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This chapter is dedicated to project strategy and performances. Traditional approaches and new competence-based theories are presented. The PM strategies regard output complexity (variety and innovation degree), project scope (in terms of supplier involvement, commonality and carry-over parts), and property of specifications. The multi-project strategies are also presented. Finally performances are considered, at the single project level and portfolio level.

Project Management (PM) as a process-based methodology is presented. A project is an organizational process. The characteristics and performances of a project are outlined. PM is considered opposite to Operations Management (PM). Three different types of projects can be identified: (1) product/process innovation (design and development of new products and services), (2) engineer-to-order or engineering and construction contracting, and (3) strategic, organizational and managerial change.

This chapter deals with one of the “hot” knowledge areas of PM: Risk Management. The risk is treated according to PMI standards (a RMP certification also exists), but other standards are cited too. Starting from the sources of uncertainty, risk assessment is exemplified (identification, analysis—both qualitative and quantitative—and quotation, that is measurement). The probability-impact matrix is introduced, with the cut-off line. The risk response (proactive or reactive) follows. And how Risk Management should be conducted throughout the duration of the project.

This chapter regards project Quality management: designing with customers (value-based), designing with suppliers, the design for manufacturability and assembly, reducing internal variety, and using simultaneous and reverse engineering.

Complex and knowledge intensive innovation, engineering and service projects are important for companies to improve their market performance. Project planning and scheduling, resource assignment and cost planning set pointers for a successful project implementation. Due to complex interdependencies between project activities and resources, increasingly less project managers are able to deal with the complex and latent uncertainties of the planning process. Discrete event, Monte Carlo simulation seems to be a promising approach to comply with the requirements of realistic planning and scheduling of complex projects. In this paper an activity-oriented, personnel-integrated simulation model is presented facilitating project managers to model and simulate the schedule of weakly-structured complex projects like engineering and service projects and, thus, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and risks of these projects. Two explorative industry case studies in the chemical industry and metal processing industry are presented to demonstrate successful operational application of the simulation-based project planning and scheduling approach and the potential of respective project risk assessment.

Projects cannot be completed without resources which need to be properly organized. Previous studies show that it is very rare that projects fail because of “hard” reasons such as technical skills and methods. Rather, projects often fail due to reasons related to “soft” abilities such as organization, personnel, and management. Problems derived from inappropriate organization and management account for 48 % of project failures.

During this preliminary study, binding statements relating to feasibility, risks and benefits must be drawn up. These are all based on an analysis of the current situation, and on clearly agreed goals.

This paper analyzes the theory of risk management and the particularity of project logistics, and combines with the relevant research both at home and abroad, then puts forward the model of risk management in project logistics, and expounds the qualitative and quantitative research methods of each step, to provide ideas for risk management of project logistics. But the paper did not research one specific project logistics, so it points out the future research direction at the end of the paper.

In recent years, the pace of change and the complexity of the business environment have increased rapidly. And this has often left operational structures outdated, no longer suitable for the new challenges. Existing organisations are often fragmented, their structures too hierarchical. This gets in the way of quick decision making, and makes interdisciplinary teamwork difficult. In situations like these, using established procedures to manage projects is rarely a recipe for success. We need new organisational forms and structures in order to facilitate more efficient management and communication, new forms and structures that are suitable for the challenges of modern business life.

Every business process is ultimately based on a business case that is intended to achieve specific objectives. The way that this is implemented, in operational terms, will vary according to the company’s corporate culture and leadership style. One approach that is widely used these days is management by objectives (or MbO). A fundamental principle of this approach is to delegate tasks, competencies and responsibility to the lowest possible level. In addition to simple line management, in terms of leadership style this approach calls for other special forms of operational management. This is where the following aspects of project management have proved to be particularly useful

Although the construction industry is project-based, risk management should cover risks at both project and enterprise levels because overemphasis on project risk management would lead to some limitations. As a holistic and integrated risk management approach, enterprise risk management (ERM), which agrees with the modern portfolio theory, deals with the entire risk portfolio of a firm and has been advocated in the construction industry. This study provides an understanding of ERM in construction firms and proposes an ERM framework for construction firms, based on the literature review. The components in this proposed framework represent the fundamentals of ERM. This framework could serve as a guide for ERM implementation in construction firms. As few studies have been focused on ERM in construction firms, it is believed that the proposed framework can contribute to the existing body of knowledge relating to ERM.

