How Robust Is Your Project? From Local Failures to Global Catastrophes: A Complex Networks Approach to Project Systemic Risk.

ABSTRACT: Current societal requirements necessitate the effective delivery of complex projects that can do more while using less. Yet, recent large-scale project failures suggest that our ability to successfully deliver them is still at its infancy. Such failures can be seen to arise through various failure mechanisms; this work focuses on one such mechanism. Specifically, it examines the likelihood of a project sustaining a large-scale catastrophe, as triggered by single task failure and delivered via a cascading process. To do so, an analytical model was developed and tested on an empirical dataset by the means of numerical simulation. This paper makes three main contributions. First, it provides a methodology to identify the tasks most capable of impacting a project. In doing so, it is noted that

SUBMITTER: Ellinas C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4659599 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature