In recent years, projects are subject to urgent operational requirements which dictate extremely short timetables, allowing no compromise on performance. "Iron Dome" is an example of such a project. Other projects are only activated following proof of concept by demonstrations. These challenging timetable requirements and the will to provide a solution to cover all needs and expectations of the stakeholders requires focused, tailor-made training for lean project management which encourages and dictates use of lean methodologies (i.e. Agile). The implications of these strictly short timetable requirements is a need for short iterations enabling speedy, cost effective development (Abrahamsson et al., 2002). This trend necessitates development of methodologies and training materials that supports a focused and appropriate training process, whose goal is to improve the decision making ability, to train for lean management and to improve project outcomes in terms of time, performance, cost, and stakeholders' approval.
Project managers face complex decisions on a daily basis. Many of these decisions have a direct impact on project success, in particular, on the so called "project triangle": project schedule, project budget, and quality and system performance level.
This study makes use of the PTB (Project Team Builder) simulator. An innovative and unique tool designed for training/teaching as well as a decision support system for project managers and their teams. The PTB simulator includes a system engineering module for supporting the process of choosing between various alternatives and determining system performance level. Thus, it can be used by both project managers and system engineers. The simulator provides an interactive possibility to experience the process of making decisions at the system design stage, and to cope with project management issues that stems from these decisions.
In order to test whether use of the PTB simulator actually creates shared understanding and serves as a decisions-supporting system for project managers and system engineers, experiments were conducted based on real projects scenarios that took place in the defense industry. The participants were divided into teams. Each team included: a Project Manager, a System Engineer and a QA Engineer.
The target was to optimize system performance and costs (cost benefit analysis). The simulation results correspond to performance, schedule, and cost - as well as the tradeoffs between them. There are well-known tradeoffs amongst these parameters, tradeoffs which were manifested in the results of the experiment.
The participants who were interested in providing a fully compliant system did actually achieve this goal in the simulation. However, the price paid for performance improvement was a higher cost.
Our study shows that investing time in analysis and in alternative planning as well as in planning future steps contributes substantially to the end result.
We tested the creation of shared understanding among team members as a result of using the simulator. current testing is focusing on the PTB contribution to software development teams in two different Israeli industries. According to the preliminary results Participants in our tests felt that the tool enhance their performance and the project'sresults.
