Research into nuclear weapons programmes leads to new project management tool

A tool that was initially devised to help prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons could help people to manage their projects more effectively.

Researchers from Imperial College Business School, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Massachusetts Institute of Technology were originally modelling how it might be possible to derail a nuclear weapons programme using limited resources. They did this by using game theory to explore what weak spot in the nuclear weapons ‘project’ someone could target in order to stop the programme being a success.

The result of the research is an algorithm that can tell someone which tasks are most likely to derail a project if they are disrupted. In addition to its potential applications in preventing nuclear weapon proliferation, the researchers believe the algorithm also has significant implications for business.

The researchers believe the tool allows for better contingency planning, and more robust project planning. Large projects are often hugely complex and expensive. If something goes wrong with a project task, the knock-on effects can be costly. The tool could be used for risk assessment, identifying those project tasks with the potential to cause the most delays to a project. Project managers could then focus resources on careful management of those tasks and even arrange special insurance for them. The work is detailed in a study in the journal Management Science.

Dr Wolfram Wiesemann from the KPMG Centre for Advanced Business Analytics at Imperial College Business School, one of the authors of the research, said: “Traditional project management is about breaking down a project into various tasks and keeping track of them to ensure that everything is done as quickly as possible. Looking at military approaches to projects has provided us with a fresh way of looking at how to keep things running smoothly. Our tool allows people to figure out potential problems before they happen and to work out which tasks are likely to cause the most damage to a project if they go wrong. There are many changeable variables involved, so we have devised a tool that can cope with the complexities of large projects and with different elements changing as a project evolves.”      

To devise their solution, the researchers deconstructed the concept of a project. A project can be described mathematically by its different tasks, and these tasks must satisfy "precedence relations" – some elements must be completed before others are started.

Projects can be represented visually using a project evaluation and review technique network. The tasks become nodes, and arrows connect the nodes indicating the order of task completion. Each task has a duration – the time it takes to complete – although these are uncertain. To complete the task as quickly as possible someone must start each task as soon as any required predecessor task is completed.

Next, the researchers considered the position of the interdictor, someone who wants to stop or delay the project. They might achieve this through a variety of means including economic sanctions, embargoes on key materials, or even more niche interventions such as the proliferation of a computer virus, for example.

Whatever method is chosen, the interdictor has limited resources, the interdiction budget, to use when trying to delay project tasks. Intuition suggests that it's best to focus resources on tasks performed in series rather than in parallel. However, there is still the considerable challenge of deciding the best tasks to act on in order to inflict maximum project delay overall.

The team used game theory to model the problem and its solution. Crucially, they modelled for uncertainty around the task durations. Indeed, if someone was to assign nominal durations to the tasks, that would fail to capture the way that changing task durations cause accumulations of delays which cascade through the project. This would lead to an underestimation of the total project completion time.

The team also considered the problem in a static and dynamic context. In the static context, the interdictor decides which tasks to delay at the start, and then the project runs with the interdictor sticking to their original decision.

In the dynamic context the interdictor can wait to see how things develop before deciding which tasks to delay. This gives the interdictor an advantage as it allows them to identify which tasks are taking longer and delay those. Mathematically this is more of a challenge to model, as it means accounting for many more possible outcomes when deciding on an optimal course of action for the interdictor. The algorithm was tested on projects with more than 100 tasks; the number of different states was in the order of 200,000 plus.

After feeding in the required information – which tasks are currently active, completed, and still to be completed, plus the resources available to disrupt these – the algorithm tells the user the optimal decision in terms of the tasks someone should try to delay, at any given moment. This provides valuable insights as it focuses attention to those tasks that are most critical for a timely project completion.