Project management research awarded for excellence

Wednesday, 12 October 2016

University of Newcastle (UON) researchers Dr Amir Salehipour and Miss Leila M. Naeni have been presented with the prestigious Project Management Achievement (Research Division) award, as conferred by the Australian Institute of Project Management.

Project management research awarded for excellence

The award seeks to recognise excellent research which directly benefits the field of project management.

Applicants are judged by an eminent panel of professionals representing industry and academia.

Amir and Leila (Amir is a postdoctoral research associate at CARMA, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, UON, and Leila is a PhD candidate within UON’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a lecturer at School of Built Environment, UTS) won the award for their paper, ‘Lessons learned from applying the individuals control charts to monitoring auto-correlated project performance data’ which was published in the Journal of Engineering and Construction Management in May this year.

Their research focuses on improving project controlling by incorporating a variety of new and traditional project management strategies.

In their paper, Leila and Amir compared the use of a traditional project management technique alone, and in combination with advanced mathematics and statistics tools.

Specifically, the researchers were looking at the earned value technique and how to improve its capacity to evaluate project performance. While this particular technique is widely used, it is often not sufficiently robust to cope with low levels of deviation from a baseline plan.

The Shewhart individuals control chart is a statistical quality control chart used to monitor variability. In their work, Leila and Amir combined this tool and some autocorrelation techniques with the traditional earned value technique.

In their award-winning work, the researchers discovered that using this particular combination of tools improves the project controlling scheme.


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