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Project Portfolio MCDM Selection

Standard project portfolio selection methods have limited business appeal since they don’t consider all business characteristics. Multiple-Criteria Decision Making overcomes this. 10 min read. (more…)

The Boston Consulting Group has developed three tools that identify critical risks and interdependencies in change efforts and regularly tests for them. 7 min read. (more…)

Project multitasking unnecessarily extends project duration's beyond their due date. #multitasking #projectmanagement #queuingsystems #simulation

Project multi-tasking virtues have been expounded for years. While it has its place, it extends project duration’s beyond their due date. 5 min read. (more…)

Can I Interrupt Your Project?

Within any project organisation, inflight projects can be interrupted (preemption/shutdown) for any number of reasons. Part 2-of-2. (more…)

Project preemption is common in all project organisations but this decision is burdensome and comes with a cost. #project managment #queuingmodels #simulation #projectscheduling

Within any project organisation, inflight projects can be interrupted for any number of reasons. Interruptions are of two kinds, preemption and shutdown. Part 1-of-2. (more…)

Top Ten Queuing Infographic

Top Ten infographic Queuing Theory

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1. What is Queuing Theory?

It’s a way of determining how to better handle situations where clients are waiting to be served. Queuing models are used to determine the average wait time and the average queue length. These measures are used to assess customer satisfaction and…

To minimise baulking & reneging opportunity loss, project organisations need to consider queuing psychology. The “experience” of waiting is more important than the actual “time” spent waiting.

Project organisation simulation model demonstrating how the ‘experience‘ of waiting is more important than the actual ‘time‘ spent waiting. 7 min read. (more…)

Long Project Wait Times exacerbate project organisations cost to serve and careful project services design considerations can considerably improve client and staff experiences and outcomes.

Motivated by client complaints of long project cycle times requires careful project service design considerations to reduce cost to serve. 5 min read (more…)

APS6 YouTube Video Showcase

I NEED YOUR HELP: YouTube requires 100 subscribers before you can embed your video channel and I only have 7! Please subscribe to pminsight today. (more…)

Project Services Throughput

Our previous blog, Minimising Project Congestion and Delays, identified that project congestion occurs when project resources are utilised more than 70% in a single-channel single phase queuing system (M/M/1). Recognising client projects have a 1-hour Poisson arrival rate and a 0.8-hour Exponential delivery time results in an average project wait time of 2.6 hours and a maximum of 14.9 hours for a single resource. Since this project organisation offers a 99% guarantee of delivery within 8-hours, it needs to simulate the effect of increasing project resource capacity to reduce the maximum wait time of 14.9 hours.

Project Services Throughput Simulation

The following simulation shows how increasing project resource capacity from 1-to-10 affects project congestion. In the interests of running time, this video is truncated to cover the simulation period of 480 hours, which allows the project organisation to overcome warm-up bias and achieve steady-state.

Project Services Throughput Results

As project resource capacity is increased, both project queuing length and wait exhibit exponential decreasing outcomes with average outcomes bottoming out when more than 3-resources are added to the system. For the given simulation if the manager were trying to offer a 100% guarantee of delivery within 8-hours, then 3-project resources would be needed to ensure a maximum project wait time of 6.1 hours.

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Project Services Queuing Summary

The simulation results show that to reduce project congestion and exceed the 99% guarantee of delivery within 8-hours, then 3-project resources are needed. Adding more support beyond this provides no client benefit and comes at a significant economic expense.

Further analysis and simulation show that if 2-resources were used instead of 3, then only 1.4% of clients would have a project delivery experience greater than 8 hours!

This insight has important implications for the management of projects. Even though clients might demand 100% of projects being delivered within 8-hours, the reality is most clients will not be prepared to pay the increased costs associated with higher staffing. Consequently, most clients will tolerate occasional small degradations in service provided their experience on the whole, is positive. As such, by having 2-resources instead of 3, management can significantly reduce their staffing costs and still satisfy their 99% guarantee of delivery within 8-hours.

In summary, our intuitive understanding of queuing systems is not adequate to understand the size and affect of increasing resource capacity, and by modelling project organisations using queuing models, better client and economic outcomes can be achieved.

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Learn More

If you would like to know more about leveraging data-driven actionable insights for your project portfolio, then feel free to contact me on [email protected].