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Can We Use Wisdom‐of‐the‐Crowd to Assess Risk of Systems Engineering Failures?
Author(s) -
Georgalis Georgios,
Marais Karen
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
incose international symposium
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2334-5837
DOI - 10.1002/j.2334-5837.2019.00624.x
Subject(s) - schedule , computer science , complement (music) , risk analysis (engineering) , risk assessment , project management , budget constraint , reliability engineering , operations research , engineering , systems engineering , computer security , business , economics , biochemistry , chemistry , complementation , gene , phenotype , operating system , neoclassical economics
Despite advances in project risk assessment methods, systems engineering failures like cost overruns, schedule slips, and failure to meet technical requirements continue to occur with high frequency. Wisdom‐of‐the‐Crowd (WoC) signals from inside the project team can complement expert management experience for risk assessment and help reduce such failures. We consider three metrics of project risk: budget, schedule and technical performance and evaluate whether WoC can provide correct estimates of these three metrics. We present a crowd‐based method to collect qualitative estimates of project metrics from engineering student teams and predict the probability that these estimates are correct. We investigate whether a team‐centered WoC approach provides better estimates than an individual‐centered case. We conclude that the WoC approach provides on average more accurate budget estimates than the individual‐centered approach. For estimating project schedule and technical performance, the WoC approach performs better when the estimate comes from individuals with high confidence.