Search

Background: IT systems in the healthcare field can have a marked sociotechnical impact: they modify communication habits, alter clinical processes and may have serious ethical implications. The introduction of such systems involves very different groups of stakeholders because of the inherent multi-professionalism in medicine and the role of patients and their relatives that are often underrepresented. Each group contributes distinct perspectives and particular needs, which create specific requirements for IT systems and may strongly influence their acceptance and success. In the past, needs analysis, challenges and requirements for medical IT systems have often been addressed using consensus techniques such as the Delphi technique. Facing the heterogeneous spectrum of stakeholders there is a need to develop these techniques further to control the (strong) influence of the composition of the expert panel on the outcome and to deal systematically with potentially incompatible needs of stakeholder groups. This approach uses the strong advantages a Delphi study has, identifies the disadvantages of traditional Delphi techniques and aims to introduce and evaluate a modified approach called 360-Degree Delphi. Key aspects of 360-Degree Delphi are tested by applying the approach to the needs and requirements analysis of a system for managing patients' advance directives and living wills.Methods: 360-Degree Delphi (short 360°D), as a modified Delphi process, is specified as a structured workflow with the optional use of stakeholder groups. The approach redefines the composition of the expert panel by setting up groups of different stakeholders. Consensus is created within individual stakeholder groups, but is also communicated between groups, while the iterative structure of the Delphi process remains unchanged. We hypothesize that (1) 360-Degree Delphi yields complementary statements from different stakeholders, which would be lost in classical Delphi; while (2) the variation of statements within individual stakeholder groups is lower than within the total collective. A user study is performed that addresses five stakeholder groups (patients, relatives, medical doctors, nurses and software developers) on the topic of living will communication in an emergency context. Qualitative open questions are used in a Delphi round 0. Answer texts are coded by independent raters who carry out systematic bottom-up qualitative text analysis. Inter-rater reliability is calculated and the resulting codes are used to test the hypotheses. Qualitative results are transferred into quantitative questions and then surveyed in round 1. The study took place in Germany.Results: About 25% of the invited experts (stakeholders) agreed to take part in the Delphi round 0 (three patients, two relatives, three medical doctors, two qualified nurses and three developers), forming a structured panel of the five stakeholder groups. Two raters created a bottom-up coding, and 238 thematic codes were identified by the qualitative text analysis. The inter-rater reliability showed that 44.95% of the codes were semantically similar and coded for the same parts of the raw textual replies. Based on a consented coding list, a quantitative online-questionnaire was developed and send to different stakeholder groups. With respect to the hypotheses, Delphi round 0 had the following results: (1) doctors had a completely different focus from all the other stakeholder groups on possible channels of communications with the patient; (2) the dispersion of codes within individual stakeholder groups and within the total collective - visualized by box plots - was approximately 28% higher in the total collective than in the sub-collectives, but without a marked effect size. With respect to the hypotheses, Delphi round 1 had the following results: different stakeholder groups had highly diverging opinions with respect to central questions on IT-development. For example, when asked to rate the importance of access control against high availability of data (likert scale, 1 meaning restrictive data access, 6 easy access to all data), patients (mean 4.862, Stdev +/- 1.866) and caregivers (mean 5.667, Stdev: +/- 0.816) highly favored data availability, while relatives would restrict data access (mean 2.778, stdev +/- 1.093). In comparison, the total group would not be representative of either of these individual stakeholder needs (mean 4.344, stdev +/- 1.870).Conclusion: 360-Degree Delphi is feasible and allows different stakeholder groups within an expert panel to reach agreement individually. Thus, it generates a more detailed consensus which pays more tribute to individual stakeholders needs. This has the potential to improve the time to consensus as well as to produce a more representative and precise needs and requirements analysis. However, the method may create new challenges for the IT development process, which will have to deal with complementary or even contradictory statements from different stakeholder groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer simulation modeling approach has been used for the last decades to address the growing need for estimation, analysis and improvement of project performance indicators. In this research, a dynamic simulation model is developed capturing both hierarchical and dynamic complexities of projects. This paper discusses how changes in dynamics can influence the critical performance indicators of a project throughout its lifecycle. The designed simulation model is capable of assessing the robustness and suitability of the scope and change management policies. The validity of the model was tested by a real-world project in the petrochemical industry. The significant factors influencing a project's performance are investigated in the case study. The simulation results indicate that resource allocation decisions could be optimized to improve project performance indicators. The developed decision model can be regarded as a flexible and predictive tool in the construction industry with the purpose of explaining the dynamic behavior of a project. SD: System Dynamics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a let scheduling problem for highway construction projects under an anticipated funding scenario. Highway construction projects typically require large-scale funds, and rely on the revenue from state and federal funding sources. The revenues mainly come from transportation-related taxes and fees. Such revenues can radically change over time due to the uncertainty of economy, and the Department of Transportations (DOTs) need to cope with such funding changes to avoid any overdraft