they work at a very relaxed pace with lots of slack and think there is enough time for doing other things. As a result, they simply waste the time required to solve uncertainties that might impact the project work. The study analyzes and quantifies the impact of Student Syndrome on a single project completion time using a simulation-based approach. It provides an insight to be considered by the project manager to ensure the project to succeed. The impact of Student Syndrome is explained by analyzing the project networks. Simulations show that eliminating the Student Syndrome considerably and immediately positively effects the project completion time shortening it by up to 35 percent compared to the situations with the Student Syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies view Information Technology (IT) as a competitive advantage of the future. In recent years, IT departments have proven to have a significant impact on the business process improvement and better customer service, enabling organizations to become more competitive in the global marketplace. To meet these demands, many IT organizations are now transforming their software development and information technology operations to a combined team, called DevOps. However, with only organizational changes and no changes in how the IT DevOps teams manage their tasks, this is not easy to achieve, especially when there is a tension to keep all resources busy and overload them with a task by maintaining a high work-in-progress. As a result, organizations operating in this mode typically experience a significant degradation in their performance. The paper presents a simulation-based performance assessment that significantly improves the performance of task execution by DevOps teams. An approach is presented to determine how to load and allocate resources and an appropriate allocation of additional (reserve) resources to improve performance. The simulations show a possibility of a 135 percent improvement in the Throughput (the number of completed tasks), work-in-progress reduced to the level of one percent of the completed tasks and the time needed to complete tasks is over 17 times shorter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]