Sven Tackenberg

Activity- and actor-oriented simulation approach for the management of development projects

The complexity of a single project – resulting from the amount of activities to be accounted for as well as the required resources – and the amount of simultaneously running projects within an enterprise are rapidly increasing. In order to stay competitive, those factors relevant for the success of project planning and execution, e.g., the project duration or budget, must be specifically identified and realised. On this basis, we developed an integrative simulation model that connects the advantages of existing activity- and actor-oriented models. The integrative model presented here is a key component of the project engineering approach and enables the automatic creation and prospective benchmarking of complex, detailed project plans. The specific aspects of the new, innovative simulation model were developed in cooperation with enterprises of the chemical industry and were verified in different development projects.

Organizational simulation of complex process engineering projects in the chemical industry

In this paper, we demonstrate that, with a suitable instrument for project engineering, the project structure and resource allocations can be modeled and simulated even for weakly structured and distributed development projects. The instrument was developed with the goal of providing project planners and project leaders with a simple tool for fast and intuitive model development for project planning. For this reason the tool should make the comparison of different work organizational project constellations under the consideration of various boundary conditions possible. First results from industrial application of the instrument indicate that project concepts can be compared with each other and then optimized with regard to selected target criteria.

A meta-model for actor-oriented, person-centered simulation for the management of development projects

The simulation of work organizations in product development projects currently occurs almost entirely in a task and process-based manner, whereas the workers involved are only considered in an undifferentiated manner. The intended use of these approaches is the optimization of project progressions to minimize the project duration and cost. Although simulation models for project organizations exist, an optimal course of a project is often not achieved in reality. Therefore, a simulation model is presented to identify realistic courses of product development projects by taking the workers in the center of consideration. Thus the workers become the active part in the simulation model and the specific models of the involved actors generate the dynamics of the model. The novel approach considers the large scope of decision making for the workers involved in the project. The simulation model is based on a formal description of the elements and their relationships in the form of a meta-model, which is presented in a restricted selection. A verification study serves for the depiction of the closeness of the central model component, the prioritization algorithm, to reality.

Integrative Simulation of Work Processes

The design and optimization of creative and communicative work processes requires a detailed analysis of necessary activities, organizational structure, and information flow as well as the identification of weak spots. These requirements are met by the C3 modeling technique, which was specifically developed for design processes in chemical engineering (cf. Subsect. 2.4.4). C3 is also the foundation of the simulation-based quantitative organizational study described in this section. Therefore, a transformation technique from semi-formal models of work organizational dependencies into formal workflow models has been developed and implemented. The verified results of test-runs show the various fields of application of this technique, including its benefits for the reduction of cycle times, for the optimization of the operating grade of the employees, and for the capacity utilization of tools and resources.

Recource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem: Investigation of the Quality of Project Plans

This paper introduces the results whether humans are able to develop project plans with a high quality for the well-established Multi-criteria Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). To analyse this, an empirical study was conducted in which activities had to be serialized or parallelized in the plan, process steps had to be inserted or removed and durations as well as resource requirements had to be modified dynamically during planning. In contrast to this human based planning, a specific multicriteria evolutionary metaheuristic is presented that identifies human compatible plans to relatively large project management problems within a reasonable period of time. To evaluate the level of human competitiveness, a metric for measuring plan quality and the results of the empirical study are presented. The results derived from data of 100 participants and the metaheuristic show that only very few people were able to identify optimal solutions. Furthermore, humans are focusing on one target criteria when solving conflicting planning objectives.

Simulation Based Evaluation of Service Science Productivity for Solution Providers

Many companies offer customized solutions by integrating services into their product portfolio. In this regard, a systematic planning for solution providers is crucial, otherwise, task sequences or the assignment of resources to achieve the business objectives can be incorrect. In order to evaluate and to raise the service productivity, service models and simulation techniques have been used to determine the sequence of activities and to assign actors and resources to tasks. In this paper, the authors demonstrate that service solutions can be prospectively modeled, simulated, and optimized. To achieve improved service productivity, the concepts for service productivity are reviewed and a Petri net based simulation approach is introduced. Tests confirm that the simulation approach is capable of calculating a number of service performance metrics that focus on the effect of a stochastic makespan for tasks and the variable assignment of actors and iterations to activities. In the validation study, a service solution process for a power plant construction is considered to analyze the external validity of the simulation model, as well as the structural validity of the corresponding computational models. Simulation results demonstrate the approach providing a convergence to a global optimal service solution.

Assessment of the Individual Work Organization During a Service Provision

Employees of knowledge-intensive service companies organize their work individually. Therefore, an inadequate coordination of people may lead to an exceeding of service time and costs. In order to avoid this, a method-based work analysis provides an appropriate, but also time-consuming procedure to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of operations at an individual employee level. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for the assessment of an individual work organization during a service provision. To achieve this objective, a performance measurement system and a software tool for tablets and smartphones are presented. The software tool will be introduced, and tested by a verification study in a service company.

Instrumentarium zur personenindividuellen Bewertung und Verbesserung der individuellen Arbeitsorganisation

Eine unproduktive Arbeitsorganisation von Arbeitspersonen bei der Erbringung wissensintensiver Dienstleistungen fuhrt oftmals zu einem Uberschreiten der geplanten Dauer und Kosten. Um dies zu vermeiden, steht mit der Methode der Arbeitsanalyse ein geeignetes, aber auch zeitaufwandiges Verfahren zur Beurteilung der Effektivitat und Effizienz der Handlungen von Arbeitspersonen zur Verfugung. Mit dem Ziel, dem Anwender die Analyse zu erleichtern, wurde eine Software fur Tablets und Smartphones mit entsprechenden Funktionen entwickelt. Das Konzept des Softwareprogramms wird vorgestellt und anhand einer empirischen Studie in einem Dienstleistungsunternehmen erprobt.

Werkzeug zur simulationsbasierten Entwicklung von Angeboten für wissensintensive Dienstleistungen

Das Kapitel stellt ein aktororientiertes Simulationsmodell vor, mit dem es erstmalig moglich ist, schwach strukturierte Arbeitsprozesse zu simulieren. Eine Besonderheit des Ansatzes ist es, dass die Dynamik nicht durch das Scheduling von Vorgangen bzw. Aktivitaten entsteht, sondern durch die Simulation des Entscheidungsverhaltens und der darauf basierenden Handlungen der in eine Dienstleistungserbringung involvierten Akteure. Dieses simulierte Verhalten von Arbeitspersonen resultiert in einer realitatsnahen prospektiven Beschreibung der Leistungserbringung, die auch zur Angebotserstellung genutzt werden kann. Eine simulationsgestutzte Angebotserstellung bietet dabei den Vorteil, eine auf realen Arbeitsprozessen basierende Kostenkalkulation zu realisieren und zudem die Risiken der Leistungserbringung durch die Analyse von What-If-Szenarien zu bewerten. Die Leistungsfahigkeit des Simulationsmodells wird anhand einer Fallstudie eines Architekturburos aufgezeigt.

Formale Beschreibung der Dynamik einer Dienstleistungserbringung

Heutzutage ist die Erbringung der von Unternehmen angebotenen wissensintensiven Dienstleistungen durch schwach strukturierte Arbeitsprozesse und durch eine Vielzahl an gleichzeitig in den Dienstleistungsprozess einzubindenden Akteuren gekennzeichnet. Ein uberwiegend situationsbasiertes Handeln bei der Dienstleistungserbringung erscheint aber aufgrund der direkten und indirekten Beziehungen zwischen Aufgaben und Akteuren als nicht zielfuhrend, so dass eine zentrale Herausforderung die Unterstutzung der Planung von Dienstleistungen ist (Gronau et al. 2010). Das Erstellen von entsprechenden Planen zur verbesserten Ausfuhrung von Dienstleistungen erfordert die Kenntnis und formale Beschreibung der Randbedingungen, die den Dienstleistungsprozess determinieren.