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The purpose of this paper is to identify best practices from high‐technology industries that face many of the same challenges around uncertainty, complexity, and risk that are faced by the pharmaceutical industry.

This research has conducted an extensive review of risk management literature and research conducted in high‐technology industries to collect some of the key best practices for high‐risk research projects.

A literature review of recent risk management publications from three high‐technology industries yielded 13 best practices in project risk management that could potentially be applied to pharmaceutical R&D projects to improve managing risks and uncertainties of managing projects. By reviewing these lessons learned from industries that share many of the challenges of the pharmaceutical R&D projects, it is suggested that the implementation of risk management in the context of drug development projects will require adaptation to the specific needs and challenges of those projects.

Implementing a risk management process is very challenging for pharmaceutical R&D projects, as there are high degrees of complexity, uncertainty, and large amounts of resources at stake. Many of the techniques could be applied to all stages of drug development, but some are clearly most applicable to particular stages. Some will work for small, medium and large pharmaceuticals, though the way they are implemented should be modified to meet the needs and resources of the particular company.

This study will serve as a basis for exploration and discussion that will result in controlled application and experimentation with these approaches, and this in turn could lead to real improvements in the use of risk management in pharmaceutical companies.

An exploration of the methods they have employed to address risk in R&D projects, as well as the outcomes of the application of those methods, should reveal tools, techniques, processes, training, and approaches that can be effectively applied to pharmaceutical development projects, and support the value of spending resources to employ risk management practices.

The purpose of this paper is to propose Knowledge4Scrum, a novel knowledge management tool for agile distributed teams. Agile software development (ASD) refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. The two most widely used methodologies based on the agile philosophy are scrum and extreme programming. Whichever methodology is considered, agile teams usually consist of few members and are collocated under the same roof. However, nowadays, agile practices for distributed development are gaining much momentum. The main reasons behind such practice are cheaper skilled labour, minimizing production cost, reducing time to market and increasing the quality and performance of projects. Along with the benefits obtained through globally distributed development, there are, however, many difficulties faced by various organisations. These problems are caused mostly due to distance, time and cultural differences. To meet up with the level of complexity of projects, ASD also has to keep up with many challenges, especially in cases of distributed teams. Four major challenges have been identified. First, the introduction of global software development entails a number of difficulties, especially related to knowledge sharing. For instance, lack of transparency is frequently observed within such teams, whereby a team member is totally unaware of the activities of his/her colleagues. Second, the unavailability of team members due to time zone differences adds up to the list of problems confronted by distributed teams. Third, there can be misunderstanding amongst the team member due to communication problems, especially in cases where the mother language of the team members is different. Fourth, a common issue faced by distributed teams is the loss of knowledge when an employee resigns from his/her post.

Based on the main problems outlined above, what has been proposed is Knowledge4Scrum, a novel knowledge management tool for agile distributed teams. Knowledge4Scrum will act as a global repository for knowledge sharing in Scrum distributed teams with the possibility of creating new knowledge through data mining techniques. Valid past projects data have been collected to train and test the data mining models. The research also investigates the suitability of knowledge management in Scrum distributed teams to address the various challenges addressed above.

Knowledge4Scrum supports the four knowledge management processes, namely, knowledge creation/acquisition, knowledge storage, knowledge dissemination and knowledge application. It has been found that the aforementioned tool satisfactorily addressed issues of distance, time and cultural differences that crop-up in distributed development teams. Data mining has been the main aspect for the knowledge creation and application processes, whereby new knowledge has been determined by examining and extracting patterns from existing data found in the repository.

A major feature of the Knowledge4Scrum tool lies in the knowledge creation and application section, where a number of data mining techniques have been utilised to identify trends and patterns in past data collected. When compared to the COnstructive COst MOdel to estimate project duration, Knowledge4Scrum gives more than satisfactory results. Such functionalities will actually help managers for future project planning and in decision-making.

Although extant theory has illuminated conditions under which organizations mimic each other in form and practice, little research examines how organizations seek to differentiate themselves from conventional forms. Our comparative ethnographic studies examine how the Burning Man and Open Source communities developed organizations to help coordinate the production of an annual temporary arts event and nonproprietary, freely distributed software. Both communities sought to differentiate their organizations from reference groups, but this was not a sufficient condition for sustaining organizational novelty. We found that the ability to pursue a differentiated strategy was moderated by environmental conditions. By exploring the organizing decisions that each community made at two critical boundaries: one defining individuals’ relationship with the organization; the second defining the organization's relationship with the market, we show how organizing practices were recombined from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors in unexpected, novel ways. This comparative research contributes a grounded theoretical explanation of organizational innovation that adjudicates between differentiation and environmental conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of interpersonal trust, team leader support, rewards, and knowledge sharing mechanisms on voluntary knowledge sharing in software development project teams in Sri Lanka.

