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Essential skills for data-driven project management: A classroom teaching experiment
No full textWe investigate the performance of students in a Data-driven Project Management course module that consists of several realistic case studies derived from the book “The data-driven project manager: A statistical battle against project obstacles” (Vanhoucke 2018). Based on case study evaluations, we monitor the students’ level for various technical and non-technical skills. We identify and classify seven project management skills in management literature and, subsequently, we statistically investigate the link between these skills and the student performance during the course module. Also, a model to incorporate these skills in the Dynamic Scheduling framework is proposed and validated using Structural Equation Modeling. The results indicate that planning is key for good risk analysis and project control, and show that both types of skills are important for successful project management
The welfare and price effects of sector coupling with power-to-gas
No full textElectricity markets with high installed capacities of Variable Renewable Energy Sources (VRES) experience periods of supply and demand mismatch, resulting in near-zero and even negative prices, or energy spilling due to surplus. The participation of emerging Power-to-X solutions in a sector coupling paradigm, such as Power-to-Gas (PTG), has been envisioned to provide a source of demand flexibility to the power sector and decarbonize the gas sector. We advance a long-run equilibrium model to study the PTG investment decision from the point of view of a perfectly competitive electricity and gas system where each sector's market is cleared separately but coupled by PTG. Under scenarios combining PTG technology costs and electricity RES targets, we study whether or not there is a convergence in the optimal deployment of PTG capacity and what is the welfare distribution across both sectors. We observe that PTG can play an important price-setting role in the electricity market, but PTG revenues from arbitrage opportunities erodes as more PTG capacity is installed. We find that the electricity and gas sector have aligned incentives to cooperate around PTG, and instead find an issue of misaligned incentives related to the PTG actor. Although not the focus of our analysis, in some scenarios we find that the welfare optimal PTG capacity results in a loss for the PTG actor, which reveals some intuition that subsidizing PTG can make sense to reduce the cost of RES subsidies. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to contextualize these findings for system specificities
Welcoming New Entrants into European Electricity Markets
No full textIn this review paper, we select four important waves of new entrants that knocked on the door of European electricity markets to illustrate how market rules need to be continuously adapted to allow new entrants to come in and push innovation forward. The new entrants that we selected are utilities venturing into neighbouring markets after establishing a strong position in their home market, utility-scale renewables project developers, asset-light software companies aggregating smaller consumers and producers, and different types of communities. We show that well-intentioned rules designed for certain types of market participants can (unintentionally) become obstacles for new entrants. We conclude that the evolution of market rules illustrates the importance of dynamic regulation. At the start of the liberalisation process the view was that we would deregulate or re-regulate the sector after which the role of regulators could be reduced. However, their role has only increased. New players tend to improve the sustainability of the electricity sector in environmental, social, or economic terms but might also present new risks that require intervention by regulators
Synchromodal transportation planning using travel time information
No full textSynchromodal transportation planning is defined by the possibility to re-route shipments to alternative transportation modes at intermediate terminals based on real-time information about the shipment in transit. We present a synchromodal decision support model to determine the optimal modal choice for a single shipment in a multimodal network that is characterized by stochastic travel times. The model is formulated as a Markov decision process and allows adaptations to the modal choice based on real-time information on the travel time. Our formulation trades off transportation and late delivery penalty costs, and captures the value of synchromodal planning. We demonstrate the use of our model in a numerical case study, where we evaluate synchromodal against static intermodal transportation planning. The latter does not allow real-time adjustments to the modal choice. Compared to intermodality, synchromodal planning has most value when the penalty for late delivery is high and transportation services are more frequent
A time-driven activity-based costing approach for identifying variability in costs of childbirth between and within types of delivery
