Benchmarking of project planning and success in selected industries

Purpose - To identify the industry in which projects are best planned and executed and use it as a benchmark for improving project planning in other industries. Design/methodology/approach - Based on data collected from 280 project managers, project success and quality of project planning were evaluated and analyzed for four industries - construction and engineering, software and communications, services, and production and maintenance. Findings - Quality of project planning was found to be the highest in construction and engineering organizations and the lowest in manufacturing organizations. This is a result of a few factors, among them the intensive organizational support which is offered to project managers working in construction and engineering organizations. The other three industries limit their support mostly to tactical aspects, such as the purchasing of project management software. The high quality of project planning in the construction and engineering organizations resulted in their ability to complete projects by almost half the cost and schedule overruns, as compared to organizations belonging to the other industries. Finally, results of the industries in Israel and Japan are compared and analyzed. Research limitations/implications - Findings are limited to the four industries included in the study. Practical implications - If organizations, not belonging to the construction industry, wish to improve the probability of success in project planning and execution, they should follow methodologies commonly used in the construction industry. Originality/value - This paper introduces a valid field study, exploring project management practices in four industries and identifies the one which may be used as a benchmark for the others. It also identifies specific strengths and weaknesses in project management within the explored industries

Knowledge-based assistance in costing the space station DMS

The Software Cost Engineering (SCE) methodology developed over the last two decades at IBM Systems Integration Division (SID) in Houston is utilized to cost the NASA Space Station Data Management System (DMS). An ongoing project to capture this methodology, which is built on a foundation of experiences and lessons learned, has resulted in the development of an internal-use-only, PC-based prototype that integrates algorithmic tools with knowledge-based decision support assistants. This prototype Software Cost Engineering Automation Tool (SCEAT) is being employed to assist in the DMS costing exercises. At the same time, DMS costing serves as a forcing function and provides a platform for the continuing, iterative development, calibration, and validation and verification of SCEAT. The data that forms the cost engineering database is derived from more than 15 years of development of NASA Space Shuttle software, ranging from low criticality, low complexity support tools to highly complex and highly critical onboard software

IPAD: Integrated Programs for Aerospace-vehicle Design

Early work was performed to apply data base technology in support of the management of engineering data in the design and manufacturing environments. The principal objective of the IPAD project is to develop a computer software system for use in the design of aerospace vehicles. Two prototype systems are created for this purpose. Relational Information Manager (RIM) is a successful commercial product. The IPAD Information Processor (IPIP), a much more sophisticated system, is still under development

SISTEM INFORMASI KEPEGAWAIAN DAN AKADEMIK DI SMA NEGERI 19 SURABAYA BERBASIS PHP

ABSTRACT SMA Negeri 19 Surabaya is one of many high school, which is appointed as the best school of north Surabaya area, which have complex process in managing they data. Event of the staffing subsection that manage all staffs data and processing all staffing rules. Now, in managing staffing data still use manual system that not computerized, not distributed in saving data and not well documentation. Where in managind the data still use Microsoft Word and Microsoft excel, doesn�t have a database for savibng data, data sharing doesn�t use network but use printout hardcopy. Therefore, the last project �Staffing Information System and academic of SMA Negeri 19 Surabaya PHP Based� becomes media to managing staffing data in staffing subsection covering staff data management, and other staffing administrations and many components to support this web application. The last project are built with use software engineering method is waterfall, and implementation use PHP programming language, and processing of database use MySQL. Keywords : staffing information system and academic PHP based

Proceedings of the First NASA Ada Users' Symposium

Ada has the potential to be a part of the most significant change in software engineering technology within NASA in the last twenty years. Thus, it is particularly important that all NASA centers be aware of Ada experience and plans at other centers. Ada activity across NASA are covered, with presenters representing five of the nine major NASA centers and the Space Station Freedom Program Office. Projects discussed included - Space Station Freedom Program Office: the implications of Ada on training, reuse, management and the software support environment; Johnson Space Center (JSC): early experience with the use of Ada, software engineering and Ada training and the evaluation of Ada compilers; Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC): university research with Ada and the application of Ada to Space Station Freedom, the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle, the Aero-Assist Flight Experiment and the Secure Shuttle Data System; Lewis Research Center (LeRC): the evolution of Ada software to support the Space Station Power Management and Distribution System; Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL): the creation of a centralized Ada development laboratory and current applications of Ada including the Real-time Weather Processor for the FAA; and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC): experiences with Ada in the Flight Dynamics Division and the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) project and the implications of GSFC experience for Ada use in NASA. Despite the diversity of the presentations, several common themes emerged from the program: Methodology - NASA experience in general indicates that the effective use of Ada requires modern software engineering methodologies; Training - It is the software engineering principles and methods that surround Ada, rather than Ada itself, which requires the major training effort; Reuse - Due to training and transition costs, the use of Ada may initially actually decrease productivity, as was clearly found at GSFC; and real-time work at LeRC, JPL and GSFC shows that it is possible to use Ada for real-time applications

Discovering Business Models for Software Process Management - An Approach for Integrating Time and Resource Perspectives from Legacy Information Systems

