Effect of organisational position and network centrality on project coordination

This study approaches project based coordination from a real-world dataset of complex multi-million dollar projects with hundreds of people working together. Using the Enron dataset provides this study with real-world interactions for exploring the effect of the employee’s organisational position and network centrality on project based coordination. With an understanding of centrality and coordination, we explore whether centrally ‘well-connected’ people are able to exercise greater project based coordination within the network structure. In this study, we explore questions such as–What is the relationship between network centrality and coordination? Which degrees of centrality (i.e., in-degree, out-degree, betweenness, closeness) have higher correlation in project based coordination? Is there a relationship between actors’ organisational position and their network position with the project group?     

Marketing view of project startup

Over three years, 25 project startups were conducted using a ‘marketing’ or ‘user-oriented’ approach. About 60% of the project startups were project restarts. The need for restarts resulted mainly from poor user/client orientation during the original project-initiation activities. Sometimes, however, it was also due to poor projectmanagement practices in general.The paper concentrates on the user/client aspects of the startups and the benefits resulting from them. The term ‘user’, or client, is used for four categories of user, who are brought together in negotiations during project starts and phase transitions. Of course, all the methods and techniques developed for project startup remained valid and indispensable, always indicating the known but often difficult-to-realize truth: invest in the start.For the majority of the organizations using this approach, it meant a breakthrough in the global ‘time-and-quality’-based competition.     

Beyond content and control: project vulnerability and the process agenda

Project management is conventionally defined in terms of deadlines, budgets and technical specifications. Project managers are normally chosen for their expertise in these areas. Research suggests, however, that the contexts of some projects demand a different set of priorities. The paper reports the findings of a competence-based study of the project-management role. The focus of the study was on projects involving strategic combinations of information technology and organizational change. With respect to the management of the implementation process, 15 competences are identified, in five clusters. The findings further suggest how the significance of these process competences depends on the project context, which is shown to vary between high and low levels of ‘vulnerability’. Vulnerability influences the project manager's ‘agenda priorities’, which in turn determine the competences that are critical to effectiveness. The implications of these findings are discussed, in terms of the selection of appropriately skilled managers for projects, the selection of appropriate projects for managers, and the design of relevant approaches to project-management development.     

Continuous accountability for acceptable building performance

Complexities in building technology when not fully understood, have resulted in a less than favorable aggregate impact on the building's environment. A surprisingly high portion of U.S. non-industrial buildings do not provide satisfactory task environments. Developments in computer technology have infused new thought processes in the way we plan, design, build and operate our buildings. This paper proposes a social and technical use of Knowledge-based-systems (KBS) for continuous accountability to assure healthy buildings. Diagnostics, as an emerging discipline in building design and operation, is also discussed. A proposed framework for such accountability and the resulting ‘chain of custody’, that draws on the medical paradigm and associated diagnostic procedures is presented. It is suggested that KBS also be used for the development and interpretation of criteria for evaluating building performance from initial conception through design, construction and operation. Thus, KBS is expected to aid in the analysis of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ buildings that may be ‘sick’ or ‘healthy’. It is proposed that for a building to provide satisfactory performance over its life-time, the ‘life-cycle’ concept must be modified in terms of the roles, responsibilities, and configuration of the building team, and in terms of its costing procedures.     

Greenways: multiplying and diversifying in the 21st century

Building on the legacy of historic greenway planning in the U.S., several new initiatives have been taking shape and gaining recognition in the past decade. One is ‘Green Infrastructure’ planning which is a ‘must have’ inter-connected system of green spaces. Another is ‘Smart Conservation’—the counterpoint of another planning initiative that preceded it known as ‘Smart Growth’. This is the establishment of critical green corridors that should be preserved and maintained for predominantly ecological functions, in advance of or in conjunction with new development. ‘New Urbanism’ has focused on bringing order and coherence to escalating ‘Edge Cities’ on the urban fringe, based on walkable, mixed-use towns, villages and neighborhoods with integrated open-space systems. Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs) are transportation plans for accommodating regional growth around clustered ‘pedestrian pockets’ linked by transit systems. Both New Urbanism and TODs have applied similar principles to ‘brown sites’ and declining city neighborhoods.All these initiatives are different aspects of the greenway movement, expressing its many possibilities, enriching its original concepts, enlarging its credibility—if need be—and emphasizing its importance for and relevance to current issues of sustainability and ‘green’ planning and design. The author, a teacher/practitioner, discusses recent U.S. greenway examples at site, metropolitan and regional scales for which he has been the principal planner/designer or a consultant, and compares New Urbanism and TOD methodologies and approaches to established greenway-planning practices and the premises of Smart Conservation.     

