OR-AS is very proud to announce that the Earned Value simulation study has been awarded by the IPMA Research Award 2008 in Rome, Italy. IPMA information

Prof. Dr. M. Vanhoucke, partner of OR-AS and professor at Ghent University and Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School has been awarded on the 22nd IPMA World Congress held on November 9-11, 2008 in Rome (Italy). He has received the Research Award for his research titled "Measuring Time - An Earned Value Simulation Study".

The award ceremony at the closing session of the 22nd IPMA World Congress in Rome (Italy) started with an introductory session given by Dr Martina Huemann, director of IPMA research awards, where she introduced the audience to the award nomination process of IPMA. She gave a short overview of the winners and honoured researchers, and asked them to join the stage to receive their award all together from the jury of IPMA.

Joana Geraldi from the Cranfield School of Management (UK) was awarded the IPMA Young Researcher Award 2008 for research on "Reconciling Order and Chaos in Multi-Project Firms". Mario Vanhoucke from Ghent University, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School and partner of OR-AS (Belgium) was awarded the IPMA Research Award 2008 for his research "Measuring Time: An Earned Value Simulation Study". Apparently, Martina explained that the difference between being young and being somewhat older lies on the 30 years threshold. Bad luck for me, I am not considered to be young anymore.

Frank T. Anbari and Young Hoon Kwak from the George Washington University's School of Business were honoured for their research on the Impact on Project Management of Allied Disciplines. Ofer Zwickael from the Victoria University of Wellington, who couldn't attend the Congress, was also honoured for his research. The research has identified unique Critical Success Processes for different project scenarios, for example, industries, cultures and level of project risk.

After the introduction, Joana Geraldi presented her work to the audience. The research project was aimed at understanding how multi-project firms reconcile order (control, efficiency, standardisation of tools and processes , reliability) and chaos (creativity, innovation, flexibility to adapt to contingencies in projects). The research developed a framework to identify potential issues in the organizational design of companies, and ascertain key dynamics that lead companies away and towards a reconciliation of order and chaos. The research was part of her PhD undertaken in the Management Internationaler Projekte, University of Siegen, Germany. Today, Joana is at the International Centre for Programme Management, in Cranfield School of Management, UK.

After this introduction, Mario Vanhoucke gave a presentation on his research. His research study critically analyzes and evaluates various Earned Value Management (EVM) based performance measurement and schedule risk analysis methods on a large set of projects. The aim of this experiment is threefold. First, the study searches for static and dynamic drivers of duration forecast accuracy in order to be able to select the most reliable method for a specific project. Second, the study embeds these project tracking methods in a corrective action decision-making framework in order to improve project performance. Finally, the research provides guidelines based on extensive computational experiments on how to set up a project tracking approach which will likely lead to the most reliable results during project execution. The research has led to the development of a new software tool ProTrack (www.protrack.be) that integrates dynamic baseline scheduling with schedule risk analysis and project tracking and control.

After the presentations and the finish of the closing seminar, I had the opportunity to talk with Frank T. Anbari and Young Hoon Kwak from the George Washington University. We exchanged our visiting cards, had some nice talks, took some pictures and talked about keeping in touch for future research efforts.

After all, this was a wonderful opportunity for OR-AS to present the research from a software point of view (ProTrack) and a nice way to startup initial conversations to think about collaborations between Ghent University, Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School and the George Washington University thanks to the nice talks with Frank and Young. The research will go on. To be continued...

Mario Vanhoucke