or unhealthily excessive cash balances. A mathematical optimization model is proposed as a means of decision support to determine how to revise the let schedule when the future revenue is expected to change. A case study of the North Carolina DOT (NCDOT) is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed model, where major types of projects having construction costs more than $10 million are analyzed. A formula to evaluate the impact of changing let dates is presented and a constrained logistic model that estimates the construction costs of individual projects is proposed. As a recommendation for utilizing the proposed model, three practical ways are summarized including the rolling-horizon-based let scheduling, funding change analysis, and the assessment of funding project risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication should not happen by chance during projects. The requirements process in projects is highlighted as a communication-intense process, although it includes only technical activities. This article describes the communication activities required during the requirements process, utilizing the communication activities of a problem-solving process. It highlights the communication activities that should be planned during the requirements process for project management to consider. Guidelines are provided for planning the communication activities to aim for quality communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After myriad studies into the main causes of project failure, almost every project manager can list the main factors that distinguish between project failure and project success. These factors are usually called Critical Success Factors (CSF). However, despite the fact that CSF are well-known, the rate of failed projects still remains very high. This may be due to the fact that current CSF are too general and do not contain specific enough know-how to better support project managers’ decision-making. This paper analyses the impact of 16 specific planning processes on project success and identifies Critical Success Processes (CSP) to which project success is most vulnerable. Results are based on a field study that involved 282 project managers. It was found that the most critical planning processes, which have the greatest impact on project success, are “definition of activities to be performed in the project”, “schedule development”, “organizational planning”, “staff acquisition”, “communications planning” and “developing a project plan”. It was also found that project managers usually do not divide their time effectively among the different processes, following their influence on project success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flexible nature of scope definition in agile makes it difficult or impossible to measure its completeness and quality. The aim of this paper is to highlight the important ingredients of scope definition for agile projects and to present a method for agile projects in order to measure the quality and completeness of their scope definitions. The proposed method considers the elements that are retrieved as a result of the systematic literature review. An industrial survey is conducted to validate and prioritize these elements. Elements are then assigned weights according to their importance in scope definition to build a scorecard for calculating the score of user stories present in the product backlog. The proposed method is able to identify the clear and complete user stories that can better be implemented in the coming iteration. Formal experiments are performed for the evaluation of the proposed method, and it suggests that the method is useful for experts in order to quantify the completeness and quality of scope definition of an agile software project.

Software size is one of the most important inputs of many software cost and effort estimation models. Early estimation of software plays an important role at the time of project inception. An accurate estimate of software size is, therefore, crucial for planning, managing, and controlling software development projects dealing with the development of software games. However, software size is unavailable during early phase of software development. This research determines the utility of CK (Chidamber and Kemerer) metrics, a well-known suite of object-oriented metrics, in estimating the size of software applications using the information from its UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagram. This work focuses on a small subset dealing with board-based software games. Almost sixty games written using an object-oriented programming language are downloaded from open source repositories, analyzed and used to calibrate a regression-based size estimation model. Forward stepwise MLR (Multiple Linear Regression) is used for model fitting. The model thus obtained is assessed using a variety of accuracy measures such as MMRE (Mean Magnitude of Relative Error), Prediction of x(PRED(x)), MdMRE (Median of Relative Error) and validated using K-fold cross validation. The accuracy of this model is also compared with an existing model tailored for size estimation of board games. Based on a small subset of desktop games developed in various object-oriented languages, we obtained a model using CK metrics and forward stepwise multiple linear regression with reasonable estimation accuracy as indicated by the value of the coefficient of determination (R^2 = 0.756).Comparison results indicate that the existing size estimation model outperforms the model derived using CK metrics in terms of accuracy of prediction.

On an example of a priority direction «the personalized medicine», allocated by Strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, risks and barriers of realization of projects of a full cycle are examined. Approaches to design and examination of complex scientific and technological projects and to the system of their analytical support are offered. The importance of identifying a qualified customer for full-cycle projects, in the capacity of which either the FEI or a large company interested in developing the priority direction can act, has been substantiated. It was recommended to delegate to a qualified customer the authority to formulate a full cycle project architecture. To minimize and manage a wide range of risks and barriers, that pose a threat to the implementation of all phases of such projects, a multi-parameter expertise is needed, along with an analysis of the trends in the development of a new technology direction, an assessment of economic feasibility, personnel and infrastructure support, adequacy of legal regulation.

