BackgroundModern health care focuses on shared decision making (SDM) because of its positive effects on patient satisfaction, therapy compliance, and outcomes. Patients’ knowledge about their illness and available treatment options, gained through medical education, is one of the key drivers for SDM. Current patient education relies heavily on medical consultation and is known to be ineffective.ObjectiveThis study aimed to determine whether providing patients with information in a subdivided, categorized, and interactive manner via an educational app for smartphone or tablet might increase the knowledge of their illness.MethodsA surgeon-blinded randomized controlled trial was conducted with 213 patients who were referred to 1 of the 6 Dutch hospitals by their general practitioner owing to knee complaints that were indicative of knee osteoarthritis. An interactive app that, in addition to standard care, actively sends informative and pertinent content to patients about their illness on a daily basis by means of push notifications in the week before their consultation. The primary outcome was the level of perceived and actual knowledge that patients had about their knee complaints and the relevant treatment options after the intervention.ResultsIn total, 122 patients were enrolled in the control group and 91 in the intervention group. After the intervention, the level of actual knowledge (measured on a 0-36 scale) was 52% higher in the app group (26.4 vs 17.4, P<.001). Moreover, within the app group, the level of perceived knowledge (measured on a 0-25 scale) increased by 22% during the week within the app group (from 13.5 to 16.5, P<.001), compared with no gain in the control group.ConclusionsActively offering patients information in a subdivided (per day), categorized (per theme), and interactive (video and quiz questions) manner significantly increases the level of perceived knowledge and demonstrates a higher level of actual knowledge, compared with standard care educational practices.Trial RegistrationInternational Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number ISRCTN98629372; http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN98629372 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/73F5trZbb)

Most software projects take place in a volatile environment in which many dangers exist that may affect the successful outcome of the project. After completion of the project an evaluation may show that many of the problems encountered during the project could have been foreseen before they actually occurred. Risk management is an approach that is aimed at predicting the occurrence of this type of problem and at taking counter measures to either prevent them from affecting the project or to soften their impact. In this paper the basic activities related to risk management are described. Furthermore a concrete method aimed at supporting risk management is presented. This method has been used successfully in practice. Some of the results obtained by using it are presented on the basis of five cases. Some conclusions are that: (1) the use of a short and structured checklist will ease identification of and discussions about risks, (2) a risk management method in which explicit use is made of a group related approach, involving all parties, will increase reliability and acceptance of the results, and (3) involvement of a neutral process risk advisor will further both the successful use of the method and the acceptance of the results.

Currently used software process improvement methods such as the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) rely in their process assessments on information, which is gathered during interviews, in oral audit sessions, and from quality manuals and process standard reviews. Although valuable information about software processes can be gained in these assessments, the resulting data quality can be improved upon. This paper investigates the potential of process mining to support current software process assessment and improvement approaches. Based on an analysis of CMMI from a process mining perspective, particular CMMI model components are identified for which it is in principle possible to apply process mining techniques. Subsequently, criteria have been defined to select, with respect to these particular CMMI components, software processes for which process mining has an added value. These criteria have been applied in the selection of a particular ‘minable’ software process, that is, a change control process. Subsequently, the results of a case study from industrial practice, on the process mining of a change control board process, are used to illustrate that process mining can provide CMMI assessors with relevant information. This information reflects the actual or ‘real’ software processes in practice, and as such, it offers an excellent basis to support assessors in understanding the ‘actual’ software processes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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As the world of Information Technology (IT) engineering becomes more complex every day, the formal study of project complexity becomes more and more important for managing projects effectively, to avoid poor performance and failure. Complexity is not yet clearly understood nor sufficiently defined and the terminology itself is being overloaded and over-used. This paper is a systematic literature review that attempts to identify and classify proposed definitions and measures of IT project complexity. The results include a map of the identified approaches and definitions, a list of classifications of project complexity, a set of proposed measurement tools and complexity measures available to practitioners. The paper contributes to establishing a common language when discussing complexity, as well as to a better understanding of project complexity and its implications to practical IT engineering projects.