New ‘rural lifestyle estates’ in The Netherlands

Recent studies tend to indicate that no longer all presently agricultural land in The Netherlands is required for sustainable agricultural production. Apart from various urban uses and some projects turning agricultural land into nature reserves or giving it a secondary function, like national landscape parks or drinking water supply area, it is not easy to find alternative users for the land presently managed by farmers. At the same time, many urban companies or families are vainly looking for building lots away from our ‘compact urban areas’. This paper explores a way to bring this supply and demand together in a landscape-wise more than acceptable manner: the planning concept and experiment of ‘new rural lifestyle estates’.     

Ultimate strength of submarine pressure hulls with failure governed by inelastic buckling

The analysis of submarine pressure hull assumes great importance among structural engineers due to the complexity involved in the collapse mechanism of stiffened shell structures. In most of the cases, the failure of stiffened shell structures occurs due to elastic buckling. But for some combinations of shell-stiffener geometry and material characteristics, the structure can fail by inelastic buckling, for which the methods of analysis are meagre. In this paper, the analysis of submarine pressure hull structure in which the failure gets governed by inelastic buckling is demonstrated. Three different approaches have been employed to investigate the ultimate strength of the ring stiffened submarine pressure hull structure with inelastic buckling modes of failure. The methods used are ‘Johnson–Ostenfeld inelastic correction’, ‘imperfection method’ and ‘finite element approach’. A typical submarine shell structure has been analysed for the inelastic buckling failure using these three approaches and the results are discussed.     

Israel: metropolitan integration or ‘fractured regions’? An alternative perspective

This paper proposes an alternative account of the high degree of power centrality in Israel, by arguing that the territorial ‘fracturing’ of Israel's main social and ethnic groups has prevented the emergence of effective pressure for regional devolution. Israel's character as a settler and settling state, and its central project of Judaising contested territories, enabled the Israeli ‘ethnocracy’ and its (mainly Ashkenazi) elites to create a political geography of ‘fractured ethnic and social regions’. This was achieved by dispersing minorities and legitimising segregation and inequality, all in the name of the ‘national interest’.The Israeli political landscape is therefore organised as ‘fractured regions’, each representing a distinct and interconnected, yet geographically dispersed, set of localities. The logic of dispersal and segregation, in turn, has also influenced patterns of development and residential separation within Israel's main urban areas. Thus ethnic and social fragmentation and conflict, and not a putative process of national or metropolitan integration, can explain much of Israel's highly centralised power structure.     

Why projects fail? How contingency theory can provide new insights – A comparative analysis of NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter loss

When important projects fail, the investigation is often focused on the engineering and technical reasons for the failure. That was the case in NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) that was lost in space after completing its nine-month journey to Mars. Yet, in many cases the root cause of the failure is not technical, but managerial. Often the problem is rooted in management’s failure to select the right approach to the specific project. The objective of this paper is to enrich our understanding of project failure due to managerial reasons by utilizing different contingency theory frameworks for a retrospective look at unsuccessful projects and perhaps more important, potential prevention of future failures. The evolving field of project management contingency theory provides an opportunity at this time to re-examine the concept of fit between project characteristics and project management, and offer deeper insights on why projects fail. After outlining several existing contingency studies, we use three distinct frameworks for analyzing the MCO project. These frameworks include Henderson and Clark’s categorization of change and innovation, Shenhar and Dvir’s NTCP diamond framework, and Pich, Loch, and De Meyer’s strategies for managing uncertainty. While each framework provides a different perspective, collectively, they demonstrate that in the MCO program, the choices made by managers, or more accurately, the constraints imposed on them under the policy of ‘better, faster, cheaper’, led the program to its inevitable failure. This paper shows that project management contingency theory can indeed provide new insights for a deeper understanding of project failure. Furthermore, it suggests implications for a richer upfront analysis of a project’s unique characteristics of uncertainty and risk, as well as additional directions of research. Such research may help establish new and different conceptions on project success and failure beyond the traditional success factors, and subsequently develop more refined contingency frameworks. The results of such research may enable future project managers to rely less on heuristics and possibly lead to a new application of “project management design.”     

