Reshaping the project manager's project story: an adoption study of 'best practice' project management

Organisations frequently procure project management training as part of their initiatives to improve project management practices. The research problem is that current learning and teaching imperatives continue to produce project management practitioners who are unable to deal with the realities of complex and dynamic environments. This research is a longitudinal study over two and a half years which reports on the adoption of the PRINCE2 project management methodology by sixteen employees of the same organisation who manage projects following the successful completion of a PRINCE2 training course. The use of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) approach permits the study of adoption of the innovation (PRINCE2 methodology) and investigates the networks that support the PRINCE2 project methodology to be adopted as two different translations. These have been called the Knowing Translation (KT) and the Performing Translation (PT). The characteristics of the PT and the KT are described together with four moments of translation that were identified. The nature of the PT is that the individual will continue to develop their interest in PRINCE2 and will look for a stable network that will support that translation, even if they resign from the organisation. The significance of the KT is that the individual will cease using PRINCE2 for their projects if there is no imperative given by the organisation to use it and no example set by others in using it. Differences between PT and KT were found to emerge about five months after the training course. Each participant brings to a training course their own ‘world view’ and conception of being on a project. This is their ‘personal story’. Translations are not people but different paths that help describe outcomes of personal stories. A participants’ ‘personal story’ affects how they see themselves in the role and ultimately how effectively they will perform in the workplace. The practical significance of this study is that it is practice-oriented and assists organisations to support project management improvement initiatives

Trade, Balance of Payments and Growth

Reviews the book Trade, Balance of Payments and Growth, edited by J. Bhagwati, R.W. Jones, R.A. Mundell and J. Vanek

POSE : A mathematical and visual modelling tool to guide energy aware code optimisation

Performance engineers are beginning to explore software-level optimisation as a means to reduce the energy consumed when running their codes. This paper presents POSE, a mathematical and visual modelling tool which highlights the relationship between runtime and power consumption. POSE allows developers to assess whether power optimisation is worth pursuing for their codes. We demonstrate POSE by studying the power optimisation characteristics of applications from the Mantevo and Rodinia benchmark suites. We show that LavaMD has the most scope for CPU power optimisation, with improvements in Energy Delay Squared Product (ED2P) of up to 30.59%. Conversely, MiniMD offers the least scope, with improvements to the same metric limited to 7.60%. We also show that no power optimised version of MiniMD operating below 2.3 GHz can match the ED2P performance of the original code running at 3.2 GHz. For LavaMD this limit is marginally less restrictive at 2.2 GHz

Reshaping the project manager's story

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PRAM Programming: Theory vs. Practice

In this paper we investigate the practical viability of PRAM programming within the BSP framework. We argue that there is a necessity for PRAM computations in situations where the problem exhibits poor data locality. We introduce a C++ PRAM simulator that is built on top of the Oxford BSP Toolset, BSPlib, and provide a succinct PRAM language. Our approach achieves simplicity of programming over direct-mode BSP programming for reasonable overhead cost. We objectively compare optimized BSP algorithms with PRAM algorithms implemented with our library and provide encouraging experimental results for the latter style of programming. 1 Introduction Research in the theory of parallel computation has primarily focussed on parallel machines that communicate via shared memory, the so called Parallel Random Access Machines (PRAMs)[7]. A PRAM is an ideal parallel computer: a potentially unbounded set of processors sharing a global address space. The processors work synchronously and during each ..

Checkpoint/restart-enabled parallel debugging

Debugging is often the most time consuming part of software development. HPC applications prolong the debugging process by adding more processes interacting in dynamic ways for longer periods of time. Checkpoint/restart- enabled parallel debugging returns the developer to an intermediate state closer to the bug. This focuses the debugging process, saving developers considerable amounts of time, but requires parallel debuggers cooperating with MPI implementations and checkpointers. This paper presents a design specification for such a cooperative relationship. Additionally, this paper discusses the application of this design to the GDB and DDT debuggers, Open MPI, and BLCR projects. © 2010 Springer-Verlag