  Understanding the role of individual nodes is a key challenge in the study of
spreading processes on networks. In this work we propose a novel metric, the
reachability-heterogeneity (RH), to quantify the vulnerability of each node
with respect to a spreading process on a network. We then introduce a dataset
consisting of four large engineering projects described by their activity
networks, including records of the performance of each activity; such data,
describing the spreading of performance fluctuations across activities, can be
used as a reliable ground truth for the study of spreading phenomena on
networks. We test the validity of the RH metric on these project networks, and
discover that nodes scoring low in RH tend to consistently perform better. We
also compare RH and seven other node metrics, showing that the former is highly
interdependent with activity performance. Given the context agnostic nature of
RH, our results, based on real-world data, signify the role that network
structure plays with respect to overall project performance.
