Asher Tishler

Refining the Search for Project Success Factors: A Multivariate, Typological Approach

Although the causes for project success and failure have been the subject of many studies, no conclusive evidence or common agreement has been achieved so far. One criticism involves the universalistic approach used often in project management studies, according to which all projects are assumed to be similar. A second problem is the issue of subjectiveness, and sometimes weakly defined success measures; yet another concern is the limited number of managerial variables examined by previous research. In the present study we use a project-specific typological approach, a multidimensional criteria for assessing project success, and a multivariate statistical analysis method. According to our typology projects were classified according to their technological uncertainty at project initiation and their system scope which is their location on a hierarchical ladder of systems and subsystems. For each of the 127 projects in our study that were executed in Israel, we recorded 360 managerial variables and 13 success measures. The use of a very detailed data and multivariate methods such as canonical correlation and eigenvector analysis enables us to account for all the interactions between managerial and success variables and to address a handful of perspectives, often left unanalyzed by previous research. Assessing the variants of managerial variables and their impact on project success for various types of projects, serves also a step toward the establishment of a typological theory of projects. Although some success factors are common to all projects, our study identified project-specific lists of factors, indicating for example, that high-uncertainty projects must be managed differently than low-uncertainty projects, and high-scope projects differently than low-scope projects.

Electricity market reform failures: UK, Norway, Alberta and California

An analysis of electricity market reforms already taken place in the UK, Norway, Alberta (Canada) and California (USA) leads to our overall conclusion that the introduction of a competitive generation market, of itself, has failed to deliver reliable service at low and stable prices. The market reform failures are attributed to market power abuse by few dominant sellers (especially at times of transmission congestion), poor market design that invites strategic bidding by suppliers, the lack of customer response to price spikes, capacity shortage caused by demand growth not matched by new capacity, and thin trading of forward and futures contracts that are critical for price discovery and risk management. The paper then explains why an electricity market reform can easily fail to deliver the promised gains of better service at lower and more stable prices. The policy implication is that an electric market reform can be extremely risky, and may lead to a disastrous outcome. Thus, it is imprudent to implement such a reform in countries with limited sites for newgeneration and no indigenous fuels (e.g., Israel and Hong Kong). These countries should therefore consider introducing performance-based regulation that can immediately benefit electricity consumers in terms of lower prices, more stable prices, improved reliability, more choices, while encouraging the electric sector to pursue efficient operation and investment. r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The relative importance of project success dimensions

Traditionally, the success of a project is assessed using internal measures such as technical and operational goals, and meeting schedule and budget. More recently, it has been recognized that several other measures should be used to define project success. These measures reflect external effectiveness: the projects impact on its customers, and on the developing organization itself. In our study of 110 defense projects performed by Israeli industry, we used a multidimensional approach to measure the success of defense projects. Based on previous studies, we defined four dimensions of success: meeting design goals; benefits to the customer; benefits to the developing organization; and benefits to the defense and national infrastructure. For each project, we asked three different stakeholders (the customer, the developing organization, and the coordinating office within the Ministry of Defense) for their views on the relative importance of these dimensions of success. Analysis of the data revealed that the dimension benefits to the customer is by far the most important success dimension. The second in importance is meeting design goals. The other two dimensions are relatively unimportant.

CEO relational leadership and strategic decision quality in top management teams: The role of team trust and learning from failure:

In this study, we examine a complex pathway through which CEOs, who exhibit relational leadership, may improve the quality of strategic decisions of their top management teams (TMTs) by creating psychological conditions of trust and facilitating learning from failures in their teams. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses of survey data collected from 77 TMTs indicate that (1) the relationship between CEO relational leadership and team learning from failures was mediated by trust between TMT members; (2) team learning from failures mediated the relationship between team trust and strategic decision quality. Supplemented by qualitative data from two TMTs, these findings suggest that CEOs can improve the quality of strategic decisions their TMTs make by shaping a relational context of trust and facilitating learning from failures.

Interval estimation of priorities in the AHP

This paper extends and modifies the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Synthetic Hierarchy Method (SHM) of priority estimation to accommodate random data in the pairwise comparison matrices. It employs a Cauchy distribution to describe the pairwise comparison of alternatives in Saaty matrices, and shows how to modify these matrices in order to handle random data. The use of random data yields Saaty matrices that are not reciprocally symmetrical. Several variants of the AHP are then modified (i) to accommodate reciprocally asymmetric matrices, and (ii) to allow each priority estimate to be expressed on an interval of possible values, rather than as a single discrete point. The merits of interval estimation are illustrated by an example.

The relative importance of the top management team's managerial skills

Purpose – The goal of this study is to examine the effect that nine managerial skills of the firms top management team (TMT) (persuasiveness, administrative ability, fluency in speaking, knowledge about group tasks, diplomacy and tact, social skills, creativity, conceptual skills, and cleverness) have on the performance of industrial firms (a weighted average of seven performance measures).Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from chief executive officers of 93 industrial enterprises in Israel through structured questionnaires and complementary in‐depth investigation. Both multivariate (robust canonical analysis and hierarchical regressions) and in‐depth analyses were used to analyze the studys results.Findings – The results show that managerial skills possessed by the TMT strongly affect firm performance, their impact apparently being greater than that of variables representing industry sectors, firm size and age, and perceived environmental uncertainty. In particular, skills that are requ...

Optimal production with uncertain interruptions in the supply of electricity : Estimation of electricity outage costs

Abstract In this paper we develop a model to measure expected electricity outage costs in the industrial and commercial sectors. Four sources contribute to the costs of outage in these sectors: foregone profits (output), possible reduction in productivity due to the outage, damage to materials, and payments to labor during the outage. The beginning and duration of the electricity outage are random variables with known distribution functions. Thus, the business customer maximizes his expected profits, taking into account his ability, or lack of ability, to respond to the random electricity outage. The model is applied, assuming a quadratic production function, to eleven industrial branches in Israel. The estimates indicate a large variation in customer preferences for reliability.

A switching regression method using inequality conditions

Abstract This paper presents three simple approximations to the likelihood function of a switching regression model with inequality conditions. These approximations, which leave the likelihood function unchanged almost everywhere, have analytical derivatives that are continuously differentiable, and hence, allow the use of efficient gradient techniques.

The industrial and commercial demand for electricity under time-of-use pricing☆

Abstract In this paper we have developed and estimated the demand for electricity by an industrial (commercial) firm subject to time-of-use (TOU) pricing of electric power. In the application we use a quadratic production function and directly incorporate into the production process the restrictions that some inputs cannot vary over the day. We show that the TOU structure implies a unique set of parameter restrictions across the demand functions for inputs.

What is really important for project success? A refined, multivariate, comprehensive analysis

Studies on project success factors were typically based on subjective lists for respondents to check, or on a limited number of managerial variables and success criteria. This comprehensive study uses multidimensional criteria for assessing project success, and employs multivariate statistical analyses for identifying the common managerial factors affecting almost all types of projects. Altogether, we used 13 success measures and 360 project management variables for our assessment. The use of a very detailed data set and multivariate methods enables us to address several perspectives which have not been adequately analysed by previous research. The main results of this study are: (i) A well-designed initiation phase is the most important factor in project success; (ii) organisational setup and project structure are not good predictors of project success; (iii) formal design and planning documents are instrumental in meeting project time and budget constraints, as well as in ensuring customer satisfaction from the end-product; (iv) design changes during the execution of the project are usually detrimental to the customers satisfaction, and contribute little to the improvement of the end-products.