题    目：Project Management: A Research Agenda and Risk-Adjusted Net Present Value

报告人：美国俄亥俄州立大学Nicholas G. Hall教授

时    间：2016年4月8日上午10:30-11:30

地    点：老校部224

邀请人：工业工程与物流优化所 唐立新 教授

摘  要：Project management has recently experienced remarkable growth in business interest, as shown by a 1000% increase in membership in the Project Management Institute since 1996. Today, one-fifth of the world’s economic activity, with an annual value of $12T, is organized as a project. This growth is largely attributable to new applications, for example IT, R&D, new product and service development and corporate change management, with different characteristics and requiring new methodologies. Yet projects still routinely fail to deliver on time, on cost and within scope. This talk outlines an agenda for project management research, including a detailed discussion of open issues that are both practically important and theoretically interesting. Within this agenda, one important topic is calculation of the performance measure net present value (NPV), which is used for project evaluation and selection. It is widely recognized that, during project execution, the level of risk diminishes. In principle, this should be represented in the discount rate that is used in the calculation of NPV. This paper represents what is apparently the first attempt to accomplish this. We model decreasing project risk by removing from the discount rate the risk factor associated with each task when it is completed. We formulate and solve the resulting nonlinear, nonconcave problem of maximizing the risk-adjusted NPV of a project. Our work enables better scheduling of projects, which increases their NPV. Also, our estimation of maximum risk-adjusted NPV enables a company to make better informed project selection decisions. We validate the contribution of our work using two computational studies: the first demonstrates a significant increase in maximum project NPV from improved project scheduling; the second demonstrates a significant increase in total project portfolio value from improved project selection. Our work also motivates companies to develop more precise information about their project risks. 

简  历：Nicholas G. Hall is a Professor in the Department of Management Sciences at the Fisher College of Business, and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at The Ohio State University. His research interests are in project management, scheduling, supply chain incentives and pricing, and applications of operations research. He has published over 80 articles in the journals Operations Research, Management Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, Mathematical Programming, and several other journals. He has served for a total of over 40 years on the editorial boards of Operations Research and Management Science. He has given over 330 academic presentations, including 98 invited presentations in 23 countries, 11 conference keynote presentations, and eight INFORMS national conference tutorials. A 2008 citation study ranked him 13th among 1,376 scholars in the operations management field. He has served as President of Manufacturing and Service Operations Management society (1999-2000), and as Treasurer of INFORMS (2011-2014). He has been a visiting professor at the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and Kellogg School (Northwestern University). He is the owner of a consulting business, CDOR, which provides business solutions to the Ohio business and government communities, as well as advice on intellectual property issues for New York City law firms. In the summer 2016 INFORMS election, he is nominated for the position of President.