IT Project Portfolio Management – A Matter of Organizational Culture?

In a qualitative research approach, an interpretive case study has been conducted. 26 experts from a large financial service provider of the cooperative banking sector were interviewed. The impact of organizational culture on the management of an organization’s IT project portfolio was subject to inquiry. We have identified three core dimensions of the organizational culture of the analyzed bank: ‘safeguarding culture’, ‘consensus orientation’, and ‘sustainability orientation’. These three central cultural elements influenced the company’s project portfolio management in a way that the portfolio of projects was oversized, resulting in a shortage of key IT resources in individual projects. As a cultural issue, the organization placed more emphasis on a sustainable, long-term oriented, effective project portfolio, rather than on efficient single IT project performance

Risk management standards for P5M

Risk can be managed, minimized, shared, transferred or accepted but it cannot be ignored. An effective and efficient risk management approach requires a proper and systematic methodology and, more importantly, knowledge and experience. Risk management are coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to risk. Based on this definition, project risk management can be derivatively defined as coordinate activities to direct and control a project with regard to risk. In this way, it becomes an integral part of every aspect of managing the project. The goal of this paper is to present and compare the main standards for project risk management that are currently available today. Five international standards recognized world-wide were selected for comparison PMI, PRINCE2, IPMA, ISO 31000 and IEC 62198.Web of Science131341

Partnership as conversation: why partnerships are condemned to talk and what they need to talk about

Participants and observers regularly complain that multi-agency partnerships are “talking shops,” engaged in constant discussion which gets in the way of “doing” the work of partnership. In this paper we engage with and criticize this characterization. Drawing on ideas from the Cultural Theory of Mary Douglas, we argue that true multi-agency partnerships are structurally condemned to talk. Instead of criticizing this talk and contrasting it with “doing” we should see it as a critical part of the doing of partnership. We should therefore concentrate on organizing and structuring partnership talk in order to move things forward rather than trying to minimize it. In the second half of the paper we therefore put forward a proposal for how partnership talk should be organized into five “conversations” concerning the principles, policies, processes, practices and politics of partnership. While we can make no predictions for the outcome of these conversations in any given case, we can, we believe, establish some necessary preconditions for effective interaction. We illustrate our arguments drawing on a range of empirical work in education and wider public services reform

What Are the Useful Past Inter-Organizational Relationships (IORs) for Forming Complex IORs?

Purpose: The purpose is to explore the relationship between prior and later inter-organizational relationships (IORs) by studying whether past experience can be leveraged on when forming new, more complex, IORs. Methodology: Participation in prior IORs is characterized in terms of both resource- transferring and resource-pooling IORs in home-country networks, while complex IORs are considered those with foreign partners. An empirical test on 366 Italian firms is performed using OLS with robust standard errors. Findings: Both resource-transferring and resource-pooling IORs have non-convergent effects. The former has controversial effects on the base of the position a firm occupies, that in turn affects the structure of interests between the partners. The latter has different effects in line with the information complexity of the objective of the relationship. Research Implications: Results provide support to the idea that structure of interests and information complexity represent \u201cdiscriminating characteristics\u201d that identify salient structural alternatives in the analysis of inter-firm organization. Practical Implications: The paper advances that firms can partially leverage on the exploitation of prior experience in settings that are explorative in nature, by carefully selecting within past experiences. Originality: A distinction between coordination \u201cgiving\u201d and coordination \u201ctaking\u201d IORs is proposed to discern among different types of inter-firm coordination forms

Changing the way we learn: towards agile learning and co-operation

This paper addresses the need for learning and competence development in industrial organizations. The people that enter professional organizations today are part of a gamer generation that have some or much experience with on-line games. Therefore they are more open to e-learning and in general more open to access anything on-line. At the same time industrial organizations experience a pressure on their ability to train employees faster due to the increase in complexity. We argue that games are not yet mature enough to support this training challenge as stand alone efforts. But games can support the training and competence development in a synchronized setup with other means

Managing Up in Down Times

Examines issues confronting foundation senior management during both up and down economic cycles. Focuses on the concepts of resource stewardship, change management, and achieving successful results

Is project management the new management 2.0?

This paper considers the evolving nature of project management (PM) and offers a comparison with the evolving nature of management generally. Specifically, we identify a number of management trends that are drawn from a paper that documents a proposed ‘Management 2.0’ model, and we compare those trends to the way in which PM is maturing to embrace the challenges of modern organizational progress.Some theoretical frameworks are offered that assist in explaining the shift from the historically accepted ‘tools and techniques’ model to a more nuanced and behaviorally driven paradigm that is arguably more appropriate to manage change in today’s flexible and progressive organizations, and which provide a more coherent response, both in PM and traditional management, to McDonald’s forces. In addition, we offer a number of examples to robustly support our assertions, based around the development of innovative products from Apple Inc. In using this metaphor to demonstrate the evolution of project-based work, we link PM with innovation and new product development.

2009 Annual Performance Report

Analyzes 2009 program impact in terms of grantmaking; outcomes; and results, learning, and refinement; as well as institutional effectiveness in terms of leadership, constituent feedback, and finance and organization. Includes selected indicators

The innovation impact of EU emission trading: findings of company case studies in the German power sector

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of how the European Emission Trading System (EU ETS) as the core climate policy instrument of the European Union has impacted innovation. Towards this end, we investigate the impact of the EU ETS on research, development, and demonstration (RD&D), adoption, and organizational change. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the rela-tive influences of context factors (policy mix, market factors, public acceptance) as well as firm characteristics (value chain position, technology portfolio, size, vision). Empirically, our analysis is based on multiple case studies with 19 power generators, technology providers, and project developers in the German power sector which we conducted from June 2008 until June 2009. We find that the innovation impact of the EU ETS has remained limited so far because of the scheme’s initial lack in stringency and predictability and the relatively greater importance of context factors. Additionally, the impact varies tremendously across technologies, firms, and innovation dimensions, and is most pronounced for RD&D on carbon capture technologies and corporate procedural change. Our analysis suggests that the EU ETS by itself may not provide sufficient incentives for fundamental changes in corporate climate innovation activities at a level adequate for reaching political long-term targets. Based on the study’s findings, we derive a set of policy and research recommendations. --EU ETS,emission trading,innovation,technological change,adoption,diffusion,organizational change,power sector