The Application of Project Management Standards and Success Factors to the Development of a Project Management Assessment Tool

AbstractIn spite of all that is known about project management best practices, they are often absent from typical construction projects. This has motivated our interest in developing a tool to assess construction project management practices, focusing on the assessment of individual project practices. We will also explore project outcomes and their correlation with project management practices-potentially identifying project management value. Previous efforts have addressed project management assessment. The paper describes examples that assess an individual's project management skills and approaches that examine the project management competencies of organizations. In contrast to these, our focus is on assessing the project management practices that have been implemented for specific construction projects. A central component of any assessment scheme is the identification of specific elements to be assessed (the assessment “targets”). We intend to draw heavily upon established project management standards and project success factors from previous research to provide the specific targets and benchmarks to be assessed. These include the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) by the PM Institute, the IPMA Competence Baseline (ICB) by the International PM Association, ISO 9000, and Prince2 by The Office of Government Commerce UK. This paper describes how these standards are integrated into the project management assessment tool. It discusses the theoretical foundations for the project management assessment tool and the methodologies used for developing the tool and for applying the tool to specific project situations

A Project To Improve Advanced Practice Provider Financial Metrics Through A Practice Management Program

A Project to Improve Advanced Practice Provider Financial Metrics Through a Practice Management Program This DNP project developed a practice management program for ambulatory Advanced Practice Providers (APPs) practicing in a large academic healthcare system with the goal to improve financial metrics. In 2020, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported $25.74 billion in incorrect payments citing documentation errors and insufficiency as the common cause. The growth of the APP workforce necessitates APP practice management knowledge to avoid significant revenue loss since APPs collectively report lack of healthcare business knowledge. Twenty ambulatory APPs participated in a 12-week practice management program focused on visit code assignment, global procedural period, modifiers, charge capture, and revenue cycle management. A 10-minute podcast lecture for each concept was sent to participants’ mobile phones via text message every 2-weeks. Participants completed a pre- and post-program practice management knowledge assessment and a perceived self-efficacy survey. The participants received monthly productivity metrics. Average work relative value units (wRVUs) per session benchmarks for each participant were established and monitored during and for 2-months after the program. There was a highly significant improvement post -program in average total perceived self-efficacy of (t = 4.8695, p \u3c 0.0001) and average total knowledge acquisition of (t = 2.579, p = 0.014). Areas within these domains also demonstrated significant trends in improvement. Mean wRVUs per session during implementation was found to be statistically significant (t = 2.63, p = 0.017). at 0.60 above benchmark. In conclusion, a short, focused practice management program improved APP practice management confidence and knowledge and increased in APP estimated financial productivity

LD4PE: A Competency-based Guide to Linked Data Principles and Practices

The IMLS-funded Linked Data for Professional Education (LD4PE) project has developed a competency-based prototype referatory of Learning Resources for teaching and learning practices in the design, implementation, and management of Linked Data. This report summarizes the work of the project in developing: 1) an RDF-modeled “Competency Index for Linked Data” (Index) based on the Achievements Standards Network Description Language (ASN-DL) for describing formally promulgated competencies and benchmarks; 2) an openly available, web-based tool set to support the management of the Index; the generation of RDF metadata about Learning Resources; the packaging and arrangement of selected Learning Resources by users in “Saved Sets”; and the creation of learning trajectory maps expressing curricular structures or personal learning journeys superimposed over the competency framework through the integration of these elements as WordPress custom posts and taxonomies on the LD4PE website; 3) a set of cataloged Learning Resources that have been mapped to the competencies and benchmarks of the Index to support competency-based resource discovery by teachers, trainers and learners; 4) the LD4PE project website (http://explore.dublincore.net), which will be managed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) as part of its educational agenda; and 5) a set of Best Practices describing the infrastructure and policies developed for the project that others can reuse in mapping future knowledge domains in a similar manner

Investigating profitability performance of construction projects using big data: A project analytics approach

© 2019 The Authors The construction industry generates different types of data from the project inception stage to project delivery. This data comes in various forms and formats which surpass the data management, integration and analysis capabilities of existing project intelligence tools used within the industry. Several tasks in the project lifecycle bear implications for the efficient planning and delivery of construction projects. Setting up right profit margins and its continuous tracking as projects progress are vital management tasks that require data-driven decision support. Existing profit estimation measures use a company or industry wide benchmarks to guide these decisions. These benchmarks are oftentimes unreliable as they do not factor in project-specific variations. As a result, projects are wrongly estimated using uniform rates that eventually end up with entirely unusual margins either due to underspends or overruns. This study proposed a project analytics approach where Big Data is harnessed to understand the profitability distribution of different types of construction projects. To this end, Big Data architecture is recommended, and a prototype implementation is shown to store and analyse large amounts of projects data. Our data analysis revealed that profit margins evolve, and the profitability performance varies across several project attributes. These insights shall be incorporated as knowledge to machine learning algorithms to predict project margins accurately. The proposed approach enabled the fast exploration of data to understand the underlying pattern in the profitability performance for different types of construction projects

