Project Time Management Research Articles

A Tale of Two Projects: why IT projects fail (and why they sometimes actually succeed)

This Case describes two similar outsourced IS projects that took place in Wellington, New Zealand (NZ) during the period 1992-99, with emphasis on the reasons why one project failed (the prime contractor repudiated the contract and the project was abandoned) and why the other succeeded. The same prime contractor was used for both projects and there were a number of other similarities, yet the outcomes were totally different. The Case provides lessons in some of the fundamental aspects of IS/IT project management, including scope, time, risk, human resources, procurement and quality management.

Reality research: Project time management and recruitment

J Vasc Nurs 2001;19:137-8.

An investigation into the fundamentals of critical chain project scheduling

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a philosophy that is used to develop specific management techniques. The TOC technique for project time management is often referred to as the “critical chain” technique. There are indications that this technique is increasingly being used. This paper reviews the literature on this application of TOC. It also investigates the assumptions and principles underlying the approach. The technique is considered an innovation that would be useful to organisations capable of accepting a new paradigm.

Expand the Horizon of Product-Development Management Research

The article presents a response to an earlier article in a 1995 issue of “Academy of Management Review” discussing product development. The authors welcome these discussions of industrial management issues and present some other areas of product management research that might be ripe for exploration, including cross-functional team research, project time management, and quality function deployment. Further exploration of industrial financial concerns are also suggested. The author notes that some of these concepts are known by other names, but the inclusion of industrial research provides much needed insight into what is happening in industry.

A β-distributed stochastic petri net model for software project time/cost management

This article proposes a new software project time and cost management model using a β-distributed stochastic petri net (BSPN), which is an integrated model of PERT and Petri nets. We adapt the β-distributed transition from program evaluation and review technique (PERT) for modeling uncertainty of time and cost of a software project. A source BSPN of a software project is constructed via the top-down modeling method or transformation method. The source BSPN can be transformed into a reduced BSPN by use of reduction rules. Structural properties of the project are analyzed from the BSPN structure. Behavioral characteristics of the project, such as time and cost, are analyzed via a chronological reachability graph (CRG) of a BSPN. The CRG is a new kind of timed reachability graph. The BSPN model is powerful enough to cope with the uncertainty and concurrency problems of large software project management.

A Grounded Theory of Thesis Blocking

Interviews were conducted with 10 individuals who had great difficulty in completing a thesis, and with 6 students who had relatively little difficulty. A hierarchical structure of categories encapsulating the respondents' accounts was developed through the use of the grounded theory method of qualitative analysis. In this structure, control over the thesis is the core category and is supported by the two properties of dependence—independence and structuring the task. The latter property is in turn supported by project meaningfulness, political expertise, and time management. The relationships among the categories are cast into a grounded theory of thesis blocking. The implications and limitations of the theory are discussed.