Project Management in Digital Disruption: Emergence of Digital Project Management Office

This review paper has been prepared to provide an overview of multidisciplinary research that combines recent findings in the fields that support digital transformation development. The potential impact of digital technologies on organizational performance is the leverage that enables changes in common elements of organizational design; such are strategy, structure, processes, or workforce. According to reports by various authors, choosing an approach to digital transformation potentially includes an emphasis on strategy, processes, a structural approach, a project approach, and other performances. Such transformation is often performed through a portfolio of interrelated projects that change the organization. Most contemporary organizations establish a project management office (PMO) as an organizational entity responsible for implementing digital transformation initiatives. In this article, PMO is highlighted as an element of organizational design that promises success in meeting the demands of digital transformation initiatives, such as digital agility or innovation project management, by introducing new digital competencies into its professional domains. Such extensions of PMO domain expertise may lead to the transformation of “traditional” PMOs into digital PMOs. The paper analyses the cases of application of structural elements of digital PMO and their characteristics in three Croatian companies. &nbs

Digital Innovation: A Frugal Ecosystem Perspective

In this conceptual paper, we attempt to answer the question: How do firms develop frugal IT capabilities in a resource-constrained ecosystem? Frugal firms tend to successfully overcome severe infrastructure, financial, social, and technological constraints. Frugal IT Innovation” is a special case of frugal innovation where IT/IS play a pivotal, core role in enabling capabilities to overcome challenges of resource-constrained business environments. It is centered on development of products/services with a sharp focus on affordability, simplicity, and sustainability. Taking a digital ecodynamics perspective, we focus on the co-evolution of firm-level capabilities, the frugal ecosystem, and underlying IT systems to uncover how a dynamic, higher-order, frugal IT innovation capability (FITIC) drives firm performance. Due to unique ecosystem conditions, we measure firm performance by including social and environmental measures in addition to financial measures. The paper discusses ecosystem-wide implications and contributes to advancement of both theoretical and practice-based knowledge in this domain

Analyzing the Budget and Strategic Plan Relationship: A Case Study Approach

The strategic plan and budget remain essential factors in the strength of most organizations. Organizations only have a finite amount of financial resources to deploy to continue to carry out their vision, mission, and goals, more commonly known as the strategic plan. The purpose of the budget is to funnel those financial resources to execute that mission. Many organizations experience a divergence between their budget and strategic plan. The literature is inundated with coverage on the budget and strategic plan yet mainly centers around them as entirely separate and distinct topics. This study examines the relationship between the budget and strategic plan, where it is critically important to have alignment, and how an individual’s perception of time factor into misalignment. To address this gap, I provide an in-depth case study of a large municipality. Organizations such as these often have tighter budgetary constraints, public service commitments, complicated public policy implications, and more legal restrictions than the private sector. Further, I explore how an exogenous shock, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, amplifies the budget and strategic plan\u27s misalignment. I conducted a total of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with senior- and executive-level personnel. I supplemented the interviews with publicly available materials, strategic plans, proposed and adopted budgets, and website information. As a result, these findings offer a detailed empirical account of how the budget and strategic plan\u27s relationship evolves over a fiscal year within a large government. Based on a broad analysis of this data, I also find that the budget and strategic plan relationship and the explanations for misalignment can be more complex and subtle than previously thought. Additionally, I provide exemplary lessons for practitioners to identify, manage and mitigate misalignments between the budget and strategic plan within their own organizations to maximize financial and non-financial performance outcomes. INDEX WORDS: Budget, Strategic Plan, COVID-19, Budget and Strategic Plan Relationship, Public Finance, Temporal Dimension

Managing suppy chain risk through collaboration

In an increasingly uncertain, complex, and global supply chain environment, supply chains face a greater multitude of risks. Information sharing and collaboration between supply chain players can reduce risk within the supply chain. This project discusses emerging supply chain risk management (SCRM) strategies pertaining to the distribution of products and how purchasing and logistics departments can work to build a resilient and agile supply chain

