Embodying Product and Process Flexibility to Cope with Challenging Project Deliveries

Four factors make it challenging to manage semiconductor fabrication facility (“fabs”) projects: technical complexity of the product design, need to compress the project duration, need to reduce upfront costs, and unexpected project changes. The strategies employed by practitioners to cope with these challenges form an intricate puzzle. We empirically develop a framework that provides a structure for helping to solve this puzzle, which comprises two principles: investing upfront in a flexible product design and structuring a flexible process. Empirical findings reveal that project teams make commitments early on by overdesigning but also postpone critical decisions by differentiating the scope of their work. Project teams employ other strategies such as increasing communication, using modular architectures, engaging in four-dimensional computer-based modeling, and fabricating components and subsystems off-site. Our analysis yields understanding on the purposes and performance tradeoffs of these strategies, and on how they embody the two principles. Project managers may find the framework useful when deciding which strategies best suit other equally challenging projects.     

Consulting psychology as creative problem solving: Lessons from my first 3 decades.

The behavioral sciences offer time-tested principles that can help consulting psychologists and their clients design and implement effective change strategies, using a creative problem-solving approach. Over the past 30 years, the author has learned some lessons about how to do this: (a) Never throw anything away--anything observed may help the work of change; (b) problem solving starts with people connecting, to mobilize the resources needed for change; (c) what's learned from consulting with for-profit organizations can be applied to nonprofit organizations with surprisingly little translation; (d) creative problem-solving often begins by building bridges between psychology and other parts of the world; (e) the work of change in the nonprofit world involves looking for leverage opportunities; and (f) the work of change is enhanced by using personal experience in defining change strategies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How Much Energy Do Different Toplighting Strategies Save?

Skylights can introduce considerable heat gains and losses that may offset the benefits of electric light savings and cause an increase in yearly net building energy use. The design of a toplight system needs to take into consideration different toplighting types, including aperture size and orientation, electric lighting control, and, most important, the local climate. This study examines the impacts of a variety of toplighting strategies and glazing types on the total yearly energy loads for a prototypical open office space situated in five different climates. Coordinated modeling with both an advanced daylight and electric lighting simulation program and a building thermal simulation program based on hourly weather data for an entire year enable the reliable estimation of annual lighting energy use in response to dynamically changing daylight conditions, and address the interaction between lighting energy and total building energy. This study shows that different toplighting strategies designed to meet a 2% daylight factor can save overall building energy consumption in a variety of climates, compared to the base case of an opaque roof, when electric lighting control is applied.     

Reliability and Stability Buffering Approach: Focusing on the Issues of Errors and Changes in Concurrent Design and Construction Projects

This paper proposes a new buffering approach, reliability and stability buffering, as a means to reduce uncertainty caused by errors and changes, in particular, when concurrent design and construction is applied to an infrastructure project. The proposed buffering provides a proactive mechanism to protect the planned performance of a project with a flexibly located and systemically sized buffer. For its implementation, the reliability and stability buffering is incorporated into a dynamic design and construction project model, which simulates the impacts of errors and changes on design and construction performance and evaluates the effectiveness of the proposed buffers. Applying this buffering approach into the infrastructure project in Massachusetts, this paper concludes that (1) the amount of hidden errors and latent changes was reduced; (2) the flexibly located and distributed buffers helped identify the predecessors’ errors and changes in concurrent design and construction; (3) the impacts of hidden errors and changes were minimized, preventing their ripple effect on the succeeding activities; and (4) the quality of the coordination process was increased. Thus it shows great potential to protect design and construction performance against uncertainty in concurrent design and construction delivery of civil infrastructure projects. Such benefit obtained from the proposed buffering should be relevant to researchers and practitioners because it provides the base for future investigation for the strategic utilization of schedule buffers in an uncertain environment as well as the guideline for their effective use in practice.     

Aging, emotion, and health-related decision strategies: Motivational manipulations can reduce age differences.

