Perspectives on research in project management : the nine schools

This paper demonstrates that project management is a developing field of academic study in management, of considerable diversity and richness, which can make a valuable contribution to the development of management knowledge, as well as being of considerable economic importance. The paper reviews the substantial progress and trends of research in the subject, which has been grouped into nine major schools of thought: optimization, modelling, governance, behaviour, success, decision, process, contingency, and marketing. The paper addresses interactions between the different schools and with other related management fields, and provides insights into current and potential research in each and across these schools.

A multidimensional model of client success when engaging external consultants

Too often the relationship between client and external consultants is perceived as one of protagonist versus antogonist. Stories on dramatic, failed consultancies abound, as do related anecdotal quips. A contributing factor to many "apparently" failed consultancies is a poor appreciation by both the client and consultant of the client's true goals for the project and how to assess progress toward these goals. This paper presents and analyses a measurement model for assessing client success when engaging an external consultant. Three main areas of assessment are identified: (1) the consultant;s recommendations, (2) client learning, and (3) consultant performance. Engagement success is emperically measured along these dimensions through a series of case studies and a subsequent survey of clients and consultants involved in 85 computer-based information system selection projects. Validation fo the model constructs suggests the existence of six distinct and individually important dimensions of engagement success. both clients and consultants are encouraged to attend to these dimensions in pre-engagement proposal and selection processes, and post-engagement evaluation of outcomes.

The role of the market sub-system and the socio-technical sub-system in innovation and firm performance : a dynamic capabilities approach

Organizational learning has been studied as a key factor in firm performance and internationalization. Moving beyond the past emphasis on market learning, we develop a more complete explanation of learning, its relationship to innovation, and their joint effect on early internationalization. We theorize that, driven by the founders’ international vision, early internationalizing firms employ a dual subsystem of dynamic capabilities: a market subsystem consisting of market-focused learning capability and marketing capability, and a socio-technical subsystem comprised of network learning capability and internally focused learning capability. We argue that innovation mediates the proposed relationship between the dynamic capability structure and early internationalization. We conduct case studies to develop the conceptual framework and test it in a field survey of early internationalizing firms from Australia and the United States. Our findings indicate a complex interplay of capabilities driving innovation and early internationalization. We provide theoretical and practical implications and offer insights for future research.

Sustainability in post disaster road infrastructure recovery projects and asset management

Civil infrastructure and especially roads are being impacted with increasing frequency by flood, Tsunami, cyclone related natural and manmade disasters in the world. Responding to such events and in preparing for more regular and intense climate-change induced events in future, the road governing agencies are reviewing how postdisaster road infrastructure recovery projects are best planned and delivered. In particular, there is awareness that rebuilding such infrastructure require sustainable asset management strategies across economic, environmental and social dimensions. A comprehensive asset management framework for pre and post disaster situations can minimize negative impacts on our communities, economy and environment. This research paper is focused on post disaster management in road infrastructures and road infrastructure asset management strategies used by road authorities. Analyzing the implications of disruption to transport network and associated services is an important part of preparing local and regional responses to the impacts of disasters. This research paper will contribute to strategic infrastructure asset planning, management leading to safe, efficient and integrated transport system that supports sustainable economic, social and environmental outcomes. This paper also focuses on proper asset management, governance and engineering principles which should be followed and adopted in post disaster recovery projects to maximize sustainability in environmental, social and economic dimensions.

Making YAWL and SmartPM interoperate : managing highly dynamic processes by exploiting automatic adaptation features

In the last years, the trade-o between exibility and sup- port has become a leading issue in work ow technology. In this paper we show how an imperative modeling approach used to de ne stable and well-understood processes can be complemented by a modeling ap- proach that enables automatic process adaptation and exploits planning techniques to deal with environmental changes and exceptions that may occur during process execution. To this end, we designed and imple- mented a Custom Service that allows the Yawl execution environment to delegate the execution of subprocesses and activities to the SmartPM execution environment, which is able to automatically adapt a process to deal with emerging changes and exceptions. We demonstrate the fea- sibility and validity of the approach by showing the design and execution of an emergency management process de ned for train derailments.

