Many organizations use project management maturity models to improve their project performance. These systematic and sequential frameworks are designed to help organizations quantify their project management maturity and improve their project management processes. However, these models rarely put enough emphasis on project reviews as tools to improve project performance, because, too often, project reviews are considered as non-productive administrative processes. The lack of emphasis on project reviews in project management maturity models is also illustrated by the limited amount of research published on the relationship between project reviews and project performance. Based on the concept of project management maturity models, this dissertation presents a project review maturity model used to measure the project review maturity for four (4) types of reviews (routine, gate, post-mortem, and focused-learning) as well as the overall project review maturity. In addition, this research establishes the quantitative relationship between project review maturity and project performance. This dissertation also quantifies the concept of project review performance and its relationship with project performance for all four (4) types of reviews, as well as for the overall project review performance. Finally, this research provides enablers, barriers, and best practices for effective reviews, based on the answers of written interview questions, and observations from a post-mortem review meeting at a highly-technical organization. The empirical case study and survey analysis conducted by this dissertation led to some unique findings. Five (5) specific conclusions were developed: ●Organizations use all types of reviews in their project management procedures, and view each review role differently. ●Some reviews are more related than others to project performance, although generally, review maturity and performance are significantly relevant to project performance. ●Organization culture (beliefs, expected actions, etc.) is not significantly relevant to project team members when assessing project status or PM procedures during project life-cycle. ●Post-mortem and focused-learning reviews are linked with higher levels of learning than routine and gate reviews. ●Effective reviews need managerial support. This research is the first of its kind to show significant positive relationships between project review maturity and performance with project performance and to provide quantifiable results for organizations to further improve their review processes.

Post-Project Review On Outsourcing Management -- The Case Of National Tax Due to the decreased budget in recent years, our government is pushing forward for outsourcing of the whole process on IT (IT,Information Itecnology) Systems. To cut cost in the developmental stage, to facilitate the integration and sharing of the resources on IT Systems, and to assist the IT Systems industries are the reasons for the outsourcing. The outsourcing is not limited to the application software on IT Systems, but also includes hardware, network equipments and personnel support. In Taiwan, although there was some existing cases in the past, but seldom involved outsourcing of the whole system . ¡§Post-Project Review On Outsourcing Management - The Case Of National Tax.¡¨ is a very good example for the outsourcing of the whole system from the government. In that project, it covered great areas and involved the integration of different groups and units. So, there are many topics worthy of exploring and studying in that project. For the research of the whole system outsourcing, some scholar key in on the successful outcomes, others focus on the project management point of view. The studies from the angle of post-project review process are scarce. The information gathered from the post-project review process are very important, it could serve as reference for government¡¦s future outsourcing projects. Therefore, the subject of this research is focused on the post-project review process. In order to adjust themselves to meet the trend in government projects outsourcing, the companies doing business in the field of Information Technology System Integration in Taiwan are investing heavily, regardless of costs, in offering every possible resources to create the best business opportunities in the future for themselves, and further winning the bid for the outsourcing projects. However, the inexperienced project management in this field and also the lack of prior experience to learn from has created a difficult environment for companies to take on the tasks. While executing the projects, they often act like a rookie on the field or walking on thin ice, one step at a time. Because the lack of precedent to follow, quite often one will encounter unexpected incidents while executing the projects, and this will lead to a huge jump in costs, therefore losing the grip on cost-control mechanism severely. Also in the case of information system outsourcing, the listed products, equipments and services from the vendors can be only considered as references; one must measures the invisible demands from customers on ¡§service satisfaction¡¨. So, one cannot make decision just based on vendors opinions, otherwise, it will just increase the negotiation costs, equipments or miscellaneous expenditures. Using this research as an example, the case involved an outsourcing bid for ¡§Tax information System Outsourcing Plan ¡V National Tax Outsourcing Service¡¨ project from the Bureau of National Tax, Department of Treasury in 1999. The Mitac Inc. won the bid for $1,830,000,000 New Taiwan dollars as a five years integrated outsourcing project. But in the company¡¦s 2001 financial report, they listed a loss of $480,000,000 New Taiwan dollars due to the project. This example made clear that one can no longer compare nowadays outsourcing projects with the old integrated projects. Through the author¡¦s first-hand knowledge of many companies, it was found that due to the complexity of tasks and deadline pressure during the executing of the outsourcing projects, no one could effectively put together in a systematic way of task flowcharts and experiences for future references. The Mitac case is in the finishing stage, so this research is focused on the post-project review, re-examine various task flowcharts, organize and structure them into a systematic way. By doing so, it provides reference information that would benefit corporate managers for their pre-project evaluation in the future. It also provides a track that people can follow when they carry out future outsourcing projects.