Software project risk system is a nonlinear system and the chaos theory provides a new paradigm for understanding the development and evolution of its risk factors. From the angle of chaotic dynamics, this paper studies the software project risk system and based on the rational premise, builds a dynamical model of software project risk system dominated by three main parameters. According to Lyapunov exponent which can judge chaos characters, this paper calculates Lyapunov exponent of the software project risk system model, proves that this system is a chaos one and analyzes the chaos characters such as initial sensibility, inner randomness and strange attractor of this system. Therefore, it opens up a new thought for software project risk control.

This paper focuses on a R&D project portfolio selection problem in a bi-level organization. In the organization, the considered project portfolio can be supported by two levels of funds, that is company fund and department funds. Thereinto, company fund can support all projects while department funds only support projects from a specified department. Hence, in contrast to prior studies, two levels of budget constraints are considered in project selection. To solve this problem, multi-objective mixed integer programming model which considers three objectives (i.e., maximization of average comprehensive evaluated score, maximization of total expected profit and minimization of average project risk) is proposed. Finally, a practical R&D project selection case from a research institute in Western China is discussed, and the efficiency of the proposed model is evaluated.

Part 8: International Workshop on Information Engineering and Management; International audience; Project Management has long established the need for risk management techniques to be utilised in the succinct identification and mitigation of associated risks in projects. Such techniques aim at the reconciliation of countervailing project activities to reduce scope creep, increase the probability of on-time and within-budget delivery. Uncontrolled changes, regardless of size and complexity, can develop risks to projects and affect project success or even an organisation’s project delivery coherence. Ideally, a change or consequence based upon a decision should have a fairly high level of predictability and thus a low level of a potential risk materializing, which would significantly undo the decision taken. This paper proposes a novel modeling process approach; CRAM (Change Risk Assessment Model), which could significantly contribute to the missing formality of business models especially in the change risk assessment area.

Previous studies regarding construction project risk management mainly hypothesized that risk factors are independent and they do not interact with each other. The applicability of those studies, however, is limited because they cannot effectively reflect the risks happening in real construction projects. Based on the principles of system dynamics approach, this paper thus proposes to analyze the interrelations between major risks influencing construction project cost. To this end, this paper establishes a risk assessment model to analyze the interactions between risk factors involved. The model developed is validated and simulated based on data collected from the Xinzheng airport rehabilitation and expansion project. The findings demonstrate that the existence of interactions between risk factors can significantly influence the entire project cost. That the results of sensitivity analysis tell that the most sensitive factors in affecting project cost include “contractors’ poor management capacity”, “engineering change”, and “rise in material and equipment price”. This study contributes to the body of knowledge of construction project risk management by furthering the understanding of risks affecting project cost.

Information Technology Project Management is becoming an increasingly important skill for all IT professionals and one that can be imparted through either education or training. This paper begins by looking at what is involved in project management and the two main approaches to project management: PMBoK and PRINCE2. We outline a core postgraduate subject in IT-based degrees at Victoria University and how this attempts to handle both concepts and practice, and a PRINCE2 training course. The paper then examines the issues involved in each of these approaches and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

By the analysis of the ABS mode advantages and applicability in the construction of public rental basis, to consider the benefits and risks of stakeholders involved in the construction of public rental introduction of the ABS mode, and on this basis to build its financing structure model proposed an integrated FAHP/FCE the ABS project risk evaluation, to build integrated FAHP/FCE risk assessment model. This method allows decision-makers (experts) use linguistic variables to assess the ABS project risk factors, with the help of triangular fuzzy numbers, and effectively build the experts preference information to identify indicators Sort vector. Finally, the quantitative analysis of the degree of risk the ABS financing model is used in the construction of public rental instance, and shows the feasibility of ABS project.

Risk is an uncertain event or condition that has a positive or negative effect on project objectives. Risk management includes the processes of planning, identification, analysis, resource planning, and controlling risk in a project. This chapter focuses on recent insights and approaches within risk management. A positive counterpart to risk management has emerged, called opportunity management. The duality between the two concepts is explained, and the fundamentals of risk–opportunity management are discussed. Furthermore, risk and opportunity management methods, processes, and tools are presented.

