Planning in the Dark: Why Major Engineering Projects Fail to Achieve Key Goals

The arguments, analysis and observations in this paper are based on 10 years of research with partners in the European and US aerospace and defence industries. During this period, the authors were part of a team of researchers who were seeking to develop a new methodology and tool set for project management, particularly aimed at large aerospace projects. The research was motivated by the seemingly ubiquitous reality of project failure, with large engineering projects apparently always late and over budget. Here the authors focus on aerospace and defence, but the problems are generic across all branches of engineering. In their view, aerospace and defence have more excuses than most, because not only are the projects huge, but also they are globally distributed and highly complex. As work progressed, a fundamental conundrum emerged. Through discussions with project managers and assessment of the teams that were undertaking the projects, it became obvious that they were well educated, intelligent, highly motivated and very capable people. So why were so many projects going wrong? And it was not just aerospace and defence, as projects were failing in many different sectors and in numerous geographic locations. Obviously the problems were not to do with incompetence, as they were clearly so generic. As a result, the authors focused their analysis on factors inherent in the way all major projects are undertaken. The ultimate finding has been that the very technology available for managing projects today is inadequate. As argued within the paper, modern, complex projects cannot be planned and executed using 50-year-old project management tools. The paper tells the story of what is wrong with the current technology and how and why it needs to change. The authors are well aware that there are also cultural problems in project management, but many of these are exacerbated by the use of inadequate tools.     

Dark trends: Psychology,science fiction,and the ominous consensus

Many science fiction authors predict that the world will continue moving towards an environment characterised by a combination of high population density and advanced technology. Psychologists and writers of fiction both appear to be in general agreement that such an environment will result in an information overload, intolerable time pressures, overwork for a minority with a lack of meaningful work for the majority, and the loss of privacy and autonomy. Futurists should note the agreement between artistic vision and scientific research—that human civilisation appears to be moving towards conditions that are unpleasant and deleterious.     

Comparability: An analytic examination

Comparability is often invoked as an evaluative criterion in regulatory and financial reporting controversies. This article explores the issue by first developing a formal model of comparability that is consistent with the prior information economics literature regarding normative criteria. This model is then used in a restricted setting to explore how such criteria might eventually be used to establish preference relationships.     

HIV prevalence for New York State using Newborn Seroprevalence and AIDS Surveillance Data

The objective of this work is to estimate human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevalence in the adult populations of New York City, and of New York State (NYS) excluding New York City. Evidence is presented that not all HIV-infected persons live long enough to satisfy an acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) diagnosis. The term preAIDS mortality refers to the mortality of HIV-infected persons, due to any cause, before they can be diagnosed with AIDS. The effect of preAIDS mortality on the estimate of HIV incidence, using back calculation of AIDS Surveillance Data, is to produce low-biased estimates of HIV incidence and prevalence.Estimates of HIV prevalence in women of childbearing age were obtained from the Newborn Seroprevalence Survey [Lessner L. The estimation of HIV prevalence for women of childbearing age in New York City, presently under review]. HIV-positive women in this population typically do not have an opportunistic infection. Thus estimates of HIV prevalence in this population occurred earlier in the spectrum of HIV disease then when they finally satisfied the definition of AIDS that depends on incidence of an opportunistic disease. These earlier estimates of HIV prevalence in women were found to be substantially larger then those obtained from back calculation using female AIDS Surveillance Data. This comparison was used to obtain a quantitative measure R of the effect of preAIDS mortality on HIV prevalence: where 1/R equals the proportion of HIV-infected intravenous drug users that become AIDS cases The preAIDS mortality adjustment factor R was used in the estimation of HIV prevalence and incidence for NYS. We believe that the use of the adjustment factor resulted in more accurate estimates. Using this factor, our estimated HIV incidence for New York City in 1991 was nearly 26% larger than without the adjustment while projected HIV prevalence for 1996 was nearly 27% larger. The paper estimates HIV prevalence. The AIDS Surveillance operation uses AIDS cases to back calculate HIV incidence and prevalence. Since many HIV-infected intravenous drug using (IDU) population die before they become an AIDS case, the estimates from the back calculation are low biased. Low biased because there were many HIV-infected people who died before they ever satisfied the AIDS protocol. The totals presented here adjust for preAIDS mortality and are necessarily larger than what was recorded by the NYS Dept. of Health. After the change in the definition of AIDS to simply HIV prevalence and the change to electronic reporting, the totals were mostly HIV cases reported in the given year and not AIDS. Thus there is no comparison. This paper represents the last best look at the natural history of AIDS in NYS.     

Incorporating contemporaneous residual relationships: A new approach

A direct (and easy to use) measure for capturing any information contained in the contemporaneous relationships among the residuals of different equations is derived herein from the moment generating function of the joint probability density function of the residuals.