Thesis: B. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of City Planning, 1935 / Includes bibliographical references. / by John J. Waferling. / B. Arch. / B. Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of City Planning

The need for good quality project scheduling methods arises in many fields such as construction, manufacturing, and military operations, among others. In this thesis, we develop a solution methodology which determines the sequence in which the activities of the project must be processed and the resource allocation to each activity in the project to minimize the makespan of the project. We consider projects whose activities' durations are defined by convex, non-increasing time-resource trade-off functions and whose activities are not pre-emptable (i.e., once some amount of resource has been allocated to an activity, this resource level may not change while the activity is processed). The solution methodology first finds all potentially optimal sequences for a given project. However, rather than considering all possible sequences, we use special relationships between certain pairs activities to determine a priori how these pairs will be sequenced in relation to each other. Then, the optimal resource allocations are determine for each sequence and the solution with the smallest makespan is selected. / Master of Science

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Thesis: B. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of City Planning, 1935 / by John Tasker Howard. / B. Arch. / B. Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of City Planning

Thesis: B. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of City Planning, 1935 / by Frank J. Brazel, Jr. / B. Arch. / B. Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of City Planning

Most of the conceptual and empirical work to date leads one to conclude that the contingency approach to understanding strategic planning systems is still in a formative stage. Overall, there seems to be few potential generalizations that emerge from these contingency based studies and even these few are tentative in nature. Furthermore, it seems that most of the contingency based studies had inadequate research designs. This inadequacy probably contributed to the relatively low degree of conclusiveness that has emerged from these studies. This study is intended to be a step forward in filling some of the gaps revealed in the literature. Its purpose is to better understand what strategic conditions need to be considered when designing strategic planning systems. The research questions triggering this research were: (1) What is the impact of the external environment on the design of strategic planning systems? (2) What variables determine the intensity, and structure of strategic planning? (3) What variables determine the role of the corporate planning staff, and CEOs in the planning process? The data were collected by a mail questionnaire and from published data of 174 firms (a response rate of 43.5%). A contingency model linking some contextual variables of business firms to a number of design parameters of strategic planning systems was developed. The findings point out that both the extent and different design parameters (e.g. the planning horizon) of planning systems are influenced by the unpredictability of environmental changes. In addition, other contextual variables such as organization technology are found to influence the extent and structural characteristics of strategic planning systems. Finally, the roles of both the corporate planning staff and chief executive officers in the planning process are identified. These roles are found to be influenced by a variety of contextual variables and non-contextual variables such as the type of industry.

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D.Com. (Strategic Management) / A review of the literature reveals that strategy implementation is an important component of the strategic management process. In addition, it has been noted that there is a high failure rate in the implementation of strategy as a result of the existence of many potential barriers to the effective implementation of strategy. A lack of leadership – specifically strategic leadership – in the management structures of organisations has been identified as one of the possible barriers to the effective implementation of strategy. However, strategic leadership is also widely regarded as one of the key drivers of strategy implementation. In view of the fact that the role of strategic leadership in strategy implementation has been overlooked, the following research question was addressed: What is the perceived role of strategic leadership in the implementation of strategy in South African organisations? In the light of the identified problem and research question, the primary objective of this study was to investigate the perceived role of strategic leadership in the implementation of strategy in South African organisations. The thesis was that strategic leadership positively contribute to the effective implementation of strategy in South African organisations.

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