861 resultados para Pedagogic projects


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Gaining economic benefits from substantially lower labor costs has been reported as a major reason for offshoring labor-intensive information systems services to low-wage countries. However, if wage differences are so high, why is there such a high level of variation in the economic success between offshored IS projects? This study argues that offshore outsourcing involves a number of extra costs for the ^his paper was recommended for acceptance by Associate Guest Editor Erran Carmel. client organization that account for the economic failure of offshore projects. The objective is to disaggregate these extra costs into their constituent parts and to explain why they differ between offshored software projects. The focus is on software development and maintenance projects that are offshored to Indian vendors. A theoretical framework is developed a priori based on transaction cost economics (TCE) and the knowledge-based view of the firm, comple mented by factors that acknowledge the specific offshore context The framework is empirically explored using a multiple case study design including six offshored software projects in a large German financial service institution. The results of our analysis indicate that the client incurs post contractual extra costs for four types of activities: (1) re quirements specification and design, (2) knowledge transfer, (3) control, and (4) coordination. In projects that require a high level of client-specific knowledge about idiosyncratic business processes and software systems, these extra costs were found to be substantially higher than in projects where more general knowledge was needed. Notably, these costs most often arose independently from the threat of oppor tunistic behavior, challenging the predominant TCE logic of market failure. Rather, the client extra costs were parti cularly high in client-specific projects because the effort for managing the consequences of the knowledge asymmetries between client and vendor was particularly high in these projects. Prior experiences of the vendor with related client projects were found to reduce the level of extra costs but could not fully offset the increase in extra costs in highly client-specific projects. Moreover, cultural and geographic distance between client and vendor as well as personnel turnover were found to increase client extra costs. Slight evidence was found, however, that the cost-increasing impact of these factors was also leveraged in projects with a high level of required client-specific knowledge (moderator effect).

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Microsoft Project is one of the most-widely used software packages for project management. For the scheduling of resource-constrained projects, the package applies a priority-based procedure using a specific schedule-generation scheme. This procedure performs relatively poorly when compared against other software packages or state-of-the-art methods for resource-constrained project scheduling. In Microsoft Project 2010, it is possible to work with schedules that are infeasible with respect to the precedence or the resource constraints. We propose a novel schedule-generation scheme that makes use of this possibility. Under this scheme, the project tasks are scheduled sequentially while taking into account all temporal and resource constraints that a user can define within Microsoft Project. The scheme can be implemented as a priority-rule based heuristic procedure. Our computational results for two real-world construction projects indicate that this procedure outperforms the built-in procedure of Microsoft Project

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Knowledge processes are critical to outsourced software projects. According to outsourcing research, outsourced software projects succeed if they manage to integrate the client’s business knowledge and the vendor’s technical knowledge. In this paper, we submit that this view may not be wrong, but incomplete in a significant part of outsourced software work, which is software maintenance. Data from six software-maintenance outsourcing transitions indicate that more important than business or technical knowledge can be application knowledge, which vendor engineers acquire over time during practice. Application knowledge was the dominant knowledge during knowledge transfer activities and its acquisition enabled vendor staff to solve maintenance tasks. We discuss implications for widespread assumptions in outsourcing research.

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The use of paraffin slides and tissue microarrays (TMA) is indispensable for translational research. However, storage of paraffin slides over time has a substantial detrimental effect on the quality and reliability of immunohistochemistry stains. Particularly affected by this issue may be any collaborative efforts where paraffin slides or TMAs are shipped to central laboratories and then 'biobanked' for some time until use. This article summarizes some of the key issues affecting loss of antigenicity on paraffin slides and some simple storage solutions to help maintain high quality immunohistochemistry results when paraffin slides must be stored for a certain time prior to use.

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OBJECTIVE A number of factors limit the effectiveness of current aortic arch studies in assessing optimal neuroprotection strategies, including insufficient patient numbers, heterogenous definitions of clinical variables, multiple technical strategies, inadequate reporting of surgical outcomes and a lack of collaborative effort. We have formed an international coalition of centres to provide more robust investigations into this topic. METHODS High-volume aortic arch centres were identified from the literature and contacted for recruitment. A Research Steering Committee of expert arch surgeons was convened to oversee the direction of the research. RESULTS The International Aortic Arch Surgery Study Group has been formed by 41 arch surgeons from 10 countries to better evaluate patient outcomes after aortic arch surgery. Several projects, including the establishment of a multi-institutional retrospective database, randomized controlled trials and a prospectively collected database, are currently underway. CONCLUSIONS Such a collaborative effort will herald a turning point in the surgical management of aortic arch pathologies and will provide better powered analyses to assess the impact of varying surgical techniques on mortality and morbidity, identify predictors for neurological and operative risk, formulate and validate risk predictor models and review long-term survival outcomes and quality-of-life after arch surgery.

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Given the centrality of control for achieving success in outsourced software projects, past research has identified key exogenous factors that determine the choice of controls. This view of exogenously driven control choice is based on a number of assumptions; particularly, clients and vendors are seen as separate cognitive entities that combat opportunistic threats under environmental uncertainty by one-off choices or infrequent revisions of controls. In this paper we complement this perspective by acknowledging that an outsourced software project may be characterized as a collective, evolving process faced with the challenge of coping with cognitive limitations of both client and vendor through a continuous process of learning. We argue that if viewed in this way, controls are less subject of a deliberate choice but rather are subject of endogenously driven change, i.e. controls evolve in close interaction with the evolving software project. Accordingly, we suggest a complementary model of endogenous control, where controls mediate individual and collective learning processes. Our research contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics in outsourced software projects. It also spells out methodological implications that may help improve cross-section control research.