Business Agility and Information Technology in Service Organizations

Service organizations have to deal with highly uncertain events, both in the internal and external environment. In the academic literature and in practice there is not much knowledge about how to deal with this uncertainty. This PhD dissertation investigates the role and impact of information technologies (IT) on business agility in service organizations. Business agility is a relatively new term defined as the capability of organizations to swiftly change businesses and business processes beyond the normal level of flexibility to effectively manage highly uncertain and unexpected, but potentially consequential internal and external events. Empirical research was carried out via surveys and interviews among managers from 35 organizations in four industries and in three governmental sectors. Four in-depth case studies were carried out within one service organization. The dissertation has six key findings: 1) In many large service organizations business agility is hampered by a lack of IT agility. 2) Organization and alignment of processes and information systems via the cycle of sensing, responding and learning along with the alignment of business and IT are important conditions for improving business agility performance of service organizations. 3) Standardization of IT capabilities and higher levels of data quality support higher levels of business agility of service organizations. 4) Two knowledge management strategies – codification and personalization -- are identified that can be used to respond to events with different degrees of uncertainty. A codification knowledge management strategy supports the response to events with low levels of uncertainty by exploiting explicit knowledge from organizational memory. A personalization knowledge management strategy drives the response to events with high levels of uncertainty by exploitation of tacit knowledge and social capital. 5) Social capital is an important moderating variable in the relation between IT capabilities and business agility. Social capital can mitigate the lack of IT agility that exists in many service organizations by overcoming information system boundaries and rigidities via human relationships. 6) The combination of sensing, responding and learning capabilities is required to increase all dimensions of business agility performance. Overall, this research introduces a new approach to analyze and measure business agility. This thesis takes the first steps to develop theoretical knowledge on the conditions under which IT supports higher levels of business agility and business agility performance

Is the US 3PL industry overcoming paradoxes amid the pandemic?

Purpose: Third-party logistics (3PL) companies have experienced an explosion of volume during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Special tiers have been introduced to provide differentiated levels of service to the customers. However, such changes in an organization reveal and intensify tensions known as paradoxes. The purpose of this research is to identify what paradoxes emerged or have become more salient specifically due to COVID-19 in 3PLs\u27 ground operations and how they are dealt with by ground operation managers. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative study conducted in two phases. Phase one utilizes a questionnaire approach to identify the paradoxes within the 3PLs operating in the USA. Phase two, conducted six months after phase one, follows an in-depth one-on-one interview approach. NVivo 12 is employed to analyze the interview data. Findings: The results show that new paradoxes did in fact emerge due to the COVID-19 and are mostly related to the performing paradox category. Findings from in-depth interviews show that the 3PL managers focus on keeping safety as priority to manage COVID-19 related paradoxes, along with modifying operational plans, improving communication, investing in training, optimizing hub network, introducing modified/new methods and adapting modified human resource policies. Originality/value: This paper is among the first known to identify paradoxes within the 3PL operations during the COVID-19 and provides insights into how these paradoxes are dealt with at mid-management level. Findings of this study provide foundations for the development of a theoretical framework on handling paradoxes within 3PLs

A lightweight method for improving coordination in distributed, high-variability product companies

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering; in conjunction with the Leaders for Global Operations Program at MIT, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-75).Product companies face new challenges as they continue to expand their international footprints. Whereas globalization initially sought savings by outsourcing production to low-cost regions, emerging markets now present new sales opportunities with unique customer demands. Companies increasingly must be sensitive to local expectations at the same time that products are becoming more technology rich and with shorter life cycles. Improved coordination that enables greater speed, flexibility, and multi-market effectiveness is particularly important as companies shift engineering and commercial responsibilities to formerly production-only centers. This study develops and demonstrates an approach to one domain of coordination-the flow of material and related information between globally distributed sites-based on lessons from engineer-to- order (ETO) operating models. By examining contemporary trends in ETO and identifying several generalizable tensions, this study outlines key parameters that distinguish dynamic coordination needs from those embedded in conventional process improvement frameworks. The five-step approach developed in this paper takes a dynamic systems perspective on organizational interfaces and seeks to build feedback mechanisms at multiple levels. It targets the knowledge-transfer, business planning, and execution levels of material management while also addressing the behavioral and practical components of implementation. In doing so, the approach recognizes that uneven process maturity and uncertain external demands must be accommodated. It argues that traditional approaches to coordination have had limited success, because they are slow to adapt and encourage circumvention. Whereas these past methods have exchanged reduced process "waste" for greatly increased rigidity and process housekeeping, the proposed method seeks reinforcing loops that align stakeholders without exhaustive process definition or significant maintenance. A detailed case study at a global ETO business group illustrates the method and its initial results in an environment of limited patience for formal process development. The resulting portfolio of change initiatives, which includes inter-site service level commitments, local forecast sharing, service parts forecasting, and reverse logistics, demonstrates an integrative approach to business site interfaces that attempts to tie local short-term performance with global long-term success.by Brian S. Hendrickson.S.M.M.B.A