Investing significant resources to develop a sensible project management plan paid big dividends when it came time to replace 7,308 ultrafiltration modules in one of North America's largest membrane treatment facilities [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Research Papers of the Wroclaw University of Economics / Prace Naukowe Uniwersytetu Ekonomicznego we Wroclawiu is the property of Uniwersytet Ekonomiczny we Wroclawiu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article reports on the "2019 Best Practices from World Libraries" Photo Gallery Project initiated by the International Connections Committee (ICC) of the International Relations Round Table (IRRT) at the American Library Association (ALA). The project was inspired by a 2018 ALA-IRRT Emerging Leader's project, Toward Increasing Engagement of International New Professional Leaders in ALA Activities, which followed a survey study developed to explore IRRT's ability to engage its international members. The article shares the project planning process and the key actions taken to build a virtual and physical gallery for the 2019 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, DC, as well as highlights example programs from the project which demonstrate how libraries around the world are building stronger communities. Finally, the authors consider how the project may be improved upon and further developed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural resource management practitioners responsible for planning collaborative adaptive management (CAM) efforts face major challenges related to the complexity of both the systems being managed and the management systems themselves. Standard project planning approaches such as logic models are poorly suited to such situations. Development of an effective action plan requires identification of potential interventions that are both likely to be impactful and practical in that particular social-political context. Little guidance is available for practitioners because there has been only limited translation of theory-driven guidelines into practical and readily useable tools and guidelines. Similar challenges are shared by practitioners in many applied social science and transdisciplinary fields that focus on interventions aimed at changing individual and collective human behavior. Intervention research was developed to assist with program development in applied social science fields and can provide natural resource management practitioners with insights into how they can gather and organize information about human behavior that is specifically relevant to the problem situation. The basic organizing structure of intervention design can be summarized as: intervening actors take actions intended to cause modification of the behavior of targeted actors leading to improvement in the conditions of interest. I present an organizing structure based on intervention design concepts that expands on the human behavior elements of the Exploratory Problem Assessment (EA) approach of Beratan (2019). The EA approach affords the positive features of results chains while further enhancing the usability and timeliness of the results for facilitation of strategic planning and project evaluation. The approach provides information that is directly relevant to project planning and can be done by or for a CAM project manager relatively quickly at the start of project planning with a minimum of facilitation. The basic concepts are readily understandable to nonspecialists both because humans are predisposed to perceive causal relationships and a diagrammatic presentation using information design principles can readily convey quite complex relationships. An example from a collaborative multilevel land-use planning effort in North Carolina illustrates how the framework can be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Malaysian Government adopted the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) as a crucial project management tool in implementing Outcome Based Approach (OBA) for public projects in 2009 via the issuance of the Guideline for Planning and Preparation of Programs and Projects Development 1/2009. The guideline was issued by the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) of the Prime Minister's Department (JPM) (also known as Ministry of Economic Affairs (MEA) since 2018), Malaysia. The Logical Framework Matrix (LFM) has been suggested as a key tool for project appraisal. However, there are some cases where the LFM has not been appropriately utilized by the ministries and agencies. This paper therefore presents the frequent failings of LFM and practical issues in the participatory approach of LFA process, which contribute to the LFM produced. Findings from the study conducted via document review and interview confirmed that frequent failings of LFM and practical issues occur in preparing LFM in Malaysia Government project planning. Three (3) measures to overcome the existing challenges as well as in reducing existing gaps were identified to include knowledge management, enforcement and format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HMD: Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Choosing a storage volume size for a rainwater catchment project is difficult because the overall volume needs to be large enough to meet the demand of users but not so high that it is never completely filled, which would waste money and space in the community. This newly developed Excel-based model can simplify choosing appropriate tank sizes for a rainwater catchment project by projecting the water availability in storage at multiple locations over the course of a year. For ease of use, the user can input monthly or daily data for improved accuracy. This tool also incorporates the ability to include adjustable daily demand, to distribute demand over multiple structures, to account for tank overflow, and to increase demand at other locations if one of them runs out of water. The water level at each location over one year and the local storage volume are shown on a plot, making it easy to determine what storage volume is necessary to provide enough water for the community. This tool was originally developed to determine appropriate storage volumes for a rainwater catchment project in Mkutani, Tanzania and has been adapted for general use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes, how based on this author's experience in project management, the three most commonly used change management approaches can help to effectively plan and execute a project. The ADKAR model, the Lewin model, and Kotter's 8 step change model are each evaluated in this context. Strategies, applications, and implications are provided at different organizational levels for project planning and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the continuous growth of investments and investigations for project management, yet there have been none apparent improvements of the total success rate of projects since the 21st century, which is a paradox in the project management fields. This article aims to manage complex IT projects by using new theories and methods. One of the essential