Criticality and propagation analysis of impacts between project deliverables

The implementation of a management by deliverables and deadlines is based on detailed planning and strict control of deliverables. It is a strategic decision that reports to the project manager and a key element to the success of complex projects. Based on the modeling of the project elements and their interactions using weighted directed graphs, this article presents some contributions to anticipate potential behavior of the project. Topological and propagation analyses are made to detect and prioritize critical elements and critical interdependencies while enlarging the sense of the polysemous word “critical.” We recommend a set of topological indicators suitable for project elements and interactions, which mainly allow us to discuss “How the impact of a project element affects other elements within the network? What is the collective influence of this element?”. These indicators permit to prioritize project elements and their interactions by detecting the most influential ones taking into account the network structure. For instance, they permit to evaluate the collective criticality of project deliverables and to re-evaluate the priority of the risks associated with these deliverables by coupling the traditional features of individual risks with the topological indicators of the deliverables. Furthermore, some algorithms are applied to extract and visualize the propagation path between two elements within the network. For example, this allows to provide a vision of potential impact propagation between two project deliverables, either they are associated with two milestones or are critical. An application to automotive industry illustrates the benefits of the approach, and some perspectives are drawn for further work.