The academic development of project management control is mainly reflected in the research of theories and methodologies of project management control, the United States has paid special attention to the education of management control, and many project management bodies of research have been established successively. A great deal of control project management theory and methodology studies have been carried out by these research institutes, universities, project management professional associations and large enterprises all over the world. The development of project management control makes its theories and methods have made a great progress and formed a professional theory and method system.

The adoption of risk management practices can help to increase the success rate of software project. As an essential process of risk management, risk mitigation aims to reduce or eliminate risks. To make the best use of resources, a scheduling strategy for risk mitigation is needed to determine the risks to be mitigated and when to mitigate them. Both PMI risk management framework and IEEE standard for software project risk management point out that time elements should be considered in risk mitigation. However, the traditionally used strategy for scheduling risk mitigation does not consider time elements. In this paper, we formally define scheduling strategy for risk mitigation, identify new scheduling strategies with due consideration of time elements, and compare their performance by applying stochastic simulation.

A project may have many forms—so many, in fact, that one may easily become confused when talking about them. So we must agree on what is meant when using the word ‘project’ and state how we use the term in this chapter so that it is clear how a particular process, technique, or consideration discussed here applies to your real-world activity.

The information asymmetry between banks and enterprises and imperfect mechanism bring some risks to banks carrying out the logistics and financial business. Based on the study of the logistics financial risk indicators, the risk evaluation index system of logistics finance from the pledge risk, financing enterprise credit risk, logistics enterprise risk and regulatory risk is set, and the risk evaluation model of logistics financial business for the bank, which supports one or more project risk assessment, is established by using fuzzy mathematics theory and analytic hierarchy process. At last, the collaborative projects between the Zhongshan branch of Bank Guangfa and finance enterprises are chosen as examples.

This work suggests a generic framework for risk related decision making from a business process management viewpoint. The framework is based on the methodology embedded in the ProcessGene Risk Management software suite. The suggested method aims to assist risk managers in making risk related decisions along the entire lifecycles of risk management, governance and compliance. This decision making is based on knowledge that is encapsulated within existing business process repositories. The method is demonstrated using a real-life process repository from a manufacturing industry.

The PPP (Public–Private Partnership) model has become increasingly important as a means of financing the construction of infrastructure, but it has many special characteristics, such as a large investment, long construction period, involving many partners, and the complex contract structure relatively. This makes the project risk control extremely important, which also is the key to success. Through a detailed literature analysis, first of all, the paper points out the main points of risk control with two-dimensional analysis of the risk, and determined both public and private risk allocation coefficient according to the equity structure, and then the control was given the most advantageous risk control side according to the shareholding structure adjusted, in order to achieve the new ideas for the purposes of risk control.

How to utilize the limited risk information to measure the project risk is an urgent problem to be solved when commercial banks do not have the ability to master all specific information of the project. This paper uses five risk elements including government risk, industry risk, policy risk, investment risk and credit risk to reflect the project risk, and constructs measure model of the project risk when the commercial banks can not fully grasp the project information. The characteristic of this paper is to use combination weighting based on G1 and Maximizing Deviation method to measure the important degree of risk elements, further to solve measure problem of business project risks in the case of the limited project information. The results show that the important degree of the project risk is listed in descending order: government risk, investment risk, credit risk, policy risk, industry risk.

The most important function of software metrics is to support quantitative decision of software project management. In this paper, we focus on identification of the most critical risk factors in software project risk management framework based on metrics and Bayesian network. Sensitivity analysis can be performed to study how sensitive the risk node’s probability is according to small changes of probability parameters in the risk BN. For a risk BN of known structure and probability parameters, we first estimate the most probable risk scenario, and then perform sensitivity analysis for the risk node. After we find the critical risk factors, concentrate on these factors in risk monitoring and control process.

