商学院青年博士学术工作坊（第十五期）

讲座题目：Waterfall vs. Agile Project Choice

主讲嘉宾： Nicholas G. Hall

时间：2024年11月11日（星期一 ）下午14:30—16:30

地点： 商学院109会议室

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江南大学商学院

2024年11月4日

主讲嘉宾简介

Nicholas G. Hall is Berry Professor of Operations & Business Analytics, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science (University of California, Berkeley). His research and teaching interests are in project management, scheduling, and sports analytics. He has published 97 articles in Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, Games and Economic Behavior, Interfaces, and others. He has served for over 45 years on the editorial boards of Operations Research and Management Science, and given over 420 academic presentations, over 200 invited presentations in 29 countries, 20 conference keynote presentations, and 10 INFORMS tutorials. In 2018, he served as President of INFORMS. A 2021 bibliometric study ranked him 1st in the field of scheduling over 1952–2019. He is an author of 8 of the 128 articles in the h-index of Operations Research (1952-2021). He is a Fellow of INFORMS. In 2022, he published Supply Chain Scheduling (Springer, 706 pp), with Zhi-Long Chen.

讲座主要内容

Traditionally, project management uses an intensively planned, sequential Waterfall process. However, for applications with uncertain requirements, an iterative learning process, Agile, has recently become widely used as an alternative. Still, for a broad range of high value applications, both processes are competitive. Our work describes optimization models that incorporate random progress during project execution to support this choice. We model both Waterfall and Agile processes using learning, with customer feedback to guide product redesign. These models compare total expected cost, which is a composite measure of development cost, time-to-market, and closeness in design to an uncertain target market. Extensive sensitivity analyses validate the robustness of these insights. We also develop a simpler procedure, with an expected loss of only 1.1%, for recommending a choice of process. Our results validate the perception that the advantage of Agile is in better fitness and less development time, but at greater cost. Further, the same level of Agile expertise is of much less value in a cost priority project than a design priority project.