Opportunities for System Dynamics Implementation in Project Management Evaluation Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2022 PICMET.Project Management (PM) provides a framework to employ, track, and control the organizational resources required to undertake a project and manage all its associated attributes like risks and costs. However, oftentimes, practitioners head into projects without a clear foresight into the cost overruns and schedule delays that are caused by the various inherent risks. System Dynamics (SD) is a powerful tool to model a complex system and the interdependencies of its parts that can help identify such intrinsic risks and their time-delayed impacts especially on project-related expenses, thereby helping PM practitioners use capital effectively. With the intent of exploring one part of this vast intersectionality between PM and SD, from a very specific end-objective of assessing only literature with published SD models, a State-of-the-Art (SAM) analysis of the extant literature was carried out to determine the trends in the research in this space and identify opportunity areas. First, peer-reviewed articles were systematically collected and classified per the PRISMA-P protocol, which also enabled generation of descriptive statistics and trend analysis. Following this, a SAM analysis of the gathered articles was carried out. The preliminary results confirmed the growth of use of SD within the PM space but also highlighted the limited availability of actual SD models modeling PM issues, thereby establishing the scope more such studies. Among the identified studies with published SD models, none was found employing the concept of isomorphism (similarity between systems of different origins) to simulate complex projects or any SD archetype

publication date

  • January 1, 2022