222 publications from this institution
The implementation of project management best practices is a preponderant factor for the success of companies. Organizations need to respond quickly, efficiently and in an integrated way to the challenges emerging from daily routines. This paper focuses on presenting a solution for the implementation of project management initiatives in an Engineering and Construction company, which was at an embryonic stage of project management maturity. The company aimed at improving its project management maturity level, in order to increase the likelihood of success of its projects. Six project management improvement initiatives in which the company should focus its efforts were identified, considering its organizational context, through four research methods: survey, document analysis, observation and focus groups. Three dimensions were considered for the development of this proposal: People and Organizational Knowledge; Processes, Tools and Techniques and General Management System.
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This paper presents an application developed to visualize and edit Activity-On-Arc (AoA) project networks. It is part of a larger project that has the goal to study the resource allocation problem in stochastic multimodal activity networks. This application was developed in Java programming language and uses the open source libraries JGraph and JGrapht. It enables one to visualize and edit AoA networks with multiple resources, and save them into one of the two types of files available (TXT or XML).
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Project Management (PM) has emerged as a crucial factor that determines the success of an organization. In this sense, there is a growing concern for organizations to assess their PM maturity. This paper presents the PM maturity results for 19 organizations, using Organizational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3®) emerging from OPM3® Portugal Project research, that is presently in progress. All aspects of OPM3® Portugal Project are explained in detail, and a brief descriptive analysis of the 19 organizations assessed is presented. The preliminary results were obtained using two scoring methods, and are presented in tables organized by PM processes, Portfolio Management processes and Organizational Enablers areas. No other similar studies were found, thus it was not possible to compare the preliminary Portuguese results with other results.
One of the engineering economics objectives is to do economic analysis of investment decisions. It has quite extensive applications since the investment may come from private companies or government entities. The analysis or evaluation of projects involves a set of techniques that establish feasibility parameters. These parameters are expressed by PBP (Payback Period number of years to recover the investment), IRR (internal rate of return) or NPV (Net Present Value). Thus, it has an important role on investment analysis or to buy a capital good, checking all technically feasible investment alternatives. This research is based on a case study, namely a project of extension of a micro enterprise, whose data was collected on Bank of Amazon. The Bank of Amazon is an agent for the application of policies and programs of the Federal Government in the Amazon region, as well as its feasibility and the potential to carry out the project. Based on these facts, it was studied the role of engineering economics in the evaluation of investment projects by the Bank of Amazon, located in the northern region of Brazil. It was concluded that the Bank relies on the economic feasibility and engineering economics to analyses the submitted projects, having as a reference a IRR parameter between 4% and 12% and a PBP of 4 to 12 years in the investment projects less or equal to R$ 400,000.00. Some opportunities and suggestions to extend and improve investment analysis procedures and tools are discussed at the end of this paper.
Fundos FEDER atraves do Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade – COMPETE e por Fundos Nacionais atraves da FCT –Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia, Projecto: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022674.
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Benefits Management is a field of growing interest in the universe of University-Industry collaborative partnerships. Therefore, this paper aims to present and discuss a review on benefits and success factors that were previously identified in the literature through two distinct methods of categorization in order to qualify and better understand how each benefit and success factor act and what are their intrinsic properties. Throughout these methods, the next goal is to perform a cause-effect analysis to understand which factors generate which benefits and make some theoretical assumptions based on these correlations. This study will display that there are important underlying conceptual issues in benefits categorization and will suggest, accordingly, an approach to surpass it in order to contribute to further research in benefits management.
This paper resulted from an action-research undertaken on a Portuguese electric energy organization – EDP Distribution. The research aimed to develop, propose and implement a risk management methodology to integrate in the project management (PM) practices of an ongoing project. The methodology implemented allowed the project team to initiate systematized risk management practices through a simple structure, easy to apply, and with a degree of complexity compatible with the effort that the PM team could initially engage. It is expected that the proposed methodology signaled the initiation of the project risk management (PRM) process standardization in the EDP Distribution organization.