Ecology on the edge:: Landscape and ecology between town and country

The trends are world wide: people and goods are increasingly mobile, compact cities develop into urban networks, industrialising agriculture is becoming footloose, rural life becomes urban life in a green setting. Social segregation, traffic nuisance, urban sprawl and other unwanted impacts of these trends challenge urban and regional planners. The search for planning answers to these issues is further complicated by the need for sustainable development at a global scale. What is the role of ecology in the context of the discussions on the future of town and country? The traditional, and still dominant, approach is based on the polarity of urban and rural worlds. In this perspective, ecology focuses on the ‘nature’ of protected areas and biodiversity. The papers in this special issue explore the prospects of a wider perspective in which natural processes are seen as basic to both, rural and urban development. This article is digging up the fundamental ‘discourses’ underlying the two approaches to ecology and nature. Firstly, the ‘object-oriented’ and ‘process-oriented’ discourses are analysed. Secondly, the prospects of a process-oriented discourse are illustrated with plans for the Dutch Randstad and the German Ruhr area. Then, some new concepts are introduced that may strengthen the institutional conditions for the process-oriented approach. Discourses, concepts, plans and projects all circle around the central question in this article about the role of ecology in planning the edge of the city.     

Greenways and the making of urban form

One aspect of greenways which is exciting popular interest in the US is the durability of nineteenth-century parkways and park systems to stitch together fragmenting cities and urbanizing areas. What the Olmsteds, Cleveland, Eliot and Kessler achieved in their regional open-space plans can be the model for a new version of Howard's ‘town/country’ in which greenways/ greenbelts/greenspaces together make a comprehensive ‘green’ infrastructure.Some of the literature and the highlights of historic greenway planning and design in the US are reviewed. Their adaptation to current projects is illustrated through a series of case studies of gradually increasing scale—villages, towns, cities and regions. Such common strategies as ‘green’ streets, parks and playgrounds structuring walkable neighborhoods, intra-neighborhood parkways connecting town/city districts, and regional park systems protecting natural areas for recreation/conservation still confer similar social, economic and environmental benefits. Whether Pedestrian Pockets or Co-housing, expanding historic settlements or preserving the countryside, planning new ‘urban villages’ or neo-traditional towns, greenways can be powerful makers and shapers of urban form at both macro- and micro-scales.     

Fast-tracking for nuclear power plant construction

Fast-tracking increases the level of activity in both the office and the field because of the shortened schedule and because of the need for prompt effective decision-making. These challenges to project management are examined, and the means by which potential problems are anticipated and prevented are discussed. In order to implement viable project management controls on any project, whether large or small, a commonly understood and quantified ‘baseline’ must first be established.     

The application of ‘least-cost’ modelling as a functional landscape model

The growing awareness of the adverse effects of habitat fragmentation on natural systems has resulted in a rapidly increasing number of actions to reduce current fragmentation of natural systems as well as a growing demand for tools to predict and evaluate the effect of changes in the landscape on connectivity in the natural world. Recent studies used ‘least-cost’ modelling (available as a toolbox in GIS-systems) to calculate ‘effective distance’, a measure for distance modified with the cost to move between habitat patches based on detailed geographical information on the landscape as well as behavioural aspects of the organisms studied. We applied the method to a virtual landscape and a small scaled agricultural system subject to different scenarios in a land re-allotment project. We discuss the importance of technical aspects and ecological assumption underlying this modelling method. The model is shown to be a flexible tool to model functional connectivity in the study of the relation between landscape and mobility of organisms as well as in scenario building and evaluation in wild life protection projects and applied land management projects. Since ‘effective distance’ has the same units as Euclidean distance (m), this effective distance may be a straightforward way to include landscape and behavioural aspects in other models which include distance as a measure for isolation. We show the importance of the ‘ecological’ quality of the input maps and the choice of relevant landscape features and resistance values.     

Wild times and domesticated times: the temporalities of environmental lifestyles and politics

In this paper, I explore how environmental movements and lifestyles, like all forms of human action, produce their own characteristic kinds of time. During this exploration, I introduce a number of concepts which I suggest are useful in understanding these temporalities—chronological and kairological time; linear and cyclic time; segmentation and plot; orientation and synchronisation. Whereas the environment as described by the natural sciences is one dominated by chronological, linear time, human time is also kairological, suffused with meaning and intention. The varieties of human action also produce their own distinctive temporalities—some linear, some cyclic, some oriented to external goals, some self-sufficient. The logic of kairological time also requires that we understand individual events and actions as ‘figures’ against a temporal ‘ground’—one that is characteristically organised into an overarching narrative, or broken up into distinctive time segments. Furthermore, human experience is not just situated in time, but orients itself within time—it faces ‘backwards’ into the past, ‘forwards’ into the future, or commits itself to the present. Finally, lived time is also sometimes synchronised with other times—with that of proximate or distant others, or with historical narratives of progress or decline.     

