Search

The accuracy of ridership forecasts for fixed-guideway transit projects in the United States has improved in recent decades. A better understanding of the causes for this improvement can help decision makers, project evaluators, and other forecast users identify ridership forecasts that are most likely to be reliable. The analysis in this paper applies a series of linear regression models to evaluate the relationship between ridership forecast accuracy for 67 New Starts projects completed between 1983 and 2012 and four types of project characteristics: time between forecast and observation, local experience with the project mode, physical characteristics, and financial characteristics. The results indicate that local experience and financial characteristics (including the share of a project's costs funded by federal grants) are not significantly related to forecast accuracy, but there are differences by project mode, where forecasts for commuter rail projects are less accurate than those for other modes. The time until ridership observation does relate to forecast accuracy. However, not all of this elapsed time is important. The length of time required for project planning and development does not have a significant relationship with forecast error, nor does the total time between forecast preparation and ridership observation. However, the length of time required to construct the project is significantly associated with the accuracy of the ridership forecast. These results can help planners, policy makers, and other decision makers make judgments about the degree of trust they should place in transit ridership forecasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review Cleland and King's Systems Analysis and Project Management, first published in 1968. Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes the form of a review of the book in its historical context and with relevance to its role in establishing project management as a discipline. Findings – The book is a classic but in retrospect it has some short-comings. These vary from lack of critique of the material to ignoring several of the issues that research shows (and showed at the time) that managers of projects and programs need to address. Had these been covered, the discipline might have been better articulated academically and professionally (which would have been useful given that the PMBOK Guide® was being formulated in the early 1980s). Research limitations/implications – The systems approach that informed the book, and the whole defence-aerospace program and project world of the second half of the twentieth century, should be critically re-examined (for example jointly with Geels' transition theory) in terms of its relevancy to the short, medium and long-terms challenges now confronting society and the contribution that project, program and portfolio management can make to addressing these issues. Originality/value – The paper shows that Cleland and King's book is immensely important as an early exposition on project management and is quite original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many U.S. government agencies and their contractors have subscribed to using the prescriptive metric of technology readiness level (TRL) as a measure of maturity of an individual technology, with a view toward operational use in a system context. A comprehensive set of concerns becomes relevant when this metric is abstracted from an individual technology to a system context, which may involve interplay among multiple technologies that are integrated through a system development life cycle. This paper proposes a system-focused approach for managing system development and making effective and efficient decisions during this life cycle. A system readiness level (SRL) index that incorporates both the current TRL scale and the concept of an integration readiness level is presented with methods for determining current and future readiness of a system. Using techniques in evolutionary algorithms, the SRL index is optimized based on resource allocation to provide a decision support approach that enhances managerial capabilities in the system's development life cycle. The optimization model for the SRL is then executed with a case example and resource constraints of 75%, 60%, 45%, 30%, and 15% to demonstrate how it can be used to make strategic planning decisions in the system's development life cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]