Centro de Informática

When making judgments, people rely on heuristics, or general rules of thumb. In other words, they use mental "shortcuts", which may lead to rational solutions and good estimates. In certain situations, however, these simplification techniques can cause inconsistencies and promote cognitive biases. One root cause of almost all project failures is human error or misjudgment. Although the ability to make right decisions is considered a main indicator of project management professionalism, many project managers are unwilling to try to improve the quality of their decisions. Because project managers rarely have enough time and resources to perform a proper analysis, and a decision analysis expert is not always available, there is always the temptation to make intuitive decisions. Even having enough knowledge of a particular area, some natural limitations to thinking mechanisms can lead to potentially harmful choices. Since people tend to rate themselves as above average when asked to characterize their abilities, they tend not to see their own biases. This paper proposes to shed light on the susceptibility of project managers to cognitive biases and how they deal with them, including techniques and tools they use to minimize their negative effects. This study evaluates ten cognitive biases: anchoring bias, exposure effect, pseudocertainty effect, certainty effect, hindsight bias, halo effect, planning fallacy, sunk-cost fallacy, availability-related bias, and Parkinson´s law effect. The qualitative approach was based on semi-structured interviews with seven experienced project managers in a Brazilian large public sector IT organization. Other three project managers participated in the triangulation process in order to validate the concepts map resulted from this process. All project managers recognized susceptibility in eight of ten cognitive biases. Some agile practices such as use of burndown chart for daily monitoring of planned versus accomplished activities and bottom-up planning from short activities were suggested as alternatives to minimize planning fallacy. The last technique was also indicated to minimize Parkinson´s law effects along with daily team meetings. Opinion of others, including experts, was the most mentioned alternative method by project managers, aiming to reduce the negative impact of seven biases. Although its limitations, we believe that this work may help to improve project managers' awareness of cognitive biases and also their susceptibility to these systematic errors, eliciting common tools and techniques used to minimize their negative effects, which can lead to better decisions, and thus, to better project´s outcomes.

Much of the work developed in organizations occurs as projects and this tendency is crescent. The Project Management Office (PMO) is an organizational entity with responsibilities related to the centralization and coordination of projects under its domain. In fact, PMOs can fill many different roles or functions in different organizations. In this way, it is not possible to state that PMOs filling specific functions are better than others, more general and preemptive. The decision about which functions a PMO might fill in a specific context will most likely be influenced by this context. However, since too many organizations tend to repeat the same mistakes too often and also reinvent the wheel, knowledge management seems to be an important integrative function with impacts on organizational learning and consequentially on project performance. As project managers tend to give lower priority to everything that does not directly contribute to their project, if this knowledge management is not well done and adopted, it will simply be ignored. In this way, this conceptual paper aims to answer how PMOs manage project’s knowledge. Through a systematic review-based approach in three search engines: ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Wiley, we obtained a classification divided into four themes: communities of practice, knowledge brokering, lessons learned and project performance, which were then synthesized. The cyclic work composed by the first three themes tends to increase project performance and thus strengthening and legitimizing the PMO presence in an organization. Lessons learned refinement and storage in an accessible and readable way seem to be the strong one to be emphasized by PMOs. As the majority of studies were based on qualitative investigations sustained by interviews, observations and focus groups, it is necessary a major number of empirical studies about how PMOs can better facilitate the groups and how tacit knowledge can be better codified to be used in future cases.

No âmbito da Engenharia de Software, a produtividade é determinada pela interação de muitos fatores, de modo que nenhum fator em especial é capaz de garantir o alto desempenho em um projeto de software. Apesar disso, ela é medida de forma única, através da divisão entre a quantidade produzida pelo esforço necessário. Portanto, torna-se necessária uma forma de medição da real produtividade de um projeto de software que reflita as circunstâncias nas quais o software foi desenvolvido. Dessa forma, este artigo propõe um modelo de avaliação da produtividade de projetos de software através de uma abordagem multicritério.

The task of reusing Web services that meet quality attributes requirements is a challenging issue in service-based development approach. In such a context, a quality model can provide the means to effectively evaluation of services, enabling the certification of these services. In this sense, this paper proposes a quality model based on the ISO 9126 standard, defining a set of attributes and metrics for an effective evaluation of Web services. A XML-based representation and security schema for the model was created to support a service certification process. Moreover, a preliminary case study was elaborate in order to verify the gap between the proposed model and the available information by the Web services providers.

The world is experiencing a knowledge-based economy with a revolution in information technology, innovation, and telecommunications. The rise of the "new economy", driven by information and knowledge, has led to an increased
interest in intellectual capital theory, which aims to manage intangible assets of organizations. Firms belonging to technology and knowledge-based industries recognize intellectual capital as the key knowledge base that contributes to the creation of a competitive advantage for the firm. This paper aims to answer the question "How are Intellectual Capital (IC) and Information Technology (IT) related?" through a systematic review based on four steps: 1) search conduction; 2) selection of papers based on their titles and abstracts; 3) content analysis of selected papers; 4) evidence mapping and discussions. The analyzed papers were categorized into five themes: "Statistical analysis or case study in IT companies from the Intellectual Capital perspective"; "IT as a tool for Intellectual Capital Management"; "Intellectual Capital or technology knowledge assets influencing innovation and development", "Intellectual Capital assets to evaluate a technology" and "Intellectual Capital theory as a way to understand and share knowledge in IT projects". Our findings evidenced that the Human Capital was the main dimension studied by the authors, followed by Structural Capital and Relational Capital. We believe that this work may help to clarify on Intellectual Capital Management procedures into Information Technology projects, thus opening new topics for future research.

Ao fazer julgamentos, as pessoas confiam em heurísticas ou "atalhos" mentais que podem levar a boas soluções. Em determinadas situações, no entanto, essas técnicas de simplificação podem causar inconsistências e promover vieses
cognitivos. Em se tratando de iniciativas de melhoria de processos de software, é importante que as práticas, técnicas, métodos e ferramentas sugeridos no processo ofereçam mecanismos para apoiar a tomada de decisão, minimizando os efeitos negativos de tais vieses. Este artigo se propõe, apoiado em uma metodologia qualitativa aplicada em duas empresas de TI no Brasil e em Portugal, a analisar oito vieses, a saber: ancoragem, efeito da mera exposição, viés retrospectivo, efeito halo, falácia do planejamento, falácia do custo afundado, viés da disponibilidade, e efeito da lei de Parkinson. Através de entrevistas semi-estruturadas com gerentes de projeto (GPs), foram identificadas causas raízes para cada viés, assim como métodos e ferramentas utilizados para minimizar seus efeitos negativos, os quais foram consolidados em um mapa de conceitos. Práticas ágeis e atividades de gestão do conhecimento foram citados como essenciais em processos de software tendo em vista à tomada de melhores decisões.

De modo a desempenhar suas atividades, os gerentes de projeto de software se veem muitas vezes diante de situações conflitantes envolvendo questões de médio e grande risco, cujas decisões, caso mal tomadas, podem atrasar o cronograma do projeto, levando-o muitas vezes ao fracasso. Por ser algo tão cotidiano, supõe-se que a tomada de uma decisão seja algo totalmente compreendido e conhecido. No entanto, o que se observa é uma ausência, na prática, de metodologia para orientar o processo de decisão em projetos de software. Nesse sentido, o objetivo deste artigo é propor, em uma perspectiva sociotécnica, a utilização da Metodologia de Conferências de Decisão para complementar os processos técnicos definidos no Guia PMBOK® com ênfase em processos de facilitação de grupo e técnicas de tomada de decisão.