What are the benefits of the Portuguese public investment projects?

The aim of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding about the effective benefits of public investment projects carried out in Portugal, since their entry into the European Union, in 1986, so far and, additionally, to know the main causes for cost Project deviations. Since the entry of Portugal in European Union, the country image has changed, where public investment in infrastructure played a critical role. However one question remains unanswered which are frequently asked by Portuguese people, namely: • What are the Benefits of the Portuguese Public Investment Projects? In addition to the above question, the present study will try as well to answer the following question: • What were the main causes for the project deviations? This research allowed conclude that, although cost/investment deviations have been observed in the majority of projects, and reported through public audits, the benefits deviation analysis between the estimated values to society and what their realization was, are in the most cases, unknown. Portuguese national authorities are concerned to measure the deviation of costs/investment, but nobody has analyzed so far the benefits deviation for society and community.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Benchmarking of software production costs: results and recommendations

This paper intends to provide a deeper understanding about the software production cost in the banking sector through a benchmarking analysis. Furthermore, the paper provides a set of recommendations to assist organizations become more efficient, productive and more competitive. This analysis was performed based on a representative sample in the Portuguese market based on a sample of 21 projects. These projects represent a total of 37.800 hours and a 2.984.000€ budget. The data collection was completed during 2 months, January and February in 2016 through different business research methods namely 15 Interviews to project managers regarding 21 projects and historical data collection. The sample went through a segmentation in two groups due to the dispersion verified among the results between some banks. These two segments were classified as "Classic Retail" - national banks of high dimension, with market recognition and influential in the Portuguese economy - and "Niche Banks"- smaller banks. Briefly, in terms of rates and considering the "Classic Retail" segment, the discrepancy of rates between the two niches is visible, the average rate of Classic Retail is 64.7% above the Niche Banks segment. In regards to productivity, The Classic Retail’s average is about 11h per unit of software produced while for the Niche segment it is about 2.6h.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Public investment project evaluation: case study on municipal solid waste sector in Portugal

Over the past 20 years, the Portuguese State has held several public investments that have resulted in significant deviation in cost and deadlines and there is no record of benefits deviation, whose results, critical in terms of public spending, will contribute in a significant way to the burden of current and future generations. To be aware of the real dimension, financial deviation in relevant projects and public works (carried out either by direct administration of the State or in concession regime) in recent years have amounted to more than EUR 4.3 billion, i.e. about 2.5% of Portuguese GDP in 2014. This research work's core objective is responding to a commonly accepted gap among the Portuguese and which is related to the lack of practical assessment of the causes (ex-ante) and the respective impacts associated with large deviation in public investment projects, when compared to the initial estimates. Based on this diagnosis, which was itself based in four international benchmarks of good practices in project analysis/assessment and public audit, we intend to propose solutions that avoid repeating the same mistakes and failures in future cases (same-type study ones). For the purpose described above, the case study is the capital investment in Valorsul's Organic Recovery Centre (ORC), in the field sector of urban waste, which seeks to answer the following questions: How and why does Valorsul's ORC project present a high deviation? How could some of the deviation observed in the project have been prevented? How can the project contribute as a learning example for the Portuguese public investment area? The answer to these questions, which can be adapted to any type of project because the focus is on process management, shows that the factors that explain the reduced project performance are the adoption of non-validated assumptions, the absence of an analysis of sensitivity and risk, the degree of innovation of the project, non-existent or unreliable sources of information and insufficient qualification of the project analysis team. As for solutions to avoid repeating the same mistakes, one comes up with the urgent need for an entity that is able to previously assess and validate the goodness, the quality and the effective investment return for society and the actual need to implement a culture of sharing lessons learned. The methodology is similar to the "RG3" one, used in this research work, and such assessment and validation is performed in an independent manner. The question is whether these teachings will be discarded again and we continue to witness project management failures, with harmful effects on our economy and society.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Pereira Diamond: benefits management framework

