Simulating work processes and organizations to 'engineer' strategic projects

摘要

Experimence shows that compaines consistently underestimate the time and effort to develop complex products quickly. Managers of strategic projects can often anticipate effort to do direct work, but they routinely underestimage effort to coordinate and do rework. Neither manages' intuitions nor standard project maagement tools can effectively predict the consequences of com,plex and dynamic interactions that emerge when a project team executes highly interdependent activities concurrently. This paper introduces Vite'Project, a software tool and set of methods to model, simulate, analyze and optimize the design of streategic projects and their implementing organizations. We introduce a test case of developing an ethylene plant. Over the past 10 years, we have demsonstrated that Vite software tools and methods can help managers of strategic projects to document critical aspects of their project design and manage the complex interactions between the variables that influence project execution. Product/project objectives, activity schedules, direct wor, coordination and rework, and project team organization.