Project resilience as network robustness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new network-based method to assess project resilience by evaluating the impact of key personnel loss, addressing limitations of existing approaches.

Contribution

It presents a novel, more accurate method for estimating project vulnerability to personnel loss using network robustness analysis.

Findings

The new method provides more consistent resilience estimates.

It outperforms existing methods in accuracy.

It captures project fragmentation effects better.

Abstract

Engineering projects are the result of the combined effort of their members. Yet, it has been documented that labor division withing projects is unevenly distributed: some project members are specialists undertaking only few tasks, whereas other are generalists and are responsible for the success of many tasks. Moreover, the latter are often facilitators of project integration. Such a workload distribution prompts one question: how resilient is a project to key personnel loss? Far from being a theoretical problem, the reliance of a project on a few key people can lead to severe economic losses and delays. We argue that current methods to estimate such a risk are unsatisfactory: some methods offer a best-case estimate and are, therefore, too optimistic; other methods fail to capture project fragmentation leading to biased estimates and unrealistic consequences in many settings. In this paper, we develop a novel method to assess project vulnerability by looking at it from the lens of network robustness. We compare our method against existing alternatives and show that it offers better and more consistent estimates of project resilience to personnel loss.