Risk Management in the Arctic Offshore: Wicked Problems Require New Paradigms

Recent project-management literature and high-profile disasters—the financial crisis, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Fukushima nuclear accident—illustrate the flaws of traditional risk models for complex projects. This research examines how various groups with interests in the Arctic offshore define risks. The findings link the wicked problem framework and the emerging paradigm of Project Management of the Second Order (PM-2). Wicked problems are problems that are unstructured, complex, irregular, interactive, adaptive, and novel. The authors synthesize literature on the topic to offer strategies for navigating wicked problems, provide new variables to deconstruct traditional risk models, and integrate objective and subjective schools of risk analysis

Considering Structural Properties of Inter-organizational Network Fragments during Business-IT Alignment

Value exchange models can be used to reason about possible networked business constellations. Such inter-organizational business settings are determined in most cases solely from a financial point of view, i.e. by assessing the economic sustainability of the constellation. In this paper we discuss also other criteria that are relevant and should additionally be considered, namely the structural properties of the inter-organizational constellation itself. The multitude of possible interorganizational business constellations – and underlying systems constellations respectively – makes it a necessary requirement to split such constellations into recurring structural patterns, which we call fragments. The structural properties are helping the designer to reason about quality related issues of the inter-organizational network, and may have an influence on design choices to be made. The paper suggests to design new e-business constellations not only on the basis of financial criteria, but to consider also quality issues of the inter-organizational network

Adapting participatory and agile software methods to participatory rural development

This paper presents observations from a project that combines participatory rural development methods with participatory design techniques to support a farmers’ co-operative in Madhya Pradesh, India</p

Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: Cambodia 2002

[Excerpt] Training and Employment of People with Disabilities: Cambodia 2002 is descriptive in nature. When the ILO commissioned the researchers for the Country Study Series, each was asked to follow the comprehensive research protocol appended to this document. The resulting report therefore includes country background information, statistics about people with disabilities and their organizations, a description of relevant legislation and policies and their official implementing structures, as well as the education, training and employment options available to people with disabilities. While few countries have such information readily available, researchers were asked to note the existence or lack of specific data points and to report data when it did exist

Technology Support for Small Industries in Developing Countries: A Review of Concepts and Project Practices

technology support, small-scale industry, technological capability, learning, competitiveness, assistance projects, industrialisation

The effectiveness of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) on students’ motivation and attitude

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) was developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the 1970's by its founders and principal authors, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, a professor of linguistics (Tosey & Mathison, 2003). Richard Bandler was a mathematics and computer science students while John Grinder is a linguistics professor. NLP helps in the teaching and learning process, especially in the classroom management. NLP was first introduced in Malaysia in the 21st century and since there are many training centres such as Akademi NLP Malaysia which train Malaysian universities and polytechnic lecturers and NLP Malaysia Centre of Excellence (NLPMC) which was the first to train NLP in Malay language