According to socioemotional selectivity theory, age-related constraints on time horizons are associated with motivational changes that increasingly favor goals related to emotional well-being. Such changes have implications for emotionally taxing tasks such as making decisions, especially when decisions require consideration of unpleasant information. This study examined age differences in information acquisition and recall in the health care realm. Using computer-based decision scenarios, 60 older and 60 young adults reviewed choice criteria that contained positive, negative, and neutral information about different physicians and health care plans. As predicted, older adults reviewed and recalled a greater proportion of positive than of negative information compared with young adults. Age differences were eliminated when motivational manipulations elicited information-gathering goals or when time perspective was controlled statistically. Implications for improving decision strategies in older adults are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Feasibility Study of an Automated Tool for Identifying the Implications of Changes in Construction Projects

Because of the fragmented nature of project information, decisions on changes in construction projects are usually based on project design instead of project requirements. This research proposes a new approach for coping with changes in construction projects: A change control tool (CCT) that will identify implications of a change as soon as it is proposed. The tool will ensure that the stakeholders involved in the decision process in which change proposals are evaluated will know in advance if a change could cause the project to stray from its original goals, as expressed in the requirements. The proposed CCT uses the building program as a link between client requirements and the building design and traces the different relationships that exist between the requirements in the project. The relationships are traced using requirement traceability capabilities on the level of a specific space in the project and on the level of the entire project. A preliminary CCT model was developed and pilot studies implementing the model have been conducted. The pilot studies have given positive results, indicating that the CCT could identify the scope of the proposed changes’ implications.     

Collaborative Planning and Scheduling of Interrelated Design Changes

During the detailed design stage of a building project, a vast amount of mostly interrelated design information is generated and communicated among specialists from several disciplines. Changes in some design information are inevitable due to the iterative nature of the design process. In many cases, when the design of a building component is modified by one discipline, this change affects the design of many related building components that are the responsibility of several other design disciplines. Commitment and resources are needed to accommodate such design changes to maintain compatibility among all the design information. Otherwise, incompatibility errors become embedded in the design information leading to numerous problems during the construction of the project. This paper presents a computer-assisted methodology that helps design managers in planning and scheduling changes with interrelated effects on the design information.     

Problem-solving strategies in reflective and impulsive children.

87 reflective and 86 impulsive 7-, 9-, and 11-yr-old children (determined by Matching Familiar Figures Test scores) were given a series of 5 problem-solving tasks in which they were required to determine the correct solution from a number of equiprobable solutions by gathering information that eliminated incorrect alternatives. Results indicate that the relative impact of cognitive style on problem solving varied with developmental level and the type of problem that was solved. Cognitive style had the greatest impact on the performance and strategy behavior of 7- and 11-yr-olds. No significant differences were found between reflective and impulsive 9-yr-olds on any measure. Nevertheless, when cognitive style was a significant contributor to performance, reflective children processed task information more efficiently than impulsive children and used more systematic and/or developmentally mature strategies. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Task representations, strategy variability, and base-rate neglect.

The authors present a new model called RCCL (pronounced "ReCyCLe"; Represent the task, Construct a set of action strategies consistent with the task representation, Choose from among those strategies according to their success rates, and Learn new success rates for the strategies based on experience). The model explains the different ways in which people combine base-rate and case-specific cues to produce choice. It also makes additional predictions regarding variability in people's choices over time. Experiment 1 tested 58 college-age students in a problem-solving task and showed that task representations can be influenced by feedback from the environment, producing changes in base rate and cue sensitivity. Experiment 2 tested 80 college-age students in a delayed match-to-sample task and showed that variations in the format of a task can lead to different representations, which in turn produce much different base-rate and cue sensitivities. Moreover, both experiments showed systematic variability in choice over time in ways predicted by the model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Problem solving in judgment under uncertainty.