Some comments on the numerical analysis of plates and thin-walled structures

The paper briefly reviews the theoretical analysis of plates structures that might exhibit multiple ‘loading paths’ and highlights the need for engineers using non-linear numerical modelling to be aware of the multi-mode phenomenon and to ensure that the modelling is set up in such a manner that the various ‘loading paths’ and possible changes of path would be incorporated in the modelling response. The paper presents a simple example of numerical analysis of thin-plate buckling that involves ‘coupled buckling modes’ and provides comments on suitable methods for defining in a simple and straightforward way the numerical modelling that could ensure that results from computer analysis describe the physically correct relationship between applied loadings and deformations of thin-walled structural components.     

Ramsey pricing: Its uses and limits

Since 1980, the idea of ‘Ramsey pricing’ has attained a marked vogue in the literature on utility pricing and deregulation in the USA. It seems to offer a simple rule - the ‘inverseelasticity’ rule -for reaching efficient price structures in multi-product firms. It has been applied particularly to utility firms in the electric and telecommunications industries, as well as to pipelines, railroads, airlines and other deregulated industries. Despite its proponents' great enthusiasm for the idea, there are a number of serious limits and problems. I will review these in this paper, trying to draw a balanced judgment about this economic tool. It is a flawed tool, and some of its defects appear to be crippling if not fatal.     

GBT formulation to analyse the buckling behaviour of thin-walled members with arbitrarily ‘branched’ open cross-sections

This paper presents the derivation, validates and illustrates the application of a Generalised Beam Theory (GBT) formulation developed to analyse the buckling behaviour of thin-walled members with arbitrarily ‘branched’ open cross-sections. Following a brief overview of the conventional GBT, one addresses in great detail the modifications that must be incorporated into its cross-section analysis procedure, in order to be able to handle the ‘branching’ points — they concern mostly issues related to (i) the choice of the appropriate ‘elementary warping functions’ and (ii) the determination of the ‘initial flexural shape functions’. The derived formulation is then employed to investigate the local-plate, distortional and global buckling behaviour of (i) simply supported and fixed asymmetric E-section columns and (ii) simply supported I-section beams with unequal stiffened flanges. For validation purposes, several GBT-based results are compared with ‘exact’ values, obtained by means of finite strip or shell finite element analyses.     

Implementing strategic change through projects

Senior managers spend a lot of time and effort trying to change their organisations. All too often it turns out to be a waste of time. Somewhere along the way, the force behind their ideas and objectives drains away. This paper looks at what gets in the way of strategic change. It shows how using projects, programmes and the associated management processes can guarantee a greater level of success. This paper does not propose that project management is a simple solution. Indeed, this is one of the most commonly-cited reasons for failure of ‘business process re-engineering’ initiatives.     

Planning of an environmental-impact statement: a scientific and political dilemma

The consistent and predictable progression of larger and more complex projects is often disrupted by conflicts of interests. Major confrontations during the realization of a project can obstruct the economic allocation of resources, and push a well managed project into a state of being ‘thrown-together’ and reactive. Therefore, the management of the unmanageable, i.e. the conflict of interests, requires more than just good management tools. The paper describes different aspects of ‘dialogue management’, and illustrates this by the planning of an environmental-impact statement (EIS).The planning of larger projects that require an EIS is not a major planning problem, because the procedure of creating an EIS is well defined by legal regulations. Nevertheless, as the goal of a well prepared EIS is that of winning a broad acceptance for the project, the reliable management of an EIS includes the planning of dialogue and the understanding of the counterparts involved. Under these circumstances, an unusual project-management strategy is required that is based on a philosophical understanding of human intentions, reactions and interests. The strategy must take into account the fact that the establishment of opinions follows rules that are different from those of normal working operations.     

A fuzzy multicriteria evaluation system for the assessment of tunnels vis-à-vis surface roads: the WPMA case—part II

The Fuzzy Multicriteria Evaluation System (FUMES) is applied on a real evaluation problem such as the Western Peripheral Motorway of Athens (WPMA). The lack of a formal development model of the study area suggested an evaluation strategy, which is characterized by the high uncertainty of the evaluation environment. This has resulted in using judgments when quantitative information on the performance of the tunnel or the surface road was not available. It also resulted in employing a relatively large number of alternative scenarios to deal with the different policy goals. The attempted impact analysis generated crisp and fuzzy scores for each competing alternative. The different scenarios under which the various alternatives were evaluated are of two types: socio-economic and policy scenarios. Subsequently, the criteria weights were computed using the Fuzzy Hierarchical Analysis and the different CBA and MCA methods were applied. Finally, the output of the evaluation determined that the surface road is the most ‘stable’ solution for all the ‘extrovert’ development scenarios, while the tunnel is more preferable for all the ‘introvert’ development scenarios.