Organisations have evidently shifted towards the projectification of their activities and operations across the world and across industries by which project management is not only limited to construction and engineering projects anymore. The projectification has shed light on the amount of project success and failure in which both have been noted to have a steep difference between each other. Whilst many factors have been discovered to be a trigger of failure or success one emerging subject that has been gaining attention across management institutions and organisationsis the integration of knowledge management principlesinto the closure stage of a project, by which the term post-project review awakens. Post-project reviewsreceive a lot of attention and strong suggestion from textbooks and other academic literature, however it was found that its application was not as effective as is suggested by the literature. Literature also indicated that cultural operators within the events management have progressively applied project management tools and techniques. At the same time there is debate concerning theproject management rationale, which collide with the prime principles of art. Here art presents itself as the core focus pointforcultural operators. In the light of this argument the author started researching the subject of Post-project reviews within the events management industryand found that the subject has been scarcely researched overall, in the events management sector and especially in the cultural branch, hence the author had identified a research gap. Consequently, this research intends to explore the application of post-project reviews by cultural operators within the events management industry. The study employed a qualitative research design in which semi-structured interviews were conducted across three different organisational size segments; micro, small and medium. The organisational size was determined with the amount of employees per organisation; each size segment had two representatives in which all of the respondents ran a non-profit organisation.The research revealed that medium organisations employed the most formal manner of a PPR by which PPR’s are considered on a strategic level whilst micro organisations still used a simplerecord and report principle, in which none of the recorded numbers were formally analysed. At the same time, the comprehensiveness of a PPR was very much dependent on the size of the project, which denoted on the amount of funding, and external stakeholders there was involved.

In spite of the benefits of implementing whole life costing technique as a valuable approach for comparing alternative building designs allowing operational cost benefits to be evaluated against any initial cost increases and also as part of procurement in the construction industry, its adoption has been relatively slow due to the lack of tangible evidence, “know-how” skills and knowledge of the practice i.e. the lack of professionals in many establishments with knowledge and training on the use of whole life costing technique, this situation is compounded by the absence of available data on whole life costing from relevant projects, lack of data collection mechanisms and so on. This has proved to be very challenging to those who showed some willingness to employ the technique in a construction project. The knowledge generated from a project can be considered as best practices learned on how to carry out tasks in a more efficient way, or some negative lessons learned which have led to losses and slowed down the progress of the project and performance. Knowledge management in whole life costing practice can enhance whole life costing analysis execution in a construction project, as lessons learned from one project can be carried on to future projects, resulting in continuous improvement, providing knowledge that can be used in the operation and maintenance phases of an assets life span. This study aims to use knowledge management as a tool to address the obstacle of whole life costing outlined in this study by developing a framework for knowledge capture and recovery in whole life costing practice in construction. An extensive literature review was first conducted on the concept of knowledge management and whole life costing. This was followed by a semi-structured interview to explore the existing and good practice knowledge management in whole life costing practice in a construction project. The data gathered from the semi-structured interview was analysed using content analysis and used to develop the framework. From the results obtained in the study, it shows that the practice of project review is the common method used in the capturing of knowledge and should be undertaken in an organised and accurate manner, and results should be presented in the form of instructions or in a checklist format, forming short and precise insights. In order to efficiently and swiftly recover knowledge from previous whole life costing project, the knowledge must be characterised based on whole life costing processes and activities, by means of an IT system with components designed to manage knowledge and locate expertise. However; the framework developed advised that irrespective of how effective the approach to knowledge capture and recovery, the absence of an environment for sharing knowledge, would render the approach ineffective. Open culture and resources are critical for providing a knowledgesharing setting, and leadership has to sustain whole life costing knowledge capture and recovery, giving full support for its implementation. The framework has been evaluated by academics and practitioners who are experts in the area of whole life costing practice. The results have indicated that the framework and its components are both suitable and efficient.

