Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) are considered as the newest and most effective tools of enterprise resource planning and include an interconnected information, management and engineering system that meets all the needs of an organization. ERP implementation is costly and time-consuming and makes fundamental change in the process, if not implemented correctly it will cause challenges in most parts of the organization and will certainly fail. Therefore, the identification of key success factors in implementing ERP helps organizations avoid the loss of the project. This research aims to identify key success factors for ERP by examining 185 managers, professionals, experts of the Information and Communication Technology Institute associated with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Iran. A questionnaire was used to collect data. Findings from exploratory factor analysis indicate that five factors: 1) user friendliness, flexible and consistency 2) establishment of project management; 3) alignment with user needs; 4) Management of organizational changes, and 5) observing the principles of successful implementation of ERP affect the institute and the corresponding suggestions are proposed consistent with these findings.

Maintenance engineering plays an important role in management of oil and gas projects. This paper presents a dynamic programming approach for resource allocation in oil and gas projects. The study presents a dynamic programming approach to allocate human resources for repairment of oil and gas equipment. Many heavy equipment normally needs to be repaired on predetermined scheduled and the process normally takes days or even weeks. The process can be divided into three stages of disassembling the equipment, executing the repairment and assembling the equipment. The proposed model of this paper models the problem into a classical dynamic programming and using a real-world case study, the implementation of the proposed model is described.

An important function of the project management is to optimize the project in various phases and at different levels. From sourcing and allocation to scheduling and even dealing with uncertainties, the science of operation research (OR) has played an important role in this area. So far, many papers have been published using the optimization science to make various decisions regarding the project management. This study aims to investigate all papers published on the application of optimization in the project management from 1940 to 2019 and shows: a) how the trend has changed over this 79 years period, b) to what direction the trend has changed, c) determines the interesting topics of the recent years, and d) which subjects are more attractive as future studies as the applications of the optimization techniques in the project management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the existing risks for the offshore project and risk weighting using the fuzzy best worst method (FBWM). In offshore oil projects, we face six major risks. Each of these risks is divided into smaller risks leaving us to have a total of 34 risks. Some of these risks are internal and some are external risks. In this method, first, the experts of this field determined the best and the worst type of risk. Then, using the experts’ opinions, the study compared the remaining risks with the two selected risks and the other weights are determined. In our survey, “Technical Risk and Project Execution” is the most important risk factor followed by “Political Risk and Sanctions”, “Market risk”, “Manage-ment risk”, “Financial risk and currency fluctuations” and “Environmental risk”.

Over the past number of years, competence management has become a key issue for companies. Similarly, to the importance of knowledge management, competence management considers an individual’s performance, based on his or her knowledge. Thus, knowledge management becomes an important aspect for companies to manage resources, through the ability of characterizing key competences and evaluating how they are improved through past experiences and roles, thus selecting project team members according to the respective existing skills. This paper focuses on the coordination of design activities in order to propose a tool dedicated to operation-level project managers to help prepare their technical teams based on the required skills. The goal is to enhance the effectiveness of the teams, as well as their performance in the short-term, as well as the long-term, while coordinating with the human resources department. This work is based on the results of the Aides et assisTances pour la conception, la conduite et leur coupLage par les connAissanceS – Help and support for design, coordination and their coupling by knowledge (ATLAS, 2008 - 2011). This project studies the coupling between systems design and management. We propose an initial tool to manage skills in a design project.

One of the most important issues on construction projects is to make sure that the project is completed on time. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to verify the effects of four factors namely procedures, technical factors, financial strength and domestic affairs on creating delay on completion of projects. The study uses two measures of Pearson and Spearman correlation tests to examine all hypotheses of the survey. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 40 experts chosen from managers and specialist in railroad construction projects in Iran. The results have confirmed that all four factors influence on creating possible delay on such project, significantly.

Among different factors, correct scheduling is one of the vital elements for project management success. There are several ways to schedule projects including the Critical Path Method (CPM) and Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). Due to problems in estimating dura-tions of activities, these methods cannot accurately and completely model actual projects. The use of fuzzy theory is a basic way to improve scheduling and deal with such problems. Fuzzy theory approximates project scheduling models to reality by taking into account uncertainties in decision parameters and expert experience and mental models. This paper provides a step-by-step approach for accurate estimation of time and cost of projects using the Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and expert views as fuzzy numbers. The proposed method included several steps. In the first step, the necessary information for project time and cost is estimated using the Critical Path Method (CPM) and the Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). The second step considers the duration and cost of the project activities as the trapezoidal fuzzy numbers, and then, the time and cost of the project are recalculated. The duration and cost of activities are estimated using the questionnaires as well as weighing the expert opinions, averaging and defuzzification based on a step-by-step algorithm. The calculating procedures for evaluating these methods are applied in a real project; and the obtained results are explained.

Sustainability in project operations such as financial, social and environmental sustainability is one of the most prominent issues of the present times to address. The increased focus on sus-tainable business operations has changed the viewpoint of researchers and corporate community towards the project management. Today sustainability in business operations along with sustain-ability of natural and environmental resources are of paramount significance which has further caused a huge impact on conception, planning, scheduling and execution of the project manage-ment activities. In this paper, a literature review between 1987 and 2018 on different issues af-fecting the sustainability in project management is carried out. The present study also identifies and discusses the future possibilities to apply computational procedures in order to estimate and optimize the sustainability issues in the management of projects, for example the computational evolutionary algorithms can be applied to formulate the multi-objective decision-making problem after considering critical factors of sustainability in the projects and then yielding optimized solu-tions for the formulated problem to achieve sustainability in the projects. A new integrated framework with the inclusion of feedback function for assessment of each decision and actions taken towards the sustainability of the projects is also identified and presented.

Nowadays, projects have become so widespread in the world that individuals and organizations are always involved in a variety of them. Recent advances in technology and fundamental chang-es in most scientific disciplines have had an essential impact on projects, and have made the na-ture and environmental conditions governing them to become more complex than before. With increasing complexity, the amount of information needed for project management increases. In general, the increasing complexity of projects is a growing source of project risks. It has been recognized that complexity affects the performance of a project and will be effective in its suc-cess. In this context, the traditional principles and practices of project management are no longer able to control the emerging complexity of projects. In addition, one of the key factors for the success of the projects is the appropriateness of the project manager's assignment. Many studies have been carried out in identifying the suitability criteria of the project manager and the methods of selecting the project manager. In most of these studies, the amount and type of complexity of the project are mentioned as factors influencing the design of an appropriate project manager. However, there has not yet been a specific approach for selecting the project manager with re-gard to the complexity of the project. Therefore, in this research, we try to investigate the rela-tionship between the complexity of the project and the merits of the project manager by applying a structural equation modeling approach.

Recently, there have been significant development on e-business and nearly all business partners try to offer their products and services via internet. One primary question for the implementation of e-business is to measure the effect of this new facility on supply chain in project based organizations. Although e-business may not directly influence on organizational performance, it definitely influences on unifying customers and suppliers, which yields to a better performance of organizations. This study performs a study to measure the indirect effect of e-business on project based organizational performance. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 140 professional experts in different industries in province of Ontario, Canada. The survey examines different hypotheses for a possible correlation between e-business and integrated suppliers, e-business and customers, integrated customers and suppliers with organizational performance. The results of this survey indicate a positive relationship between all these components either directly or indirectly.