Improving project management planning and control in service operations environment.

Projects have evidently become the core activity in most companies and organisations where they are investing significant amount of resources in different types of projects as building new services, process improvement, etc. This research has focused on service sector in attempt to improve project management planning and control activities. The research is concerned with improving the planning and control of software development projects. Existing software development models are analysed and their best practices identified and these have been used to build the proposed model in this research. The research extended the existing planning and control approaches by considering uncertainty in customer requirements, resource flexibility and risks level variability. In considering these issues, the research has adopted lean principles for planning and control software development projects. A novel approach introduced within this research through the integration of simulation modelling techniques with Taguchi analysis to investigate ‗what if‘ project scenarios. Such scenarios reflect the different combinations of the factors affecting project completion time and deliverables. In addition, the research has adopted the concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to develop an automated Operations Project Management Deployment (OPMD) model. The model acts as an iterative manner uses ‗what if‘ scenario performance outputs to identify constraints that may affect the completion of a certain task or phase. Any changes made during the project phases will then automatically update the performance metrics for each software development phases. In addition, optimisation routines have been developed that can be used to provide management response and to react to the different levels of uncertainty. Therefore, this research has looked at providing a comprehensive and visual overview of important project tasks i.e. progress, scheduled work, different resources, deliverables and completion that will make it easier for project members to communicate with each other to reach consensus on goals, status and required changes. Risk is important aspect that has been included in the model as well to avoid failure. The research emphasised on customer involvement, top management involvement as well as team members to be among the operational factors that escalate variability levels 3 and effect project completion time and deliverables. Therefore, commitment from everyone can improve chances of success. Although the role of different project management techniques to implement projects successfully has been widely established in areas such as the planning and control of time, cost and quality; still, the distinction between the project and project management is less than precise and a little was done in investigating different levels of uncertainty and risk levels that may occur during different project phase.United Arab Emirates Governmen

End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure

Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service

A review of microgrid development in the United States – A decade of progress on policies, demonstrations, controls, and software tools

Microgrids have become increasingly popular in the United States. Supported by favorable federal and local policies, microgrid projects can provide greater energy stability and resilience within a project site or community. This paper reviews major federal, state, and utility-level policies driving microgrid development in the United States. Representative U.S. demonstration projects are selected and their technical characteristics and non-technical features are introduced. The paper discusses trends in the technology development of microgrid systems as well as microgrid control methods and interactions within the electricity market. Software tools for microgrid design, planning, and performance analysis are illustrated with each tool's core capability. Finally, the paper summarizes the successes and lessons learned during the recent expansion of the U.S. microgrid industry that may serve as a reference for other countries developing their own microgrid industries

Water Quality Trading and Offset Initiatives in the U.S.: A Comprehensive Survey

This document summarizes water quality trading and offset initiatives in the United States, including state-wide policies and recent proposals. The following format was used to present information on each program. We attempted to have each program summary reviewed by at least one contact person for program accuracy. In the cases where this review occurred, we added the statement "Reviewed by.." at the end of the case summary

Enhancing IT investments productivity: Integrating network QOS and it indirect costs

Increasing productivity is considered one of the major driving factors for a successful business. From an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure perspective, obtaining an optimised performance of resources is expected to improve productivity. From a technical viewpoint, the introduction of Quality of Service (QoS) models have been perceived to optimise the performance of the organisation network backbone. These models aim to provide an acceptable level of service assurance to the newly introduced applications and services such as voice and video. From a management viewpoint, the proper management of IT investments indirect costs can lead to a reduction of the overall cost portfolio. Consequently, both benefits and productivity increase are likely to be realised. This paper introduces network QoS strategy within the hierarchy of business infrastructure. In addition, it aims to identify the relationship between network QoS and IT indirect costs. Such integration demonstrates how network QoS strategy can be used to control IT indirect costs as well as enhancing network performance

Applications of lean thinking: a briefing document

This report has been put together by the Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre (HaCIRIC) at the University of Salford for the Department of Health. The need for the report grew out of two main simple questions, o Is Lean applicable in sectors other than manufacturing? o Can the service delivery sector learn from the success of lean in manufacturing and realise the benefits of its implementation?The aim of the report is to list together examples of lean thinking as it is evidenced in the public and private service sector. Following a review of various sources a catalogue of evidence is put together in an organised manner which demonstrates that Lean principles and techniques, when applied rigorously and throughout an entire organization/unit, they can have a positive impact on productivity, cost, quality, and timely delivery of services