Managing Complexities in Railway Infrastructure Development Projects - Engineering Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Task
Railway infrastructure development projects provide the key impetus that drives South African economic growth through providing opportunities for job creation and delivering better freight transportation services. However, the country's endeavor to continuously improve its railway infrastructure did not progress unchallenged due to complexities. This phenomenon has become a problem that is resistive for the economy to persist in the positive trajectory. The traditional project management approaches have proved to be inadequate in terms of managing the complexities inherent in railway infrastructure development projects. The consistent deviations of costs and schedule overruns in these projects attest to the existing defects in project management approaches. 

This study is focused on establishing effective means in which the soft and hard systems approaches could be tailored and complementarily applied to address the complexities inherent in railway infrastructure development projects at The Company (South Africa's largest railway operator). In the context of The Company, it has been evident that the railway infrastructure development projects are susceptible to various complexities (social and technical). The lack of effective management of technical-related complexities and social systems, in particular, has become a persisting challenge that compromised numerous projects at The Company. This study proposes a hybrid soft and hard systems approach to managing the complexities that emanate from various social structures and technical-related activities within the railway infrastructure development projects. The soft and hard systems approaches are two extremes of SE. Previous studies have indicated that SE has been successfully applied in high-tech industries such as telecommunication, aerospace, weaponry systems, etc. but no clear evidence on the railway system.

This study used a case study research approach conducted within the premises of The Company. The findings in this study are based on the literature review and the interviews analyzed through qualitative analysis. The interviewees included eight experts (employees) of railway infrastructure development projects from The Company. The aim was to get inputs based on experience concerning the current system's complexities, the approaches currently applied to manage the complexities, and how soft and hard systems approaches can be applied to effectively manage the complexities. It is found that the complexities in railway infrastructure projects emanate from project structures, functions, means, and human dimensions and that many projects fail due to mismanagement of the complexities. Furthermore, it was discovered that the current project management approaches applied to manage the complexities deliberately ignored the human dimension which is one of the important factors that need to be considered early. Therefore, this study proposed the use of a hybrid soft and hard systems approach to analyze the system holistically and address the complexities inherent in railway infrastructure development projects.  

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