Part 4: Software Development; International audience; Software development organizations across the globe are concerned about the high rate of project failures. Two constructs which are hypothesized to have significant impact on project outcome are risk and risk management. Risk points to an aspect of a development task, process or environment which, if ignored, tends to adversely affect the project performance. Risk management is defined as the mechanism for identifying, addressing and eliminating software risk items before they become threats to project success. Based on the data collected from 527 software development projects in India, this research develops an integrated model linking these three constructs. Structural Equation Modeling was used to develop and validate the models. The models show how the impact of risk management on project outcome may be mediated by risk.

This chapter is concerned with the subject of risk management and its component parts, risk management planning, risk identification, risk assessment, risk quantification, risk response development, and risk monitoring and control. Risk is present in any situation in which decisions must be made under constraint and uncertainty with imperfect information. To properly develop a project risk management plan, we should first understand the nature of “risk.”

This is the project management process for documenting the actions necessary to define, prepare, integrate, and coordinate all subsidiary plans into one reference document: The “process improvement” project plan.

Various project risk factors are not isolated from each other. There is a mutual influence among the factors as well as an interaction between the factors and their consequences. Research on the transfer laws between them can get more comprehensive insight in project risks. In this paper, analyzed the interactions between various project risk factors, elaborated 4 kinds of basic project risk transfer structure, discussed horizontal and vertical transfer modes of project risks, built Markov model of project risks transfer, and provided a case to verifying the model.

Publicado em "Advances in data mining: applications and theoretical aspects. Volume 7987 of the series Lecture notes in computer science", Independently from the nature of a project, process management variables like cost, quality, schedule, and scope are critical decision factors for a good and successful execution of a project. In software engineering, project planning and execution are highly influenced by the creative nature of all the individuals involved with the project. Thus, managing the risks of different project stages is a key task with extreme importance for project managers (and sponsors) that should be focused on control and monitoring effectively the referred variables, as well as all the others concerned with their context. In this work, we used a small “cocktail” of data mining techniques and methods to explore potential correlations and influences contained in some of the most relevant parameters related to experience, complexity, organization maturity and project innovation in Software Engineering, developing in a model that could be deployed in any project management process, assisting project managers in planning and monitoring the state of one project (or program) under its supervision., (undefined)

Energy service companies (ESCOs) always vigorously promote DSM implementation during all periods, and among these companies contract energy management is the best method for advancing the continuous and healthy development of the energy conservation service industry and DSM. Moreover, numerous countries have implemented this management method. With policy support and the establishment of practical mechanisms, China’s ESCOs have witnessed dramatic growth and the energy conservation service industry has rapidly developed. This chapter introduces why ESCOs are treated as the backbone of DSM, as well as experiences in facilitating the healthy development of DSM, which relies on the connotation of ESCO, implementation flow of the energy management contract (EMC) or energy performance contracting (EPC) project and methods of the ESCO to perform energy conservation analysis, financing analysis, and project risk analysis.

The information asymmetry between banks and enterprises bring some risks to banks when participate in the logistics and finance business. Based on the fuzzy mathematics theory, this paper sets risk evaluation index system for the pledge risk, financing enterprise credit risk, logistics enterprise risk and regulatory risk, and it can support one or more project risk assessment. Also, this paper indicates the feasibility by an empirical study.

In a complex network in Switzerland project risk management and the evaluation of success driver has helped the project leader and key stakeholders to achieve the goals and to quickly find clear improvements. This paper presents the experience with the success driver analysis method, which extends and improves the classical risk management approach and inspires a discussion about potential benefits in complex projects and programs.

Measuring the value of IT is always a challenge for investors. Market share for service oriented Information Systems (IS) is constantly growing and it creates the demand for methods of measuring the value of SOA-based IS projects. This research is aimed at adopting existing IT Project assessment methods to this growing demand. The work proposes the method that considers the fact that SOA-based IS deployment and evolution could be split in separate flows, one per service. It will allow usage of individual discount rate values per service since project risk values should be different for different services. It should make project value assessment more accurate comparing to existing methods which use the single flow for the entire project. This research also proposes Real Options for calculating the flexibility fraction of the value. The developed method was verified using own simulation model. Both developed method and the simulation model were applied to value assessment of a real-world project.

