A generic model of project management with Vensim

Abstract

Large projects without good management will often cause cost and deadline overruns, missing the project scope and insufficient quality. The construction of the channel tunnel which link between England and France was budgeted at $7 billion, but it entered service in the second half of 1994 with a price tag of $13 billion. The Disneyland in Paris initially planned to cost $2.25 billion in the project, but finally cost $4 billion. Some projects are even never finished, typically software projects System dynamics has proven to be an effective methodology to explain the reasons of project failure and to provide insights for best practice in project management. In more than 100 projects where system dynamics has been applied, the cost-benefit ratio is 1:200. More than 50 litigation cases which have used SD methodology have all won their cases in court [1]. Consequently, in this thesis I will implement a generic system dynamics stock-and-flow model with the popular system dynamics modeling tool—Vensim. The causal-loop diagram I decide to implement is represented in the paper “System dynamics applied to project management: a survey, assessment and directions for future research” by Lyneis and Ford (2007). I choose it because it concludes most dynamic factors during the process in one single project. I expect that my generic system dynamics model could be useful in improving project management.