Abstract
Current societal requirements necessitate the effective delivery of complex projects that can do more while using less. Yet, recent large-scale project failures suggest that our ability to successfully deliver them is still at its infancy. Such failures can be seen to arise through various failure mechanisms; this work focuses on one such mechanism. Specifically, it examines the likelihood of a project sustaining a large-scale catastrophe, as triggered by single task failure and delivered via a cascading process. To do so, an analytical model was developed and tested on an empirical dataset by the means of numerical simulation. This paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a methodology to identify the tasks most capable of impacting a project. In doing so, it is noted that a significant number of tasks induce no cascades, while a handful are capable of triggering surprisingly large ones. Secondly, it illustrates that crude task characteristics cannot aid in identifying them, highlighting the complexity of the underlying process and the utility of this approach. Thirdly, it draws parallels with systems encountered within the natural sciences by noting the emergence of self-organised criticality, commonly found within natural systems. These findings strengthen the need to account for structural intricacies of a project’s underlying task precedence structure as they can provide the conditions upon which large-scale catastrophes materialise.
Highlights
Improved planning and resource allocation is an intricate part of decision making
With respect to used quality functions (QF), the Sigmoidal variant will be chosen due to its widespread use in describing various Project Management (PM) activities; the entire set of results can be found in S3 Table
A number of important insights can be drawn. It suggests that large catastrophes do not necessary require a great exogenous force to emerge–a single local failure can be sufficient in taking out a large portion of the project
Summary
Task decomposition and dependency mapping are usual ways of improving it. Standard practice for doing so, for modelling any kind of project, relies on the use of task precedence data [1]. The majority of tools adopt an activity-on-arc network representation [2], building on concepts first introduced by the Critical Path Method [3] and Program Evaluation and Review Technique [4]. This view is formally constructed using temporal elements of PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0142469. This view is formally constructed using temporal elements of PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0142469 November 25, 2015
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