Survey methodology was used and 150 software developers who were directly involved in developing and maintaining a software product from project teams responded. Regression analysis was used for data analysis.

Interpersonal trust and rewards have significant positive effects on knowledge sharing. Although it was anticipated that the team leader support would be a significant predictor of knowledge sharing, the results did not provide evidence for a positive and significant relationship. “Work‐group communications” and “Personal interactions” had significant positive effects on knowledge sharing.

It is expected that the findings of this study will provide useful information to better understand the predictors of the extent of knowledge sharing at the individual level in the context of project teams. By doing so, this exploratory study will be able to establish baseline data and would be a source of general guidance in stimulating future research in this area.

Examines management development requirements in small companies within the software industry, and suggests that firms′ effectiveness in this sector in the long term requires the presence of a significant proportion of managers who can demonstrate both managerial and technical expertise. Based on the findings from a study of training practices and management development needs within 24 software firms in Northern Ireland. The training needs identified are the building blocks which are being used to design a suite of post‐experience courses for middle managers in the software sector in Northern Ireland. It is hoped that the framework adopted will be useful to other training providers who are considering training provision on a sectorial basis.

The flexibility of an automated manufacturing system (AMS) is largely determined by the architecture of its supervisory software. The AMS supervisory software should be compatible enough to allow re‐configuration, maintenance, and upgrading to be done at a reasonable cost, so as to prolong the life span of the AMS, and to maintain its value and success. In this connection, the application of software engineering methodologies is to introduce better management of AMS software development, with a view to providing some structure and formality to express, analyse, and produce them. This paper presents an object‐oriented methodology to address the task of AMS supervisory software development. The effectiveness of the methodology is examined in an extensive case study of the development of the supervisory software for a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) that contains a robot and an AGV.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how knowledge takes effect in different software development methodologies by relating them to different knowledge cycles.

The results were find by conducing a general review about the topics of knowledge cycles and software development methodologies.

All software development methodologies have knowledge cycles. In Waterfall methodology, the cycle followed is I-Space. For “code and fix,” there is a parallel with March’s cycle. Scrum shows a parallel with SECI cycle. Among the methodological options, results show there an increase in hierarchy, documentation, processes and explicit knowledge.

Identified parallels of each methodology with knowledge cycles; established which Scrum artifacts are performed at each stage of SECI, which Waterfall steps correspond to I-Space phases and which activities in “code and fix” deal with exploration and exploitation of knowledge; and features shown increase or decrease according to the adoption of each methodology.

Results help knowledge sharing implementations and foster inter-team knowledge sharing, with the identification of the correct methodology-cycle match and the personalization of the strategy for each team based on the adopted methodology. Training for knowledge initiatives can be improved by determining how knowledge-sharing activities are incorporated on the determined series of actions established by the methodologies adopted on the firm.

The identification of how knowledge is generated and shared among teams in each methodology, the optimum pairing of the methodology and the parallels with the other, and the differences that emerge from the adopted knowledge cycle show that software projects are embedded in a knowledge cycle.

In the wake of growing pressures to make scholarly knowledge commercially relevant via translation into intellectual property, various techno-scientific communities have mobilized to create open access/open source experiments. These efforts are based on the ideas and success of free and open source software, and generally try to exploit two salient features: increased openness and circulation, and distributed collective innovation. Transferring these ideas from software to science often involves unforeseen challenges, one of which is that these movements can be deemed, often incorrectly, as heretical by university administrators and technology transfer officers who valorize metrics such as number of patents filed and granted, spin-off companies created, and revenue generated. In this paper, we discuss nascent efforts to foster an open source movement in nanotechnology and provide an illustrative case of an arsenic removal invention. We discuss challenges facing the open source nano movement that include making a technology widely accessible and the associated politics of metrics.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze risk profiles of projects based on project characteristics and provide key managerial insights.

A total of 37 project cases from engineering and construction (E&C), information system/technology (IS/IT), and new product development (NPD) sectors with detailed information on project characteristics and risks were identified from published literature. An integrated framework was developed to analyze the prominent risk categories associated with novelty, technology, complexity, and pace (NTCP) project characteristics.

Within-sector analysis revealed that schedule, resource, and scope risks are the most prominent risk categories in E&C, IS/IT, and NPD projects, respectively. Similarly, interesting key insights have been drawn from detailed cross-sector analysis, depicting different risk categories based on NTCP project characteristics.

The findings are based on the case studies adopted from the literature that provides details of project characteristics and risk profiles.

Depending upon the risks associated with different project characteristics, an integrated framework developed in the study can be used for the development of highly authentic risk management plans at the onset.

This is one of the earliest studies to provide an integrated risk framework for projects based on their NTCP characteristics. The two contrasting perspectives of within-sector and cross-sector analyses were adopted. Overall, the study will enhance the future preparedness toward risks.