Nowadays, effort estimation in software projects is turned to one of the key concerns for project managers. In fact, accurately estimating of essential effort to produce and improve a software product is effective in software projects success or fail, which is considered as a vital factor. Lack of access to satisfying accuracy and little flexibility in existing estimation models have attracted ...

The MIT MEng team of four worked with Konarka Technologies, a world leading organic solar panel manufacturer, on production tracking and analysis as well as various operational improvement projects. MIT's collaborative improvement projects at Konarka's manufacturing facility were focused on information system and operations in the finishing processes after solar panels have been coated. This th...

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) inevitably involves change. However, modern business organizations are extremely complex. Setting improvement targets in BPR too high without considering the company’s capability and its external and internal interactions will have little chance of achieving the set targets, which means project failure. Unfortunately, forecasting of the BPR outcomes is curr...

Audits and quality improvement projects are vital aspects of clinical governance and continual service improvement in medicine. In this article we describe the process of clinical audit and quality improvement project. Guidance is also provided on how to design an effective audit and bypass barriers encountered during the process.

Most rural development projects include ecological considerations, and most conservation projects include some reference to sustainable development. However, conservation projects frequently fail because they do not incorporate local communities' perceptions and needs. Many development projects are also unsuccessful because they are not based on adequate ecological assessment. We focus here on ...

In this paper we discuss the results of the Create Acceptance project. In a comparative analysis of 27 case studies on new energy projects we identify five crucial challenges for project managers of new energy projects related to societal acceptance. We discuss a six-step methodology for facilitating societal acceptance in new and ongoing energy projects. The methodology is tested and refined i...

This paper draws on examples of successful stakeholder collaboration in existing projects to reason the importance of collaboration in education quality improvement. Stakeholder collaboration in the definition, implementation, measurement, and evaluation of education quality improvement projects arguably increases the likelihood that the resulting policy will more effectively meet the needs of ...

In this paper we empirically examine the role of knowledge creation mechanisms in process improvement projects. Using scales adapted from the knowledge management literature, we collect data on 98 Six Sigma process improvement projects and analyze these data using regression. Results support our hypotheses linking knowledge creation mechanisms to project performance. Specifically, we find that ...

This book on ‘access and expansion: challenges for higher education improvement in developing countries’ is based on the experiences and reflections of experts from the North and the South in a variety of capacity development projects. Most of these projects have been awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Cooperation in Higher Education (NUFFIC) to the Centre for International Cooperation...

Software Process Improvement (SPI) is one of the main software development challenges. Unfortunately, process descriptions generally do not correspond to the processes actually performed during software development projects. Process and project alignment is essential to really find out how process improvement is important to achieve an organization’s strategic objectives. Considering this appro...