Business Process Management (BPM) is becoming the modern core to support business in all type of organizations and software business is not an exception. Software companies are often involved in important and complex collaborative projects carried out by many stakeholders. Each actor (customers, suppliers or government instances, among others) works with individual and shared processes. Everyone needs dynamic and evolving approaches for managing their software projects lifecycle. Nevertheless, many companies still use systems that are out of the scope of BPM for planning and control projects and managing enterprise content (Enterprise Content Management, ECM) as well as all kinds of resources (ERP). Somehow systems include scattered artifacts that are related to BPM perspectives: control and data flow, time, resource and case, for example. It is aimed to get interoperable BPM models from these classical Legacy Information Systems (LIS). Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) allows going from application code to higher-level of abstraction models. Particularly, there are standards and proposals for reverse engineering LIS. This paper illustrates LIS cases for software project planning and ECM, looking at time and resource perspectives. To conclude, we will propose a MDE-based approach for taking out business models in the context of software process management.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-

Autonomous Agents and Intelligent Assistants for Exploration Operations

Human exploration of space will involve remote autonomous crew and systems in long missions. Data to earth will be delayed and limited. Earth control centers will not receive continuous real-time telemetry data, and there will be communication round trips of up to one hour. There will be reduced human monitoring on the planet and earth. When crews are present on the planet, they will be occupied with other activities, and system management will be a low priority task. Earth control centers will use multi-tasking "night shift" and on-call specialists. A new project at Johnson Space Center is developing software to support teamwork between distributed human and software agents in future interplanetary work environments. The Engineering and Mission Operations Directorates at Johnson Space Center (JSC) are combining laboratories and expertise to carry out this project, by establishing a testbed for hWl1an centered design, development and evaluation of intelligent autonomous and assistant systems. Intelligent autonomous systems for managing systems on planetary bases will commuicate their knowledge to support distributed multi-agent mixed-initiative operations. Intelligent assistant agents will respond to events by developing briefings and responses according to instructions from human agents on earth and in space

Detector Construction Management and Quality Control: Establishing and Using a CRISTAL System

The CRISTAL (Cooperating Repositories and an Information System for Tracking Assembly Lifecycles) project is delivering a software system to facilitate the management of the engineering data collected at each stage of production of CMS. CRISTAL captures all the physical characteristics of CMS components as each sub-detector is tested and assembled. These data are retained for later use in areas such as detector slow control, calibration and maintenance. CRISTAL must, therefore, support different views onto its data dependent on the role of the user. These data viewpoints are investigated in this paper. In the recent past two CMS Notes have been written about CRISTAL. The first note, CMS 1996/003, detailed the requirements for CRISTAL, its relationship to other CMS software, its objectives and reviewed the technology on which it would be based. CMS 1997/104 explained some important design concepts on which CRISTAL is and showed how CRISTAL integrated the domains of product data man- agement and workflow management. This note explains, through the use of diagrams, how CRISTAL can be established for detector production and used as the information source for analyses, such as calibration and slow controls, carried out by physicists. The reader should consult the earlier CMS Notes and conference papers for technical detail on CRISTAL - this note concentrates on issues surrounding the practical use of the CRISTAL software.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figure

The GENESIS platform, its distribution, and web services

The GENESIS project is developing an Open Source platform that supports co-operation and communication among software engineers belonging to distributed development teams involved in modeling, controlling, and measuring software development and maintenance processes. The GENESIS platform is made up of three main elements: a distributed workflow management system, a resource management system, and an artefact management system (OSCAR, developed at Durham). The platform is designed to be non-invasive and have a low barrier to entry (in terms of the effort required to begin using the system). This is accomplished, as far as possible, by adapting the platform to the workflow processes and tools already in place in an organisation. OSCAR (Open-Source Component Artefact Repository) is the artefact management system, used to store and retrieve any item produced by any member of a software engineering team. Traditional artefacts (documents and code, for example) as well as non-traditional items (such as informal annotations, mailing list postings, and personnel profiles) are managed by the system, which has the capability to maintain a rich set of relationships between the artefacts (for traceability and comprehension purposes). Each instance of OSCAR contains a software configuration management system (currently, a plugin is provided to use CVS). Currently, OSCAR is slightly distributed: the workflow management system can use more than one instance of a repository, but a single instance of OSCAR can use only one repository. There are a few known systems which provide some form of real distributed software configuration management, which, it is hoped, can be used to inspire further development of the distribution of OSCAR and its associated services. Initially, OSCAR and the rest of the GENESIS platform communicated using RMI, but a web service interface is currently under development. As an initial attempt at realising this, the RMI interface is simply wrapped to provide servlets. The web services approach allows for a single instance of an OSCAR repository to serve many projects, and for potential global distribution of a single instance of the GENESIS platform. Possible avenues for future work include: applications to e-learning and e-science (applying OSCAR to the Grid, in order to support educational and scientific collaboration); using OSCAR as a basis for supporting collaborative design work; instrumenting the tools in the GENESIS platform to provide data for studies of software engineering practices; and studying process models (for example, determining the difference between the ideal models defined in the literature and the real processes of software engineering)