Joint research projects are create new knowledge and lessons learned from experience. A research project with several partners is a challenging environment for systematic reuse of knowledge and experience. Knowledge management is often considered overhead, with several tasks added to the workload of the project. This overhead can become overwhelming, since partners from academia and industry have different backgrounds, and may associate different goals and priorities with the project. Industry partners tend to follow strict security guidelines that hamper experience exchange. An extension of project duration is not possible in many publicly funded joint projects. In this paper, we describe our experiences from the initial phase of a major German joint research project with partners from academia and industry. We describe the applied techniques and the lessons learned during the first year the project. We derive conclusions and provide suggestions how to introduce knowledge and experience management in similar projects.

The study examines the impact of lack of experience in the domain problem or lack of experience with the technologies used in a software development project on the accuracy of single expert estimation of task effort, as measured by estimated versus actual effort. Expert judgment in the estimation of task effort is the most frequently used estimation technique for software projects. Estimators rely on their experience, business domain knowledge, and technical expertise. Occasionally, organizations lack experts on staff that have relevant prior experience on some business or technology related aspects of the project. This research investigates the impact of such incomplete expertise on the reliability of estimates.

This paper introduces the construction project of risk management, and expounds the principle of Farmercurve, analysis the risk of the construction project with Farmercurve, and then to make the objective evaluation.

The paper introduced the energy performance contracting (EPC) mechanism and studied the policy, market, financing, operational, benefit and customer risk existing in the process of the development of EPC. On the basis of it, the target system of Risk Evaluation on EPC was discussed. It used the fuzzy neural network to make the evaluation of the risk of EPC project, and fuzzily processed the value of degree and the evaluation standard by adopting the relative membership degree. Through empirical analysis, the results are accurate and rational.

Requirement volatility is a common and inevitable project risk which has severe consequences on software projects. When requirement change occurs, a project manager wants to analyze its impact so as to better cope with it. As the modification to one requirement can cause changes in its dependent requirements and its dependency relationship, the impact analysis can be very complex. This paper proposes a simulation approach DepRVSim (Requirement Volatility Simulation considering Dependency relationship) to assessing this sort of impact. We abstract the general patterns of the influence mechanism, which may trigger modification in its dependency relationship and bring changes in other requirements through dependency. DepRVSim can generate such information as the probability distribution of effort deviation and schedule deviation. As a proof-of-concept, the applicability of DepRVSim is demonstrated with an illustrative case study of a real software project. Results indicate that DepRVSim is able to provide experimental evidence for decision making when requirement changes.

In order to accumulate risk management knowledge and reduce risk communication barrier, continuous process pattern of project risk management is suggested from the view of risk pattern and knowledge reuse. And then its application background, structure, advantages and disadvantages are analyzed. At last, an example is analyzed to point out that effective project risk management should be a continuous improvable process rather than a onetime activity.

Landslide disaster risk assessment is a rather complex work, which includes many uncertain factors. Hence, it is different for an accurate comprehensive assessment using quantitative method. In view of complexity, fuzziness and lacking of united evaluation method for assessment object. This paper studies the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method which is used for landslide risk assessment. With an example, it selects the main index which affects landside disaster risk, applies for AHP to determine index weight at all levels which is used for fuzzy comprehensive evaluation. Analysis shows that fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method using for project risk assessment is feasible and the outcome is basically the same as the monitoring results, objectively reflects the indicator’s dynamics to the value of comprehensive assessment, and has advantages.

Information Technology (IT) projects are accompanied by various risks and high rate of failure in such projects. The purpose of this research is Risk assessment of IT projects by an intelligent system. Here, a Fuzzy Expert System has been designed with considering main effective variables on risk assessment as Inputs variables and level of project risk as output. Then, the system rules have been extracted from the IT experts and the system has been developed with the use of FIS tool of MATLAB software. Finally, the presented steps have been run in an Iranian Bank as empirical study.

With China’s changing economic structure and increasingly fierce competition in the market, the uncertainty and risk factors in the projects of electric power construction are increasingly complex, the projects will face huge risks or even fail if we don’t consider or ignore these risk factors. Therefore, risk management in the projects of electric power construction plays an important role. The paper emphatically elaborated the influence of cost risk in electric power projects through study overall risk management and the behavior of individual in risk management, and introduced the Bayesian network to the project risk management. The paper obtained the order of key factors according to both scene analysis and causal analysis for effective risk management.