La réalité virtuelle (RV) va révolutionner de nombreux domaines comme le domaine médical, industriel, architectural, etc. C'est devenu un élément important dans la phase de développement d'une solution, notamment dans le domaine architectural. Que ce soit pour la commercialisation ou la revue de projet, la RV permet de faire des visites virtuelles de maisons visualisées à l'échelle réelle en environnement virtuel (EV). Aujourd'hui, l'architecte dispose d'un véritable outil de commercialisation en proposant aux acheteurs potentiels des visites virtuelles de maisons. Lors de ces visites virtuelles, le client peut avoir une idée de la maison. Avec la visualisation à l'échelle 1:1 le client a la possibilité d'explorer la maison et peut ainsi se projeter plus facilement dans la maison pour prendre plus facilement des décisions. L'espoir est que cette visite virtuelle puisse conduire plus rapidement à une signature de précontrat. Par ailleurs, lors du processus de conception, l'architecte peut effectuer une revue de projet en EV avec le client afin de le guider dans ses choix et d'affiner le recueil des besoins. À l'issue de cette revue, ensemble, ils valident le plan de la maison en termes de taille et d'agencement des pièces, de position des fenêtres, etc. Par conséquent, la RV permet un gain de temps et d'argent considérable aux architectes. Les décisions prises en EV sont généralement basées sur la perception des distances et des volumes. Par conséquent, l’efficacité des décisions prises dépend de la capacité des visiteurs à porter un jugement sans biais sur ce qu’ils voient dans l’EV par rapport à l’environnement réel correspondant. Plusieurs études ont montré que l'estimation des distances en EV est différente de l'estimation en environnement réel. De multiples facteurs peuvent être à l'origine de ce problème, comme le dispositif d'affichage, le champ de vision restreint, la qualité graphique, etc. Malgré les différentes études consacrées à cette problématique, les causes de ce phénomène restent diverses et mal identifiées. Notre travail s'inscrit dans le cadre d'un projet architectural : le projet CIMBEES. Ce projet vise à intégrer la RV dans le processus de vente/achat et de conception au travers de la visite virtuelle et de la revue de projet en EV. Notre travail consiste à concevoir et à évaluer l'outil de revue de projet architectural en EV. La phase de conception consiste à proposer un outil de revue de projet permettant la visualisation des maquettes numériques à l'échelle réelle et offrant une interaction qui répond aux besoins des architectes. Au cours de cette phase nous avons développé un outil de revue de projet et nous avons modélisé les maquettes numériques nécessaires à partir de plans réels de maison.Dans la phase d'évaluation de l'outil de revue de projet architectural, nous nous sommes intéressés à la problématique de la perception des distances en EV. L'objectif de cette évaluation est d'identifier et d'étudier les facteurs les plus importants pour l'outil afin de proposer des paramètres adaptés à notre contexte applicatif (les visites virtuelles). Pour ce faire, nous avons effectué une étude expérimentale qui porte sur l'étude de l'influence de trois facteurs sur la perception des distances : 1) le profil cognitif des utilisateurs, 2) le contexte environnemental et 3) la vitesse de navigation [...] / Virtual reality (VR) will revolutionize many fields such as medicine, industry, architecture, etc. It has become an important element in the development of a solution, particularly in the architectural field. Whether for marketing or project review, VR allows virtual visits of homes in virtual environment (VE) at real scale. Today, the architect has a real marketing tool by providing to potential customer virtual visits of homes. During these virtual visits, the customer can get an idea of the house. With the visualization at scale 1: 1, the customer has the opportunity to explore the house and he can easier project himself into the house to take decisions more easily. The hope is that, this virtual visit would more quickly lead to a signing agreement.Furthermore, during the design process, the architect can make a project review in VE with customer to guide his choices and refine the collection of needs. Following this review, together, they validate the plan of the house in terms of size and layout of rooms, window position, etc. Therefore, the VR allows considerable time and money saving for architects. Decisions taken in VE are generally based on the perception of distances and volumes. Therefore, the effectiveness of the decisions depends on the ability of customers to make judgments about what they see in the VE similar to the judgments they would have made in the corresponding real environment. Several studies have shown that the estimation of distances in VE is different from the estimation in real environment. Several factors can be the source of this problem such as the display device, the limited field of view, graphical quality, etc. Despite these studies, factors that cause this phenomenon remain unclear, and diverse. Our work is part of an architectural project: CIMBEES project. This project aims to integrate VR in the process of selling / buying and of the design through virtual visits and project review in VE. Our work is to design and evaluate architectural project review tool. The design stage is to suggest a project review tool for the visualization of digital mockups at real scale in VE and providing interaction that meets the needs of architects. During this stage we developed a project review tool and we modeled necessary digital mockups from real house plans. In the evaluation stage of the architectural project review tool, we were interested at the problem of the perception of distances in VE. The aim of this evaluation is to identify and to study the most important factors for the tool, to propose suitable parameters for our application context (virtual visits). To do this, we conducted an experimental study that focuses on the study of the influence of three factors on the perception of distances: 1) the cognitive profile of users, 2) the environmental context and 3) the speed of navigation. [...]

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