The Language : Rationale and Fundamentals

The Business Process Management domain has evolved at a dramatic pace over the past two decades and the notion of the business process has become a ubiquitous part of the modern business enterprise. Most organizations now view their operations in terms of business processes and manage these business processes in the same way as other corporate assets. In recent years, an increasingly broad range of generic technology has become available for automating business processes. This is part of a growing trend in the software engineering field throughout the past 40 years, where aspects of functionality that are potentially reusable on a widespread basis have coalesced into generic software components. Figure 2.1 illustrates this trend and shows how software systems have evolved from the monolithic applications of the 1960s developed in their entirety often by a single development team to today’s offerings that are based on the integration of a range of generic technologies with only a small component of the application actually being developed from scratch. In the 1990s, generic functionality for the automation of business processes first became commercially available in the form of workflow technology and subsequently evolved in the broader field of business process management systems (BPMS). This technology alleviated the necessity to develop process support within applications from scratch and provided a variety of off-the-shelf options on which these requirements could be based. The demand for this technology was significant and it is estimated that by 2000 there were well over 200 distinct workflow offerings in the market, each with a distinct conceptual foundation. Anticipating the difficulties that would be experienced by organizations seeking to utilize and integrate distinct workflow offerings, the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), an industry group formed to advance technology in this area, proposed a standard reference model for workflow technology with an express desire to seek a common platform for achieving workflow interoperation.

Generating natural language texts from business process models

Process Modeling is a widely used concept for understanding, documenting and also redesigning the operations of organizations. The validation and usage of process models is however affected by the fact that only business analysts fully understand them in detail. This is in particular a problem because they are typically not domain experts. In this paper, we investigate in how far the concept of verbalization can be adapted from object-role modeling to process models. To this end, we define an approach which automatically transforms BPMN process models into natural language texts and combines different techniques from linguistics and graph decomposition in a flexible and accurate manner. The evaluation of the technique is based on a prototypical implementation and involves a test set of 53 BPMN process models showing that natural language texts can be generated in a reliable fashion.

Structuring acyclic process models

This paper addresses the problem of transforming a process model with an arbitrary topology into an equivalent well-structured process model. While this problem has received significant attention, there is still no full characterization of the class of unstructured process models that can be transformed into well-structured ones, nor an automated method to structure any process model that belongs to this class. This paper fills this gap in the context of acyclic process models. The paper defines a necessary and sufficient condition for an unstructured process model to have an equivalent structured model under fully concurrent bisimulation, as well as a complete structuring method.

The triconnected abstraction of process models

Companies use business process models to represent their working procedures in order to deploy services to markets, to analyze them, and to improve upon them. Competitive markets necessitate complex procedures, which lead to large process specifications with sophisticated structures. Real world process models can often incorporate hundreds of modeling constructs. While a large degree of detail complicates the comprehension of the processes, it is essential to many analysis tasks. This paper presents a technique to abstract, i.e., to simplify process models. Given a detailed model, we introduce abstraction rules which generalize process fragments in order to bring the model to a higher abstraction level. The approach is suited for the abstraction of large process specifications in order to aid model comprehension as well as decomposing problems of process model analysis. The work is based on process structure trees that have recently been introduced to the field of business process management.

The Interaction of lean and building information modeling in construction

Lean construction and building information modeling (BIM) are quite different initiatives, but both are having profound impacts on the construction industry. A rigorous analysis of the myriad specific interactions between them indicates that a synergy exists which, if properly understood in theoretical terms, can be exploited to improve construction processes beyond the degree to which it might be improved by application of either of these paradigms independently. Using a matrix that juxtaposes BIM functionalities with prescriptive lean construction principles, 56 interactions have been identified, all but four of which represent constructive interaction. Although evidence for the majority of these has been found, the matrix is not considered complete but rather a framework for research to explore the degree of validity of the interactions. Construction executives, managers, designers, and developers of information technology systems for construction can also benefit from the framework as an aid to recognizing the potential synergies when planning their lean and BIM adoption strategies.

