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Incentive schemes for resolving Parkinson's Law in project management
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Chen, Bo and Hall, Nicholas (2021) Incentive schemes for resolving Parkinson's Law in project management. European Journal of Operational Research, 288 (2). pp. 666-681. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2020.06.006 ISSN 0377-2217.
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WRAP-Incentive-schemes-resolving-Parkinsons-Law-project-management-Chen-2020.pdf - Accepted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0. Download (582Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2020.06.006
Abstract
Project management is a business process that supports about 30% of the world's economic activity. Yet projects routinely suffer from the influence of Parkinson's Law. This behavioural phenomenon routinely results in failure to deliver work that is completed early before its assigned deadline. As a consequence, the late completion of other work is not offset, and overall project performance suffers. Hence, project success rates below 40% are widely reported. Our work uses mechanism design within non-cooperative game theory. A particular issue in the design process is to eliminate the possibility that a project worker with multiple dependent tasks can improve their incentive payment by falsely reporting some of their task completion times. From our review of the academic and business literature of project management, no incentive scheme used in practice accomplishes this. Our results include the design of incentive schemes that eliminate or mitigate Parkin-son's Law. These schemes apply to projects designed under either traditional Critical Path Method (CPM) planning or modern Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) planning, and are also invulnerable to group strategy. A large-scale computational study validates the resulting benefit to project performance as substantial and also robust across different project characteristics. We also provide what is apparently the first analytical comparison between traditional CPM and modern CCPM planning systems. The incentive schemes we propose are simple and easily implementable. We recognize that performance incentives are structured differently by each organization, but our work provides a flexible basis from which various practical schemes can be designed.
Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Operational Research & Management Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School |
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Journal or Publication Title: | European Journal of Operational Research | |||||||||
Publisher: | Elsevier Science BV | |||||||||
ISSN: | 0377-2217 | |||||||||
Official Date: | 16 January 2021 | |||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 288 | |||||||||
Number: | 2 | |||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 666-681 | |||||||||
DOI: | 10.1016/j.ejor.2020.06.006 | |||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | |||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | |||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 9 June 2020 | |||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 12 June 2022 | |||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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