Improving management and tools for project performance in software development: a system dynamics approach.

While existing research has mainly focused on project management’s static view, our work investigates the impacts of projects’ structure and behavioural dynamics on their performance, with a specific focus on the influence of some peculiar development processes. A dynamic simulation model of a single-phase project was built using the system dynamics methodology. The model integrates several previously developed and tested project structures and adds a separate structure for the negotiation process. Simulations describe the behaviours generated by the interaction of customized development processes in single-phase projects. Project performances are measured in terms of time, quality and cost. Our research aims to show that development processes, as well as shared resource levelling techniques, significantly impact the dynamic behaviour of projects through the feedback, delays and nonlinear relationships which are usually omitted in traditional project management practice, as well as in methods, tools and models, but are very important descriptors of project complexity. Expanding the models used to manage projects to include dynamic features requires a change of focus by researchers and practitioners. The system dynamics methodology provides some of the tools for developing and implementing such an expansion in project models.