The Service Portfolio of a BPM Center of Excellence

A key concept for the centralized provision of Business Process Management (BPM) is the Center of Excellence (CoE). Organizations establish a CoE (aka BPM Support Office) as their BPM maturity increases in order to ensure a consistent and cost-effective way of offering BPM services. The definition of the offerings of such a center and the allocation of roles and responsibilities play an important role within BPM Governance. In order to plan the role of such a BPM CoE, this chapter proposes the productization of BPM leading to a set of fifteen distinct BPM services. A portfolio management approach is suggested to position these services. The approach allows identifying specific normative strategies for each BPM service, such as further training or BPM communication and marketing. A public sector case study provides further insights into how this approach has been used in practice. Empirical evidence from a survey with 15 organizations confirms the coverage of this set of BPM services and shows typical profiles for such BPM Centers of Excellence.

Interaction modeling using BPMN

Process choreographies describe interactions between different business partners and the dependencies between these interactions. While different proposals were made for capturing choreographies at an implementation level, it remains unclear how choreographies should be described on a conceptual level.While the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is already in use for describing choreographies in terms of interconnected interface behavior models, this paper will introduce interaction modeling using BPMN. Such interaction models do not suffer from incompatibility issues and are better suited for human modelers. BPMN extensions are proposed and a mapping from interaction models to interface behavior models is presented.

Impact and energy absorption of portable water-filled road safety barrier system fitted with foam

Portable water-filled barriers (PWFBs) are roadside appurtenances that are used to prevent errant vehicles from penetrating into temporary construction zones on roadways. A numerical model of the composite PWFB, consisting of a plastic shell, steel frame, water and foam was developed and validated against results from full scale experimental tests. This model can be extended to larger scale impact cases, specifically ones that include actual vehicle models. The cost-benefit of having a validated numerical model is significant and this allows the road barrier designer to conduct extensive tests via numerical simulations prior to standard impact tests Effects of foam cladding as additional energy absorption material in the PWFB was investigated. Different types of foam were treated and it was found that XPS foam was the most suitable foam type. Results from this study will aid PWFB designers in developing new generation of roadside structures which will provide enhanced road safety.

Beyond tasks and gateways: discovering BPMN models with subprocesses, boundary events and activity markers

Existing techniques for automated discovery of process models from event logs largely focus on extracting flat process models. In other words, they fail to exploit the notion of subprocess, as well as structured error handling and repetition constructs provided by contemporary process modeling notations, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). This paper presents a technique for automated discovery of BPMN models containing subprocesses, interrupting and non-interrupting boundary events, and loop and multi-instance markers. The technique analyzes dependencies between data attributes associated with events, in order to identify subprocesses and to extract their associated logs. Parent process and subprocess models are then discovered separately using existing techniques for flat process model discovery. Finally, the resulting models and logs are heuristically analyzed in order to identify boundary events and markers. A validation with one synthetic and two real-life logs shows that process models derived using the proposed technique are more accurate and less complex than those derived with flat process model discovery techniques.

Knowledge Based Urban Development

The changing and challenging conditions of the 21st century have been significantly impacting our economy, society and built and natural environments. Today generation of knowledge—mostly in the form of technology and innovation—is seen as a panacea for the adaptation to changes and management of challenges (Yigitcanlar, 2010a). Making space and place that concentrate on knowledge generation, thus, has become a priority for many nations (van Winden, 2010). Along with this movement, concepts like knowledge cities and knowledge precincts are coined as places where citizenship undertakes a deliberate and systematic initiative for founding its development on the identification and sustainable balance of its shared value system, and bases its ability to create wealth on its capacity to generate and leverage its knowledge capabilities (Carrillo, 2006; Yigitcanlar, 2008a). In recent years, the term knowledge precinct (Hu & Chang, 2005) in its most contemporary interpretation evolved into knowledge community precinct (KCP). KCP is a mixed-use post-modern urban setting—e.g., flexible, decontextualized, enclaved, fragmented—including a critical mass of knowledge enterprises and advanced networked infrastructures, developed with the aim of collecting the benefits of blurring the boundaries of living, shopping, recreation and working facilities of knowledge workers and their families. KCPs are the critical building blocks of knowledge cities, and thus, building successful KCPs significantly contributes to the formation of prosperous knowledge cities. In the literature this type of development—a place containing economic prosperity, environmental sustainability, just socio‐spatial order and good governance—is referred as knowledge-based urban development (KBUD). This chapter aims to provide a conceptual understanding on KBUD and its contribution to the building of KCPs that supports the formation of prosperous knowledge cities.