An investigation of project dependencies and risks in project schedule slippage and effort overrun in the engineering computing organization.

摘要

The purpose of the author in this dissertation was to investigate relationships between project dependencies and risks and the project schedule slippage and effort overrun in the Engineering Computing Organization of a leading electronic communication company. The rationale for this study was to provide a simple mechanism for the project leaders enabling them to follow their project plan more closely.; Engineering Computing (EC) provides support services for all workstations, servers, Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications, and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) applications in a leading electronic communication company. This organization is comprised of several major support groups: Service Center, Systems/Servers (USS), Network Infrastructure, Electrical/Mechanical CAD Applications, Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) Applications, Product Data Management (PDM) Tools, Web Technology, and Process Engineering teams. These teams develop, implement and maintain new computing technologies at a facility with over 3000 users. The majority of the human resources in these interdisciplinary teams are involved in project activities.; In this dissertation, a selected sample of completed projects at EC was examined. The researcher designed a questionnaire and conducted interviews with project leaders involved in the selected sample projects. Two cause and effect diagrams were developed to present the categories of reasons associated with the project delays and effort overruns. The inferential statistics testing provided further information on the project characteristics that further exposed the projects to risk of schedule delays and effort overrun. This research study revealed that the top three high-level categories having the largest weights on the schedule delays were supplier product, managerial, and product development.; Examination of project schedule delays and effort overruns by project size, type or dependencies in this research study allowed establishing the following conclusions: software projects were exposed to risks of having significantly higher schedule slippage when compared to projects of type “installation” or “documentation”, large size projects were exposed to risks of having higher schedule slippage when compared to smaller size projects, projects with dependency to external organizations were exposed to risks of having higher schedule slippage when compared to projects with no dependency to external entities, and software projects were exposed to risks of having higher effort index (cost overrun) when compared to projects of type “documentation”, “evaluation”, and “installation”. These findings provided impetus to the project leaders to improve their project scheduling, effort estimation, risk assessment and risk management processes and practices based on the project characteristics. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)