Critical success factors for projects in the petroleum industry

The paper identifies the critical success factors for petroleum projects. Factors have been obtained from existing literature and tested in the petroleum industry. The paper identifies 58 success factors that have been categorised into 11 groups. These factors were tested and grouped based on their individual relative importance index. The paper highlights the importance of project risk management and requirements management in achieving project success in the petroleum industry. The study also highlights the importance of the soft aspects of risk management in achieving successful implementation of project risk management and scope management in requirements management implementation

Decision making in Engineering Projects

Even though risk management is a vital aspect of project management, the way that risk-based decisions are taken in projects is not well documented. Economic theory employs the concept of utility and assumes that decision makers are rational. Behavioural economics and prospect theory challenge this idea, making a number of specific claims about how decision-making behaviour deviates from rationality in practice. Based on a focus group discussion with project managers, this research highlights the importance of risk management in underpinning decision making and investigates the extent of rationality and applicability of prospect theory in an engineering project context. Prospect theory’s claims of reference dependence and loss aversion are found to be important, but the claims of diminishing sensitivity and probability weighting appear to be less relevant

Implementation of a risk management simulation tool

Risk management is an essential part of project management. Proactive management of risk in projects helps increase the success rate of projects and the reduction of potential costs. The paper presents a new tool for implementing the risk management process in projects. The tool allows participants to understand a project further, and to analyse risks in a project using various methods such as risk exposure and Monte Carlo method. From the results of the study, the tool helps in improving the understanding and implementation of risk management in projects. The tool implementation and results are discussed in this paper

Attitudes to risk in petroleum projects

The paper identifies common personality traits and attitudes to risk management for people in the petroleum industry. The research was conducted with the aid of a survey and was addressed to people who have participated in the delivery of petroleum projects, with fifty responses obtained. The questions in the survey were based on Jung's personality theory and risk decisions identified from previous projects. Using Jung's personality classification, it has been concluded that people who deliver petroleum projects are judgers (Relationship with the world), more extrovert than introvert (Focus on attention), more intuitive than sensing (Seeking of information), and finally more thinkers than feelers (Decision makers). The results also show that the respondents are aware of different forms of risk in a project and prefer not to introduce any form of risk to a project

Meta-Analysis of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT): Challenging its Validity and Charting A Research Agenda in the Red Ocean

There are both formal and informal cries that UTAUT and by association the stream of research on technology adoption has reached its limit, with little or no opportunities for new knowledge creation. Such a conclusion is ironic because the theory has not been sufficiently and suitably replicated. It is possible that the misspecifications in the various replications, applications, and extensions led to the incorrect conclusion that UTAUT was more robust than it really was and opportunities for future work were limited. Although work on UTAUT has included important variables, predictors and moderators, absent a faithful use of the original specification, it is impossible to assess the true nature of the effects of the original and additional variables. The present meta-analysis uses 25,619 effect sizes reported by 737,112 users in 1,935 independent samples to address this issue. Consequently, we develop a clear current state-of-the-art and revised UTAUT that extends the original theory with new endogenous mechanisms from different, other theories (i.e., technology compatibility, user education, personal innovativeness, and costs of technology) and new moderating mechanisms to examine the generalizability of UTAUT in different contexts (e.g., technology type and national culture). Based on this revised UTAUT, we present a research agenda that can guide future research on the topic of technology adoption in general and UTAUT in particular