No full textBackgroundRecently, time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) is put forward as an alternative, more accurate costing method to calculate the cost of a medical treatment because it allows the assignment of costs directly to patients. The objective of this paper is the application of a time-driven activity-based method in order to estimate the cost of childbirth at a maternal department. Moreover, this study shows how this costing method can be used to outline how childbirth costs vary according to considered patient and disease characteristics. Through the use of process mapping, TDABC allows to exactly identify which activities and corresponding resources are impacted by these characteristics, leading to a more detailed understanding of childbirth cost.MethodsA prospective cohort study design is performed in a maternity department. Process maps were developed for two types of childbirth, vaginal delivery (VD) and caesarean section (CS). Costs were obtained from the financial department and capacity cost rates were calculated accordingly.ResultsOverall, the cost of childbirth equals €1894,12 and is mainly driven by personnel costs (89,0%). Monitoring after birth is the most expensive activity on the pathway, costing €1149,70. Significant cost variations between type of delivery were found, with VD costing €1808,66 compared to €2463,98 for a CS. Prolonged clinical visit (+ 33,3 min) and monitoring (+ 775,2 min) in CS were the main contributors to this cost difference. Within each delivery type, age, parity, number of gestation weeks and education attainment were found to drive cost variations. In particular, for VD an age > 25 years, nulliparous, gestation weeks > 40 weeks and higher education attainment were associated with higher costs. Similar results were found within CS for age, parity and number of gestation weeks.ConclusionsTDABC is a valuable approach to measure and understand the variability in costs of childbirth and its associated drivers over the full care cycle. Accordingly, these findings can inform health care providers, managers and regulators on process improvements and cost containment initiatives
An Energy System Model to Study the Impact of Combining Renewable Electricity and Gas Policies
Get PDFEnergy system models are needed to help policy makers design renewable energy policies that combine support for renewable electricity with support for renewable gas. In this paper, we advance a stylized model that includes demand for electricity, heating, and hydrogen in industry that is supplied by competing technologies. We first show that the status quo in most countries, which is a combination of carbon pricing with support for renewable electricity, only supports green gases indirectly and in a limited way. When we then add direct support for renewable gas to the model, we have two main findings. First, a Renewable Energy Sources - Gas (RES-G) target is more effective in supporting biomethane than in supporting green hydrogen. Second, there are strong interaction effects between a RES-E target and a RES-G target that can be both complementary and substitutive
The Team Causes and Consequences of Team Membership Change: A Temporal Perspective
No full textMembership change—adding, replacing, and losing members—is a common phenomenon in work teams and charts a different theoretical space from prior team research that has assumed stable team membership and shared team properties. Based on a comprehensive review of 133 empirical studies on team membership change since 1948, we propose a temporal framework pertaining to the causes and consequences of membership change. Three key theoretical insights emerge from our evidence-based integration: (a) Membership change first disrupts team cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal processes and states (e.g., transactive memory systems, coordination) but can benefit team performance after teams adapt to form new processes and states; (b) whether and to what extent team performance benefits from membership change is contingent on the magnitude of membership change, requirements of team communication, member adaptation-related attributes, change in team knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs), and team knowledge work; and (c) poor team experiences motivate member departure and may make it challenging for newcomers to join and teams to adapt to membership change. Our review moves team research into new avenues that do not presume stable team membership and shared team properties in understanding team functioning and performance, and outlines key directions to advance integrative theory
HR Barometer 2021. HRM trends and challenges in Belgian organisations
No full textHudson and Vlerick Business School publish their HR Barometer annually to identify the most significant HR trends and challenges of the previous year. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the past year an exceptional one for everyone. In uncertain times, it was a challenge to set the right priorities. What impact did COVID-19 have on the performance of HR? Our online survey resulted in 104 organisations sharing their experiences and concerns. This year, the HR Barometer covered no less than 363,631 employees in Belgium through these organisations
Automatic detection of the best performing priority rule for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem
No full textPriority rules are applied in many commercial software tools for scheduling projects under limited resources because of their known advantages such as the ease of implementation, their intuitive working, and their fast speed. Moreover, while numerous research papers present comparison studies between different priority rules, managers often do not know which rules should be used for their specific project, and therefore have no other choice than selecting a priority rule at random and hope for the best. This paper introduces a decision tree approach to classify and detect the best performing priority rule for the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP). The research relies on two classification models to map project indicators onto the performance of the priority rule. Using such models, the performance of each priority rule can be predicted, and these predictions are then used to automatically select the best performing priority rule for a specific project with known network and resource indicator values. A set of computational experiment is set up to evaluate the performance of the newly proposed classification models using the most well-known priority rules from the literature. The experiments compare the performance of multi-label classification models with multi-class classification models, and show that these models can outperform the average performance of using any single priority rule. It will be argued that this approach can be easily extended to any extension of the RCPSP without changing the methodology used in this study