This article presents a problem-solving approach to judgment under uncertainty. According to this approach, the application of statistical rules and nonstatistical rules depends on the same general problem-solving factors. The experiments reported herein used base-rate problems to study four such factors: the prior and immediate activation of the rules, their relation to the goal, and their applicability to the givens of the problem. All of the experiments used purely statistical base rates and highly representative case information. Supporting the prior activation assumption, Experiment 1 found that prior use of base rates enhanced subsequent use of other base rates. Consistent with the immediate activation assumption, Experiment 2 showed that the use of base rate increased with their immediate salience. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that the application of inferential rules is goal driven. Specifically, base-rate and case information were used to the extent that they led to satisfactory solutions. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 demonstrated subjects' sensitivity to restrictions on the application of the relevant statistical and nonstatistical rules. In these experiments, subjects' reliance on base rates increased with the perceived randomness of the process whereby the case was selected from the population and with the perceived unreliability of the source of case information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automated Code Compliance Checking for Building Envelope Design

Automating the checking of building envelope design according to design regulations is a complex process because these regulations consist of complicated logic sentences covering multiple functions. Existing mechanisms of building code computer-aided checking have some limitations dealing with design regulations. This paper presents a new integrated approach to automated code compliance checking for building envelope design based on simulation results and building codes. In this approach, building codes and simulation results are seamlessly linked with the compliance checking software. A hierarchical object-based representation of simulation results is proposed as an extended building information model (EBIM) to describe the attributes of a building and its subsystems. A representation of building codes based on decision tables and compatible with the EBIM is also proposed so that users can check the building envelope design against building codes based on the standardized simulation results. A prototype system is developed and a case study gives an example of evaluating the hygrothermal performance of an exterior wall.     

Learning botany concepts mnemonically: Seeing the forest and the trees.

Sixty-one college students read a passage that described a plant classification system and the distinguishing characteristics of the plant groups within that system. There were three experimental conditions: taxonomic, which included a standard figural taxonomy (boxes connected by lines) as an instructional aid; mnemonic, which included pictorial mnemonic (memory-enhancing) representations of classification and characteristics information; and free study, in which the students were instructed to use their own best method(s) to master the passage content. Students were tested on a variety of learning measures immediately after reading the botany text, 2 days later, and 2 months later. Mnemonically instructed students statistically outperformed free-study students on every measure taken and performed better than taxonomically instructed students on almost all of the measures. These findings (a) establish the versatility of mnemonic strategies by extending their benefits from simple factual memory tasks to tasks requiring the manipulation of knowledge in novel problem-solving contexts and (b) points to the potency, durability, and educational utility of mnemonic techniques, relative to other instructional strategies, on tasks that involve remembering and creatively applying both factual and structural information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Componential modeling of alternative strategies for performing spatial tasks.

Tested single-strategy and strategy-shifting models in a stratified random sample of 30 male high schoolers and undergraduates to explore relations among aptitude, spatial task solution strategy, and task performance. Results show that different models fit different Ss on each of 3 task steps (encoding, synthesis, and comparison), suggesting that different Ss used different strategies for solving the same items. Some of the best fitting models specified that Ss frequently and flexibly switch strategies in keeping with variations in item demands (a form of adaptive, within-task learning). For the encoding and synthesis steps, significant performance differences were found among Ss using different strategies. Aptitude may have affected strategy choice. Evidence for 2 types of strategy shifting (route and sequence shifting) was found. The shift models help explain individual differences in problem-solving processes employed in complex tasks such as the ones administered in this study. The strategy-shift models are appended. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multimedia Learning in an Interactive Self-Explaining Environment: What Works in the Design of Agent-Based Microworlds?

Students learned about electric motors by asking questions and receiving answers from an on-screen pedagogical agent named Dr. Phyz who stood next to an on-screen drawing of an electric motor. Students performed better on a problem-solving transfer test when Dr. Phyz's explanations were presented as narration rather than on-screen text (Experiment 1), when students were able to ask questions and receive answers interactively rather than receive the same information as a noninteractive multimedia message (Experiments 2a and 2b), and when students were given a prequestion to guide their self-explanations during learning (Experiment 3). Deleting Dr. Phyz's image from the screen had no significant effect on problem-solving transfer performance (Experiment 4). The results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning and yield principles for the design of interactive multimedia learning environments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's referential communication: Components of plans for effective listening.

