Abstract
Planning a project with proper considerations of all necessary factors and managing a project to ensure its successful implementation are facing a lot challenges. Initial stage in planning a project is costly, time consuming and usually with poor accuracy on cost and effort predictions. On the other hand, detailed information for previous projects may be buried in piles of archived documents, which make it increasingly difficult to learn from the previous experiences. Current information sharing methods to support project management focus on activity based project operation and processes but lack some granulations on project deliverables, especially when project context and customer requirements are varied. This research develops a product based information sharing (PBIS) framework, which attempts to serve in general project planning and lead to properly and effectively benchmarking and recommending product portfolios for project management purposes.PBIS made contributions in various areas. It introduced a new product based approach to capture and reuse the project information that tackles the issue of information sharing from a very different perspective. The Project Analyser part articulates requirement information at both project and product levels. The analysed results can be used to assist the product based breakdown process which is validated by product refinement rules. The Project Planner part enables project plan to be generated accurately and efficiently through a novel product benchmarking and recommendation mechanism. This mechanism integrated with the strengths of Quartile, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to ensure the right products are selected based on products of which attributes are important for customer criteria during the project planning stage. A novel software system iPAS based on PBIS has been developed to bridge the gap between PBIS main principles and its application, with providing the user with automated planning, monitoring, reports and human resource allocation.
PBIS has been trialled with cases studies in two organisations, which clearly shows the business benefits of autonomic project management. It reduced effort to plan new projects and manage project portfolio and decreased estimation bias thereby reducing operational risk. It also automatically benchmarked performance against company best practices. As a result, the PBIS can be used to solve other real world problems in standardised industries such as manufacture, education, medicine, construction and rail industries etc.
| Date of Award | Mar 2018 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Linda Yang (Supervisor) & Salem Aljareh (Supervisor) |