Project monitoring is one of the important activities in the management of a project and its main objective is to supply the necessary information for proper control of the…
Abstract
Project monitoring is one of the important activities in the management of a project and its main objective is to supply the necessary information for proper control of the project based on the project plan. Monitoring of a project covers different issues related to costs, resources, problems, progress etc. All these issues are dependent on many other sub‐issues and any changes in any of them influences the whole project monitoring system. EArned value analysis is one of the tools used for monitoring the progress and costs of the project is composed of several factors. In the present work, the activity of project monitoring has been treated as a general system and earned value analysis as a specific system for modeling and simulating the dynamics involved therein. System dynamics methodology has been applied for this purpose. A case study has been conducted on a real‐world software project in an IT organization. The results show that the system of earned value analysis is highly influenced by the variations in the estimated cost of unit effort, delay in an activity and estimated effort of work package.
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Jigeesh Nasina and Sai Nandeswara Rao Nallam
The purpose of this paper is to examine different possible issues that can contribute to cost escalations in pharmaceutical capital projects and identify remedial measures to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine different possible issues that can contribute to cost escalations in pharmaceutical capital projects and identify remedial measures to control them.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is supported by a detailed survey performed around some big pharmaceutical companies of Indian sub-continent. Various issues that lead to cost escalations of projects have been identified. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyzes have been applied to the feedback data.
Findings
The study derived and validated four prominent factors leading to cost escalations. The paper discusses these factors along with the remedies identified to control project cost. Convergent and discriminant validity have been well established for the model.
Research limitations/implications
The data needful for the study were collected from only four big pharmaceutical companies established in Southern India. Through frequent and elaborate interactions with senior project managers of those companies, it became possible to get a consolidated list of reasons that contribute to cost escalations in pharmaceutical projects. The list and the feedback data may be more exhaustive if some more companies would have been surveyed. Future research is committed to cover some more notable pharmaceutical companies both nationally and internationally and enhance the sample size. This would add more strength to the analysis and derive more consistent and validated results.
Practical implications
This study provides necessary support to the project people to analyze different issues that stand as hurdles for project success and enable them to look for remedies to resolve them. The results would help the project managers to enhance their awareness in controlling the project costs. The study stands as a stepping stone and a roadmap to embed further research in this direction.
Originality/value
Since several significant issues impact the progress of the projects, this work focussed on analyzing cost-related issues in projects; since there is meager research work done in the area of pharmaceutical project management, as an attempt to fill the research gap, this work carried out detailed analysis of different issues leading to cost escalations in pharmaceutical capital projects; factor analysis, including exploratory and confirmatory, has been applied to the data collected and several important factors derived and the measurement model well validated; the research work was done in close interaction with the project people working in four big Indian pharmaceutical companies and useful information was collected; in addition to generation of important factors from the factor analysis, the study was further extended to collect various remedies to mitigate the issues that lead to cost escalations; the research work has enough strength to act as a role model to motivate researchers and project people to further their research on other issues and also refine the present work.