Nowadays organizations are challenged daily to keep their business running by continuously adding value to its stakeholders in a sustainable way. In order to achieve that, business managers are required to have a clear organizational vision, mission and a well-established business strategy combined with a set of portfolio of projects towards converting strategic goals into business value. Although this is a clear concern in the most of management and executive teams, the majority of them are unable to identify the benefits each initiative will deliver neither how much they represent moneywise, easily leading to a complete “investment-in-failure”. The crisis context together with the huge speed of technology advancements, the power of social networking and market globalization are triggering organizations to rationalize and optimize their resources while business managers are pressurized to deliver successful results. Another concern is the fact business managers are getting “tempted” to tighten their budgets and follow a cost-control management approach as it turns to be the most immediate way to get a positive impact on the P&L. However, in a long term, it will compromise the organization growth and the ability to create sustainable wealth to the stakeholders. This is where capital investments play a key role to support innovative initiatives’ implementation which explains the worldwide increase budget available for new investments, the capital expenditure (capex). But even though new project proposals justify the need of increasing funds, why do most of projects still fail on delivering results? Despite the well advanced project management techniques to manage projects efficiently (triple constraint criteria: scope, budget and time) are organizations selecting the most valuable projects? If resources are not infinite, organizations must follow a reliable appraisal model to select the initiatives that will deliver the most valuable return on investment. The ability to solve a market need with a high value for money within the time-to-market is essential, so knowing what, when and how to invest following a rigorous approach is becoming an essential business skill across every business sector. Since projects are investments which intend to maximize return then business cases and benefits management are a powerful tool to support top management decisions. This paper presents the conceptual basis, perspectives and guidelines for effective project investments, based on the worldwide best practices for business cases. Besides the literature reviews and studies collected to date about this subject, the final conclusions presented are sustained on the results collected from a sample of companies across different sectors who were invited to participate on this research. This research suggests that the Pereira Diamond approach to benefits management has a strong contribution to successfull investment decisions towards the maximization of the return on investment hence the value creation to the business stakeholders.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Disc Clearing of Young Stellar Objects: Evidence for Fast Inside-out Dispersal

The time-scale over which and the modality by which young stellar objects (YSOs) disperse their circumstellar discs dramatically influences the eventual formation and evolution of planetary systems. By means of extensive radiative transfer (RT) modelling, we have developed a new set of diagnostic diagrams in the infrared colour-colour plane (K-[24] vs. K-[8]), to aid with the classification of the evolutionary stage of YSOs from photometric observations. Our diagrams allow the differentiation of sources with unevolved (primordial) discs from those evolving according to different clearing scenarios (e.g. homologous depletion vs. inside-out dispersal), as well as from sources that have already lost their disc. Classification of over 1500 sources in 15 nearby star-forming regions reveals that approximately 39 % of the sources lie in the primordial disc region, whereas between 31 % and 32 % disperse from the inside-out and up to 22 % of the sources have already lost their disc. Less than 2 % of the objects in our sample lie in the homogeneous draining regime. Time-scales for the transition phase are estimated to be typically a few 10^5 years independent of stellar mass. Therefore, regardless of spectral type, we conclude that currently available infrared photometric surveys point to fast (of order 10 % of the global disc lifetime) inside-out clearing as the preferred mode of disc dispersal.Comment: 31 pages, 21 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA

Time series forecasting with the WARIMAX-GARCH method

It is well-known that causal forecasting methods that include appropriately chosen Exogenous Variables (EVs) very often present improved forecasting performances over univariate methods. However, in practice, EVs are usually difficult to obtain and in many cases are not available at all. In this paper, a new causal forecasting approach, called Wavelet Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous variables and Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (WARIMAX-GARCH) method, is proposed to improve predictive performance and accuracy but also to address, at least in part, the problem of unavailable EVs. Basically, the WARIMAX-GARCH method obtains Wavelet “EVs” (WEVs) from Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous variables and Generalized Auto-Regressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARIMAX-GARCH) models applied to Wavelet Components (WCs) that are initially determined from the underlying time series. The WEVs are, in fact, treated by the WARIMAX-GARCH method as if they were conventional EVs. Similarly to GARCH and ARIMA-GARCH models, the WARIMAX-GARCH method is suitable for time series exhibiting non-linear characteristics such as conditional variance that depends on past values of observed data. However, unlike those, it can explicitly model frequency domain patterns in the series to help improve predictive performance. An application to a daily time series of dam displacement in Brazil shows the WARIMAX-GARCH method to remarkably outperform the ARIMA-GARCH method, as well as the (multi-layer perceptron) Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and its wavelet version referred to as Wavelet Artificial Neural Network (WANN) as in [1], on statistical measures for both in-sample and out-of-sample forecasting

Pereira diamond: projects' economic and social impacts

This research paper presents a model to assist business managers and decision-makers to make better decision of investment projects. This model provides a methodology and principles to assist organizations estimating and evaluating their projects benefits to apply in a Business Case, namely for projects with economic and social impacts. This model may be applied by any organizations (private sector, public sector or NGO) which may aim to leverage business value or generate more social value.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio