Project Management Organization Design And Performance Testing

Management operation is a complex system; it not only includes task processiong, which is a physical process, but also human behavior, which is a psychological activity. This research summarized simulation methods and techniques, and for the task processing aspect in human-task interaction of an organization, we analyzed the defects in traditional project management methods that are used to solve task processing problem. Currently, project management methods include Program Evaluation and Technique or PERT, and Critical Path Method, or CPM. But these methods just use the expectation of task duration instead of its distribution; by making the task durations constant, the whole project duration can be calculated by finding critical path. In theory, the resulted duration is not the expectation of the project duration, nor the mode of its distribution. In addition, the data acquired by CPM or other such methods is too thin; for example, the optimistic and pessimistic duration time cannot be obtained. By using simulation methods we proposed for project management, the distribution of project can be acquired, and then all the numeric charistics of the distribution can be calculated, including optimistic time, pessimistic time, mode, and expectation.We programmed this simulation approach to project management, and wrapped it as a web service, which can be called by users. The service can be requested from within a website. In this paper, we demonstrated how to make such request from within a webpage and get the response from the service; we also plotted the data, that is, the distribution of project duration, in SVG within the webpage. The URL of this demo is given in this paper and readers can visit to look into our implementation, which attests that simulation can be implemented using just web techniques. Newer browsers all support SVG and ECMAScript, so users don’t need to download any softwares or plugins for a simulation experiment. This will relieve users of heavy burden in installing and maintaining softwares, and also imply a solution to integrate different simulation models together.Simulation approach to project management can build models for task processing in management and compute the project duration. But for the human behavior and group interaction in management, we have to adopt a different approach. Based on the psychology theory about the interaction of group and personal traits, this paper uses Multi-Agent System, or MAS, to represent human factor. And based on this approach, we explored how the simulation approach to project management can be integrated with the MAS model for human behavior. This collaboration of simulation can reflect the reality of enterprise management; and by doing simulations in the integrateed system, we can test the performance of an organization, and give some advices to the management on personel, transcation process, etc. We also use simulation to describe the macro-level structure of an organization, and how human collaborates with each other under such structure. Based on computational organization theory, we use MAS and Discrete Event Simulation, or DES, to deal with the relationships among employees and analyze its effect on organizational efficiency. We discucssed how incentives and communications take effect on such collaborations, and obtained some conclusions about organization structure. This research demonstrates how to establish simulation model for a macro structure of an organization; this helps wrap such simulation into web service, and put it into integration with task processing or human behavior models. This integration will reflect a whole picture of organization operation.Based on the simulation methods research and technique implementation details, we proposed a web service based simulation platform. This design goes with the trend of cloud simulation, and will allow multiple users to collaborately set up simulation models, call simulation service, and do computational experiments. Simulation service on the web has to manifest itself in order to make the callers understand how the service should be used; in this regard, we take advice from ontology theory and use ontology language to describe models and services. Currently, there are no web based simulation platforms (all popular simulation softwares are for single user use). Web based simulation platform has many advantages, and will make modeling and consuming of service easy.