A new way of thinking about IT project management practices: Early empirical results

Despite decades of efforts to improve the management of Information Technology (IT) projects, failure rates remain high. This article first reviews literature about information systems success and IT project success. Most of the improvement efforts have focused on advancing variations of the traditional project management paradigm, such as embodied by the Project Management Body of Knowledge. This article describes a new way of thinking about managing IT project called Value-Driven Change Leadership (VDCL), and reports the results of an initial empirical exploration to identify project success factors stemming from VDCL as well as the traditional paradigm. The results are based on data collected from 16 medium-sized IT-intensive projects at eight Chicago-based organizations from six different industries. The results, although not based on a large sample, point to several project management practices associated with project success that stem from both the traditional paradigm as well as VDCL. For example, traditional practices managing stakeholders’ expectations, scope, and schedule are associated with project success, as are practices stemming from VDCL, such as managing the end-product’s architecture, business value added, and the organization change associated with systems implementation. The results of this study also suggest that further research into new ways of thinking about IT project management may be fruitful.     

China feels the heat: negative impacts of high temperatures on China's rice sector

We analysed a county‐level data set of single‐season rice yield and daily weather outcomes in China to examine the effects of temperature on China's rice sector. We found that rice yield exhibited highly nonlinear responses to temperature changes: rice yield increased with temperature up to 28°C and decreased sharply with higher temperatures. Holding current growing seasons and regions constant, average rice yield in China is projected to decrease by 10–19 per cent by 2050 and 11–33 per cent by 2070 due to future warming under the global climate models HadGEM2‐ES and NorESM1‐M. These results imply that future warming poses a major challenge for Chinese rice farmers and that the effectiveness of adaptations will depend on how well they reduce the negative temperature impacts on rice yield because of very hot days.     

When do MNCs fail to learn from prior failure experience?

Do multinational corporations (MNCs) learn from their prior failures in international joint ventures (IJVs)? When does decision makers’ cognitive inability hinder MNCs from learning through their prior failure experiences? In the context of IJV survival in subsequent IJV entries, this study compares predictions made from two distinct theoretical perspectives, both of which belong to the behavioural school in strategy literature. According to the performance feedback perspective, MNCs may effectively learn from their prior failure experiences gained in familiar decision‐making contexts. On the other hand, according to the cognitive bias perspective, MNCs may not be able to effectively learn from their prior failure experiences if they inaccurately interpret the causes of their prior failures. The results provide partial support for the notion that MNC decision makers may not be able to effectively learn from their prior failures because of their cognitive biases. Copyright © 2015 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A profit-maximization location-capacity model for designing a service system with risk of service interruptions

This paper considers the design of an immobile service system in which each facility’s service process is subject to the risk of interruptions. The location-capacity decisions and allocations are simultaneously made to maximize the difference between the service provider’s profit and the sum of customers’ transportation and waiting costs. An efficient Lagrangian-based solution algorithm is developed, which solves large-sized instances with up to 50 service facilities and 500 customers in a few seconds. Several sensitivity analyses and managerial insights are presented. The model is also applied to a case study on a logistics network design problem in the zinc mining industry.     

Responding to negative online reviews: The effects of hotel responses on customer inferences of trust and concern

Our research examines the perceptions and evaluations of prospective customers toward an online negative review and any accompanying hotel response. The study explores two main issues: whether the presence (versus absence) of an organizational response to negative customer reviews affects the inferences potential consumers draw about the target business, and which aspects of responses affect their impressions. We test the effects of four variables associated with a response: source of response, voice of responder, speed of response, and action frame on two outcomes variables (i.e., customer concern and trust inferences). The provision of an online response (versus no response) enhanced inferences that potential consumers draw regarding the business's trustworthiness and the extent to which it cares about its customers. Using a human voice and a timely response yielded favorable customer inferences. Inferences did not vary with response source or action frame. Implications are drawn for effective management of negative online reviews.     

Credit market frictions and political failure

We study how an excessively favorable regulatory environment for banks could arise even with a perfectly competitive credit market in a median voter world. In our occupational choice model with heterogeneous wealth endowments, market failure due to unobservability of entrepreneurial talent endogenously creates a misalignment between surplus maximizing reforms and reforms that are preferred by the median voter, who is a worker. This is in contrast to the world without market failure where the electorate unanimously vote in favor of surplus maximizing institutional reforms. This paper illustrates how market failure could lead to political failure even in the benchmark political system that is free from capture by interest groups.     

A barrier options approach to modeling project failure: The case of hydrogen fuel infrastructure

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the potential to contribute to a sustainable transport system with zero tailpipe emissions. This requires the construction of a network of fuel stations, a long-term, expensive and highly uncertain investment. We contribute to the literature by including a knock-out barrier option in an n-fold compound real option model to take account of immediate project failure in a multi-stage sequential investment project. Our model allows to explicitly incorporate the default possibility of large-scale energy infrastructure projects. In our case study of hydrogen infrastructure development, we find that even for the least conservative valuation method no profitable business case can be made for the development of hydrogen as a sustainable transportation mode. However, we do provide some suggestive scenarios that plausible tax schedules can be designed to overcome the starting problems for hydrogen infrastructure development.     

Reformulating Environmentally Constrained Traffic Equilibrium via a Smooth Gap Function

Various government laws have recently been enacted to alleviate the environmental deterioration of transportation systems. Environmental constraint is a valid means to explicitly reflect various environmental protection requirements imposed by the government. In this paper, we examine the environmentally constrained traffic equilibrium problem (EC-TEP), which is a fundamental tool for modeling and evaluating environmental protection requirements. Specifically, we provide an equivalent reformulation for the EC-TEP. The proposed reformulation adapts the concept of gap function to simultaneously reformulate the nonlinear complementarity conditions associated with the generalized user equilibrium conditions, environmental constraints, and conservation constraints as an equivalent unconstrained optimization problem. This gap function reformulation has two desirable features: (1) it can handle a general environmental constraint structure (linear or nonlinear; link-based or area-based) and a general link and route cost structure, enhancing the modeling adaptability and flexibility; (2) it is smooth and unconstrained, permitting a number of existing efficient algorithms for its solution. A gradient-based solution algorithm with a self-regulated averaging stepsize scheme is customized to solve the reformulated unconstrained optimization problem. Numerical examples are also provided to demonstrate the modeling flexibility of the proposed EC-TEP reformulation.     

农民工工资市场决定失灵的原因及解决途径

我国农民工的工资市场决定存在失灵,主要是农民工劳动力供求的变动对其工资水平的影响微弱,农民工劳动力短缺与其工资水平偏低并存。这种失灵直接源于农民工劳动力的供需矛盾性、需求垄断性和信息非对称性所决定的农民工劳动力市场的发育缺陷,根源于农民工劳动力市场所面临的包括以户籍制度为主的制度壁垒、重城轻乡的制度安排和信息传导的制度缺失在内的制度困境。而培育农民工劳动力市场、完善相关制度是解决其工资市场决定失灵的现实出路,其中转变政府职能是关键。     

国际工程承包项目失败因素的三角模糊数分析

本文分析了影响国际承包项目失败的因素并建立了相应的指标评价体系,介绍了运用三角模糊数互反判断矩阵[3]确定因素权重的方法。结合实例描述了此方法在确定国际承包项目失败因素权重上的应用,进而明确主要失败原因,不断认识项目在承包过程中出现的问题,使我国建筑企业在国际承包领域不断进步。