features of a failure complex IT project is the high degree of uncertainty, which is the subject of this crucial point. Individually, the high uncertainty leads to high risks result that need to be handled by particular methods and processes of risk management. The purpose of investigating complex IT projects is not only to summarize the best practices/methods of this approach but also to improve management activities and the practice of various projects to address low success rates. Therefore, this paper help to solve some of the problems in the field of IT project management, and finally gives some valuable advice on general IT projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scarce resources may cause delay in completion of a project. In this research, a multi-objective decision making model is developed for scheduling multi-mode resource constraint scheduling problem in the presence of uncertain resources. The objectives are profit, execution cost and completion time. To develop this idea, a multi-objective non-linear mixed integer programming model is developed where resource availability is not deterministic and expressed by triangular probability function. Then, a multi-objective weighting genetic algorithm is proposed (MOWGA) which is flexible enough to be used in real projects. To verify the performance of the proposed method, a number of experiments are solved and results are analyzed. The outcomes indicated that while resource uncertainty increases, higher complexity in schedules is observed. It is also found that optimizing one objective function does not necessarily resulted in optimizing the others. The MOWGA is then successfully applied for a project with real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Project managers are continuously under pressure to shorten product development durations. One practical approach for reducing the project duration is lessening dependencies between different development components and teams. However, most of the resource allocation strategies for lessening dependencies place the implicit and simplistic assumption that the dependency structure between components is static (i.e., does not change over time). This assumption, however, does not necessarily hold true in all product development projects. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for optimally allocating resources to shorten the lead time of product development projects having a time-varying dependency structure. We build our theoretical framework on a linear system model of product development processes, in which system integration and local development teams exchange information asynchronously and aperiodically. Utilizing a convexity result from the matrix theory, we show that the optimal resource allocation can be efficiently found by solving a convex optimization problem. We provide illustrative examples to demonstrate the proposed framework. We also present boundary analyses based on major graph models to provide managerial guidelines for improving empirical PD processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Inaccurate and overoptimistic project schedules can result in project failures. • Uninformed suggestions or expectations of the project duration can act as anchors. • In a controlled experiment we test whether anchors bias project duration estimation. • We find strong anchoring effects and systematic estimation biases that persist over time. • Persisting biases can be caused also by the planner's own initial estimate. The success of a business project often relies on the accuracy of its schedule. Inaccurate and overoptimistic schedules can lead to significant project failures. In this paper, we explore whether the presence of anchors, such as relatively uninformed suggestions or expectations of the duration of project tasks, play a role in the project estimating and planning process. Our laboratory experiment contributes to the methodology of investigating the robustness and persistence of the anchoring effect in the following ways: (1) we investigate the anchoring effect by comparing the behavior in low and high anchor treatments with a control treatment where no anchor is present; (2) we provide a more accurate measurement by incentivizing participants to provide their best duration estimates; (3) we test the persistence of the anchoring effect over a longer horizon; (4) we evaluate the anchoring effect also on retrospective estimates. We find strong anchoring effects and systematic estimation biases that do not vanish even after the task is repeatedly estimated and executed. In addition, we find that such persisting biases can be caused not only by externally provided anchors, but also by the planner's own initial estimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide program managers insight into considerations for launching and running a large‐scale, long‐term citizen science project, using the Snapshot Wisconsin trail‐camera project as a case study. Many citizen science projects are undertaken with a "learn as you go" approach, so there is room to better prepare program managers from the outset. We provide a comprehensive list of components making up citizen science projects, and discuss capacity needs for each component. We then quantify staff time needed throughout the project, based on our own experiences managing a long‐term citizen science project with >1,000 participants. We show that total staff time and staff time devoted to certain project components vary markedly among 3 project phases: planning, growth, and maintenance. We recommend planning for 5.5 staff positions to maintain a long‐term project serving a few hundred volunteers or more. The illustrated concepts can be applied by any person or group developing a volunteer‐based project to prepare for logistic and funding needs across a project's lifespan. Program managers must remember that people form the backbone of any citizen science project, and the success or failure of such projects depend in large part on the user experience of volunteers. © 2019 The Wildlife Society. Many citizen science projects are undertaken with a "learn as you go" approach, so there is room to better prepare program managers from the outset. We provide a comprehensive list of citizen science project components and quantify staff time needed throughout the lifespan of a project, drawing from our own experiences managing a long‐term citizen science project with >1,000 participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Forestry Review is the property of Commonwealth Forestry Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Project planning implies determination of the development goals related to the specific ideas, plans, activites and priorites in their implementation. Predictions determine the assumptions as the grounds on which appropriate decisions are made. Accordingly, the right choice of development activities, organizational potentials, appropriate resources, as well as the time dimension related to the project are of the great importance. The basic purpose of strategic management is contained in the project planning, project management and exchange of project information.