Social networking and open educational resources: updating quality assurance for e-learning excellence

Quality assurance approaches in higher education are well-established, but it is important to develop methods which are applicable to the domain of e-learning. The E-xcellence methodology (EADTU, 2009a) was therefore designed to assess the quality of e-learning in distance learning and blended learning contexts. The methodology is based around a set of benchmarks, supported by a practitioner handbook and a web-based ‘QuickScan’ self-evaluation tool. Experience shows that the E-xcellence methodology is particularly valuable for the process of improvement through collaborative internal review. E-learning has evolved since the E-xcellence methodology was first developed. In particular, there is increasing awareness and use of open education resources (OERs) and social networking. However, these aspects were not explicit in the original E-xcellence resources. The E-xcellence Next project was therefore established to update the resources, incorporating these developments. To begin this process, a consultation was carried out among E-xcellence Next project members, followed by a participatory workshop on the themes of social networking and OERs. The E-xcellence resources were also used in a series of self-evaluation seminars held at European higher education institutions. Experience and feedback from these activities has been used to update the manual, the benchmarks and the QuickScan tool. The result is a set of quality assurance resources which encompass social networking, OERs and other recent developments in e-learning

ALOJA: A benchmarking and predictive platform for big data performance analysis

The main goals of the ALOJA research project from BSC-MSR, are to explore and automate the characterization of cost-effectivenessof Big Data deployments. The development of the project over its first year, has resulted in a open source benchmarking platform, an online public repository of results with over 42,000 Hadoop job runs, and web-based analytic tools to gather insights about system's cost-performance1. This article describes the evolution of the project's focus and research lines from over a year of continuously benchmarking Hadoop under dif- ferent configuration and deployments options, presents results, and dis cusses the motivation both technical and market-based of such changes. During this time, ALOJA's target has evolved from a previous low-level profiling of Hadoop runtime, passing through extensive benchmarking and evaluation of a large body of results via aggregation, to currently leveraging Predictive Analytics (PA) techniques. Modeling benchmark executions allow us to estimate the results of new or untested configu- rations or hardware set-ups automatically, by learning techniques from past observations saving in benchmarking time and costs.This work is partially supported the BSC-Microsoft Research Centre, the Span- ish Ministry of Education (TIN2012-34557), the MINECO Severo Ochoa Research program (SEV-2011-0067) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014-SGR-1051).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Role of Knowledge Networks and Boundary Organizations in Coproduction: A Short History of a Decision Support Tool and Model for Adapting Multiuse Reservoir and Water-Energy Governance to Climate Change in California

Climate adaptation relies on theoretical frameworks of coproduced science and knowledge networks to produce acceptable outcomes for politically contentious resources. As adaptation moves from theory to implementation, there is a need for positive case studies to use as benchmarks. Building from literature on actionable science this paper presents one such positive case—the development of a hydropower and reservoir decision-support tool. The focus of this history is on the multiple phases of interaction (and noninteraction) between researchers and a semidefined community of stakeholders. The lessons presented from the Integrated Forecast and Reservoir Management (INFORM) system project stress that collaborations between managers and researchers were crucial to the success of the project by building knowledge networks, which could outlast formal processes, and by incorporating policy preferences of end users into the model. The history also provides examples of how even successful collaborative projects do not always follow the usual expectations for coproduced science and shows that, even when those guidelines are followed, external circumstances can threaten the adoption of research products. Ultimately, this paper argues for the importance of building strong knowledge networks alongside more formal processes—like those in boundary organizations—for effective collaborative engagement

Assessment Report 2014 KTC Limited, China AA0000000364

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.FLA_2014_KTC_AR_China_AA0000000364.pdf: 31 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Information Systems Undergraduate Degree Project: Gaining a Better Understanding of the Final Year Project Module

The place of an individual project in the final year of Information Systems (IS) undergraduate degrees at UK universities is well established. In this paper we compare the final year project modules at four UK universities: the University of Brighton, the University of South Wales, University of West London and the University of Westminster. We find that the aims of the projects are similar, emphasising the application of the knowledge and skills from the taught element of their course in a complex development project, often including interactions with a real client. Although we show in this analysis that projects serve a similar purpose in the IS degree courses, the associated learning outcomes and the assessment practice varies across the institutions. We identify some gaps in the skills and abilities that are not being assessed. In further work we are planning to consult final year students undertaking their projects and their supervisors, in order to gain an understanding of how project assessment criteria are actually put to use