Research On The Behavior Uncertainty In Project Progress Management And It's Control Policies

Uncertainty features are today's market environment with economic globalization and fierce competition. How to manage the uncertainty in the corporate world dominated and organized by projects becomes huge challenge to traditional project management. Among a variety of uncertainty factors, behavior uncertainty caused by cognitive bias and risk aversion has come to draw academic attention and behavior OM gradually frames its research areas. Critical Chain Project Management firstly proposed by Goldratt takes behavior uncertainties in consideration in project scheduling problems has improved the traditional Critical Path method and pointed out that cause of behavior uncertainty need to further be explored. This dissertation analyzed and researched management and social service of behavior uncertainties in critical chain project management. It has important theoretical and practical significance on enriching research content of related subjects and solving practical problems in project management.Behavior of procrastination has direct impact on project operation performance, so varied frequency and extent of procrastination become one focused area of research in uncertainty management in projects. This dissertation addresses the problem of the behavior operation by reviewing literatures in this emerging area, analyzes the cognitive bias through experiment description and behavior interpretation, and describes the real phenomenon by normative research models to test efficiency of solutions to the problem. As uncertainties can't be completely eliminated, we can only use and internalize them within a certain range through certain mechanism design. The dissertation treats individual decision maker as the analysis object and gets results as follows:Firstly, the dissertation confirms the feasibility of Prospect Theory in project management through heuristic analysis of procrastination phenomenon. Within the framework of Prospect Theory, a theoretical model was formulated for planner's time choice behavior within a critical activity as follows:Firstly, the planner's subjective perception function of cost was proposed, then we defined the reference point for decision and give the calculation method of prospect value. This dissertation demonstrates that the Prospect Theory could provide a more accurate description of planner's behavior of time decision under the conditions of uncertainty than the Expect Utility Theory. To a certain extent, this dissertation solves the problem that the behavior variables are difficult to quantify. Secondly, this dissertation analyzes the impact of behavior variables on real procrastination scenarios. The findings indicate that the degrees of procrastination are various with different control variables in different scenarios. This dissertation demonstrates that appropriate strategies will decrease disadvantage by proper design of incentive intensity and frequency and schedule flexibility. Moreover, accumulated experience through learning will enhance professionalism and help practitioners reduce delays and improve their self-restraint ability effectively.Thirdly, this dissertation uses real options methodology to analyze the value of uncertainty of "student's syndrome" in project management. As to delay option and switching option, the optimal super-trigger and the optimal lower-trigger of switching option are applied respectively. A practitioner with bounded rationality should choose whether or not to execute the option and maximize utility. The model provides the basis for the design of incentive mechanisms and control strategies.Fourthly, this dissertation analyzes internalization behavior uncertainties based on the limitations of critical chain buffering mechanisms and the feasibility of real options tools. This dissertation models a project buffer allocation in critical chain under uncertainties, incorporates real options concepts to construct an option-based 0-1 stochastic integer programming considering the probability distribution of uncertainty to allocate the provocative project buffer among critical activities. We can execute such activities with time flexibility and optimize the value of the whole critical chain in a proactive approach.Last but not least, this dissertation integrates objective functions of the cost and option value, and proposes a multi-objective optimization model of project buffer allocation method. It takes into account time preference inconsistent and mental account and offers a solution to identify the most valuable critical chain in multiple critical chains and project portfolios. Thus, this dissertation puts forward a framework for flexible scheduling strategy in critical chain project management.This dissertation mainly explored procrastination phenomena in scheduling and controlling period of critical chain project. Coordinating various behavioral dimensions of uncertainties for scheduling and controlling is an enormous engineering and needs more efforts. The purpose of this dissertation is throwing out a minnow to catch a whale and further research will be imperative.