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The general purpose of this paper is to give Sapolsky's classical study of the Polaris Project, written in 1972, the credits it actually earns. In addition, there are two more specific aims: to discuss the role and usage of project management techniques, such as PERT (programme evaluation and review technique), in the practices of project execution; and to display the power of thorough empirical case studies in order to deepen our understanding of the realities of project execution.

The paper constitutes a detailed review of the content and contributions of the book The Polaris Systems Development written by Harvey M. Sapolsky in 1972. The paper presents the main ideas of the book and discusses its implications for contemporary project management research.

Sapolsky's work, The Polaris Systems Development, is an important account of some of the most significant courses of events in the birth and formation of project management, especially the creation of PERT as a technique for project coordination. However, by going beyond the rhetorical surface of the project management, Sapolsky shows that PERT never played the role in Polaris that it is generally claimed to have had. The paper puts these findings in context and discusses why this has been ignored in project management research so far.

Scholars focusing on project management research need to distance themselves from its historical tight bounds to project management textbooks and administrative project management techniques. There is a strong need for a broader empirical basis and pluralism in theoretical perspectives in the study of the realities of project execution.

The paper recapitulates a classic account of the formative period of project management, which so far has generally been ignored in project management research. In addition, it discusses three functions of project planning techniques: boundary objects for coordination, political features for legitimacy and trust building, and cognitive means for the social construction of a predicable future.

ELEVEN YEARS have passed, we were reminded at the Hague Congress last month, since a handful of people met a few kilometres away and agreed to bring together all concerned with work study through the medium of a European Federation. The tenth assembly of that body gave at least one member of that original group an opportunity to consider the present position.

Accident emergency hospital (AEH) services require cohesive, collective, uninterrupted streamlined medical diagnostic and satisfactory patient care. Medical service efficiency in AEHs is difficult to quantify due to the clinical complexity involved in treatment involving various units, patient conditions, changes in contemporary medical practices and technological developments. This paper aims to show how to measure efficiency by eliminating waste in AEH system, identify service failure points, identify benchmark medical services, identify patient throughput time and measure treatment time when AEH services are nonstandard. The applications shown in this paper are distinct in particular; we the authors use nontraditional and systems engineering approach to collect data as the traditional data collection is difficult in real-time AEHs.

The authors show in this study how to measure overall patient treatment time from admission to discharge. Project evaluation and review technique (PERT) captures the inconsistencies involved in measuring treatment time, including measures of variability. The irregular treatment time and complexity involved in the emergency health-care services are usual. The research methodology illustrates how the time function map and service blueprint can improve value-added time in AEHs and benchmark services between similar AEHs.

The inconsistency in treatment time between AEH in public and private hospital is found to be in ratio of 1:20. The private hospital suggests variety of treatments and long stays for recovery. The PERT computations show that the average time a patient remains in a government AEH is about 10 days. The standard deviation of the AEH treatment time is about 0.043 per cent of the expected patient care time. The inconsistency is not significant as compared to the expected value. In 89.64 per cent of the cases, a patient may be discharged in less than 10 days’ time. The patient on average is discharged in 13 days in a private hospital.

The patient treatment time of an AEH is evaluated with PERT project management approach to account for inconsistencies in treatment time. This research makes new contributions in benchmarking AEH throughput time, identify medical service failure points with service blueprint, measure the efficiency with time function map and collect patient data with nontraditional methods. The inherent inconsistencies in a clinical process are identified by PERT analysis with the variance as a characteristic of the treatment time. Improvement of variability implies cost reduction in AEH system.

Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) is a form of network planning developed by the US Navy, to improve and maintain the efficiency of arms production during the Second World War. It has since been adapted for the planning and control of all kinds of projects in all sections of industry, commerce, and public service.

The aftermath of the Enron collapse included Congressional legislation known as the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act (SOX), which was rushed into law on July 29, 2002, by President Bush. This legislation, aimed at restoring confidence in the financial markets, addresses many aspects of corporate governance. This article addresses the audit committee provisions of SOX, particularly the requirements for independent membership and financial expertise. The article outlines the legislative requirements and then discusses the possible effects of this ‘patch‐up’. Is it too little too late and how long will the patch last?

Marketing planning is a key area of marketing management. Planning activities have become extremely complex and demand systematic and effective techniques which can help to optimize the efficiency of executing such activities. Efficiency amounts to bringing about the greatest reductions in time to complete the scheduled activities while taking into account the economic feasibility of using available resources. Argues that planning, scheduling and control can be enhanced greatly with the use of project evaluation and review technique (PERT). Claims that it helps to monitor and organize resources to enable activities to be completed on time and within budget limits. Describes Time Line for Windows, a PERT package which is designed specifically for the end‐user and which can be run on a desktop computer to facilitate the marketing planning process.

Reports on how the Royal Australian Air Force maintains its military Orion aircraft. States that a typical service consists of five stages: preparation, inspection, rectification, rebuild, and testing. Maintains that for a service to be completed efficiently all service personnel involved in these distinct processes have to be monitored carefully for everything to run smoothly, owing to time constraints involved. Posits that the air force uses total quality management procedures to do this, as well as mapping out and measuring the process. States that measurement was done using Micro Planner X‐Pert, a computer software package. Concludes that this has helped to reduce servicing man hours.

The merchandising process of a large buying office in Hong Kong was studied using a network analyses tool, programme evaluation and review technique (PERT). Quantitative and qualitative data were both obtained by in‐depth interviews with key people in the company. The delivery lead time, which was the cycle time from the receipt of an order by the buying office to the point where the garment lot was ready for shipment at the manufacturer’s factory, was determined quantitatively, and probabilities of late shipments analysed. For bulk orders of woven garments, the activity time of fabric manufacture and garment manufacture was found to account for about half and one‐third, respectively, of the total delivery lead time (about 69 days). Also the PERT was shown to help identify critical activities which were redundant and thereafter, through process re‐engineering, could shorten the delivery lead time and reduce the work load of the merchandiser.

The application of advanced methods of process management is essential, especially in those fields in which activity durations can be determined only vaguely, while at the same time a highly competitive market enforces strict completion schedules through the implementation of penalties. The technique presented is most suitable for determining a time‐cost trade‐off based on practice‐relevant assumptions. Completion time overruns usually cause penalties whose size depends on the degree of the overruns. To avoid such penalties – or at least to keep any losses low – distinct processes may be crashed by one or several measures that decrease the activity duration. The risk of an overrun has to be weighed against the expected costs and benefits of certain crashing measures and their combinations. The technique presented is a new PERT‐based, hybridised approach using simulated annealing and importance sampling to support typical process re‐engineering, which focuses on the efficient allocation of extra resources in order to achieve a more reliable performance without changing the precedence‐successor‐structure.