Investigated the effects of 2 plans on children's listener behavior in a referential communication setting. The design systematically varied the presence and absence of instructions about a plan to engage in comparison activities (comparison plan) and instructions about a plan to request more information if the speaker's message was ambiguous (action plan). 94 elementary school Ss played the role of listener. The speaker was an adult confederate who produced messages of varying informational adequacy. Results show that on an immediate test, Ss who received the action plan asked more questions when the messages were ambiguous and made more correct referent choices than other Ss. These effects persisted on a test administered 2 wks later and were observed both for nameable and abstract stimulus items. No significant effect of the comparison plan was observed. Results suggest that knowing when and how to request additional information is an important listener skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experience, Context, and the Visual Perception of Human Movement.

Why are human observers particularly sensitive to human movement? Seven experiments examined the roles of visual experience and motor processes in human movement perception by comparing visual sensitivities to point-light displays of familiar, unusual, and impossible gaits across gait-speed and identity discrimination tasks. In both tasks, visual sensitivity to physically possible gaits was superior to visual sensitivity to physically impossible gaits, supporting perception-action coupling theories of human movement perception. Visual experience influenced walker-identity perception but not gait-speed discrimination. Thus, both motor experience and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human movement. An ecological perspective can be used to define the conditions necessary for experience-dependent sensitivity to human movement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The development of the dental high-speed air turbine handpiece. Part 2

It is usually assumed that sexual material is easily identifiable by its content. The present study investigated whether subjects could be led to interpret ambiguous material as sexual or not via simple instructions. Thematically ambiguous written text was presented to 269 subjects. The principal independent variable was the content of advance information. Advance information was designed to suggest that the accompanying text had either a sexual or a nonsexual theme. After reading the story and completing an intervening task, subjects completed recall and recognition tasks based on the text. These data were used to determine the theme or story interpretation given by subjects. The information contained in the advance organizers influenced subjects' memories for and interpretations of the ambiguous story. When the story was preceded by introductory information that suggested sexual content, subjects tended to attribute sexual meaning to the story. Other subjects attributed a nonsexual meaning to the same text when it was preceded by nonsexual information. Findings suggest that under certain conditions, sex is in the "eye of the beholder."     

Adolescent problem-solving thinking.

Tested the hypothesis that adolescent psychiatric patients would be deficient with respect to normal controls in their interpersonal problem-solving skills by comparing 33 patients and 53 high school student controls on 7 tasks reflecting different aspects of problem solving. With IQ covaried out, controls obtained significantly higher scores on the tasks evaluating optional thinking, social means-ends thinking, and role taking, but not on the tasks measuring problem recognition, causal thinking, emotional means-ends thinking, and consequential thinking. Findings are interpreted within a developmental framework of interpersonal problem-solving thinking. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Site Management of Work-in-Process Buffers to Enhance Project Performance Using the Reliable Commitment Model: Case Study

Buffers have been commonly used as a production strategy to protect construction processes from the negative impact of variability. Construction practitioners and researchers have proposed several buffering approaches for different production situations and contexts. However, these solutions have been impractical for managing buffers. To overcome this, this study proposes a new site methodology for managing work-in-process (WIP) buffer in repetitive projects, on the basis of the reliable commitment model (RCM). RCM is a decision-making tool based on lean principles, which uses statistical models to develop more reliable work plans at the operational level. RCM helps to manage WIP buffer in work plans by using site information and planning reliability indicators that result in improved project performance, such as labor productivity and process progress. A repetitive building project was used as a case study. The main finding was that labor productivity, process progress, and waiting times improved when using larger WIP buffers than those typically used among crews. This shows the potential of RCM as a practical tool to manage WIP buffer sizes and to promote the use of lean production strategies at the operational level.