Complex System Governance Leadership

The purpose of this research was to develop a systems theory-based framework for leadership in governance of complex systems. Recognizing complexity and uncertainty as norms for the environments in which organizations exist encouraged researchers to suggest complexity theory, complex systems, and complex adaptive systems as appropriate for addressing these conditions. Complex System Governance (CSG), based in systems theory, management cybernetics, and governance, endeavors to provide for the design, execution and evolution of functions that provide control, communication, coordination, and integration at the metasystem level to support operations and continued system existence (viability). From a management cybernetics perspective, CSG leadership has a role in the design of the metasystem that provides governance functions for a complex system. Similarly, leadership assures the existence of conditions necessary for the requisite metasystem functions to be enabled, executed, and evolved sufficiently for continued system viability. In this research, CSG leadership functions were examined from a system theoretic perspective. An extensive body of leadership literature provides insight into leadership from a number of perspectives including leadership as personal traits, leadership as a set of skills, or leadership as a process or relationship. Systems theory conceptual foundations applied to CSG leadership functions are not represented in this literature thus resulting in a gap. This research contributes to addressing that gap by linking systems theory to leadership functions for CSG. The research was a journey of discovery with no pre-established hypotheses that could be tested using deductive approaches, therefore, an inductive approach supportive of exploring, understanding (gaining insight) and discovery was employed. As the purpose was to develop a systems theory-based framework for leadership in governance of complex systems, theory construction was required. As a recognized methodology to discover theory from data, Grounded Theory was chosen as the research methodology. The framework that resulted from this research presents a novel contribution to CSG leadership that is grounded in systems theory and management cybernetics. It also provides practitioners the opportunity to develop novel approaches for facilitating anticipation, identification, and remediation of leadership issues

Developing sales forecasting by utilizing business intelligence : A Single Case Study

In a highly volatile business environment, companies must utilize technological tools to make decisions effectively and efficiently. Therefore, companies use business intelligence to aid in decision-making. Sales forecasting is a key component of decision-making in companies, as it lays the groundwork for a vast number of decisions. However, only some companies have harnessed the full potential of business intelligence and sales forecasting. This study examines how business intelligence can be utilized in sales forecasting. More precisely, this study examines the significance of capabilities in improving sales forecasting accuracy. The role of capabilities is vital as capabilities are intangible assets, in contrast to technological tools that are easily imitable and mobile. This study's literature review focuses on business intelligence and sales forecasting literature. Previous studies of business intelligence and sales forecasting capabilities are examined to identify the key capabilities. Previous studies that synthesize business intelligence and sales forecasting are lacking. Moreover, there is a gap in the previous literature as the key business intelligence capabilities for sales forecasting have not been identified. This thesis adopts a qualitative approach to answering the research questions. The case study method is used to examine how business intelligence can be used to develop sales forecasting. More precisely, the study is a single case study focusing on a company operating in the rental industry. The data is gathered for the study through six semi-structured interviews. The interviewees are chosen based on their business intelligence and sales forecasting expertise. The findings of this study provide insight into how business intelligence can be utilized to develop sales forecasting. The theoretical framework developed for this study presents the key business intelligence and sales forecasting capabilities that improve sales forecasting accuracy. More precisely, the key capabilities are analyzed to get more detailed information on how capabilities can be developed to match the needs of the sales forecasting process. This study concludes by addressing its limitations and suggesting future research to extend the research in business intelligence and sales forecasting

Sustainability Strategies for Small Business Survival Beyond 5 Years

Owners of small retail businesses who fail to implement adequate managerial strategies experience reduced profits and sustainability challenges. Small businesses account for 85.3% of the market, and 66% of small businesses fail within the first 5 years due to low sales and personnel issues. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the managerial strategies that owners of successful small retail businesses implemented to sustain their operations for longer than the first 5 years. The population for the study included owners of 3 small retail businesses in the southeastern region of the United States, who successfully implemented managerial strategies and remained in business for longer than 5 years. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with the owners and from a review of the company websites and social media pages. Systems theory and the general systems theory was the conceptual framework for the study. Data were analyzed in accordance with Yin\u27s 5-phase data analysis process consisting of pattern matching, explanation building, time-series analysis, program logic models, and cross-case synthesis. Three themes emerged from the data analysis: updating the business model, addressing customer feedback, and enhancing business efficiency. The findings of this study could contribute to positive social change by providing insights for owners of small retail businesses regarding strategy execution for managerial approaches that increase business productivity, which may lead to the improved economic wellbeing of some employees as well as positive contributions to the communities\u27 retail businesses serve