Search results

Companies today face many conflicting priorities in remaining competitive. Some of the challenges include leading company staff in thinking bigger, operating in direct relationship to customers and stockholders’ needs, while staying flexible and adaptable to economic and market shifts. How does a facilities manager stay connected to the business strategy, manage more projects with less staff, and still provide responsive service, while the business environment the manager supports is changing rapidly? The manager may be faced with consolidating facilities owing to a merger or company restructuring. Consolidation presents several challenges that must be met. The manager must work with executives to align equipment deployment and facility use to merger goals and objectives. He/she must consolidate facilities management infrastructure into a cohesive unit from the different approaches of the original companies. This requires the ability simultaneously to coordinate the strategic, tactical and technical aspects of consolidation, while maintaining the seamless operation of the company. If it is a large operation, with facilities spread across a region, facilities management may have been distributed, with each location responsible for their own projects and maintenance. A major change effort such as consolidation requires a centralised facilities management structure that is tied directly into the strategy of the company. The answer for many companies in meeting these challenges is enterprise programme management (EPM). Enterprise programme management is a way of thinking, communicating and working, supported by an information system, that organises an enterprise’s resources in direct relationship to leadership’s vision, and the mission, strategy, goals and objectives that move the organisation forward. Simply put, EPM provides a 360‐degree view of an organisation’s collective efforts.

With the rapid development of economic reform and organizational change, management education and development has become an increasingly important topic among Chinese universities, governmental departments as well as industrial organizations. The transformation of the Chinese state‐owned management systems into a market‐oriented shareholding system, the nationwide organizational reform and downsizing movement among state enterprises, the development of international joint ventures and wholly‐owned companies, and the increasingly urgent needs for professional training call for innovative approaches to management education in China. This article presents some current models of management education and innovative strategies for facilitating training and development in Chinese enterprises.

Outlines the development of business enterprises in Zhejiang Province and explains the need for enterprise management. Describes the background in setting up the Zhejiang University – The Hong Kong Polytechnic University International Executive Development Centre. Explains the design and the rationale behind the Higher Diploma in Enterprise Management offered by the PolyU at the China Outposts and describes the programme aim and objectives, design, structure and operations. Also discusses the challenges encountered and concludes with an implication for management educators in mainland China.

This monograph is devoted to the countries of Eastern Europe, which are experiencing the dramatic changes following on from the fundamental developments of the last few years. These countries, Albania, Bulgaria, Czecho‐slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the USSR and Yugoslavia, are likely to become members of a greater Europe in the future. Their economic and educational systems are examined and the structures of their management training systems are described.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide an evaluation of how Chinese managers perceive and respond to training and management development programmes that have been designed and delivered by Western experts, and of the extent to which such programmes have been successful in achieving their learning outcomes.

Data have been collected from experience of a management development programme for Chinese managers in 20 state‐owned enterprises, and from interviews with 45 senior Chinese managers and officials who had been involved in a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for the training of Chinese managers.

It was found that although considerable efforts had been made to train the largest possible number of managers, there was still a gap between what Chinese managers could do and what they had been expected to do in order to meet the demands of increasing economic reforms. Limited resources, inadequate means, traditional ways of learning, power relationships, and political restrictions are examples of some of the apparent obstacles to the efficient implementation of Western‐designed and delivered programmes of management development in China.

Management development programmes that do not take into consideration the cultural context in which managers were brought up and taught to think and operate may not be successful. It is only when Western providers of management education understand the culturally and politically bound learning habits of the Chinese they may be able to introduce some change in management and contribute to the development of China's economic reform process.

The paper is a further contribution to the ongoing debate on cross‐cultural training and could spark a useful discussion on the relevance of Western‐designed management development programmes in less developed countries in general and in China in particular.

Gives an eye‐witness account of how training and management development policies are put into practice in Chinese state‐owned enterprises. Makes observations on how training is perceived and implemented in a period of rapid economic change. Also discusses the contribution that western countries could make and the obstacles that could be met, as a result. Draws evidence for these observations from the author’s involvement in a major United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for the design and teaching of management strategy and human resource management courses to cohorts of managers from selected Chinese foreign trade corporations (FTCs). Asserts that, despite much effort being made to train and develop as many managers as possible, there is still an urgent need for appropriate management training programmes that could meet the quest for skilful and efficient managers who would be able to cope with the managerial demands of increasing economic reforms. Argues, therefore, that there is a gap between the abilities and the process of developing Chinese managers on the one hand and what is required from them for exploiting the economic reform on the other. The process of introducing and implementing training programmes in the People’s Republic of China is characterized by a clear emphasis on quantitative rather than qualitative knowledge and by a poor appreciation of training priorities, because of the way in which management is perceived and managers are controlled.

The growing importance of risk management programmes and practices in different industries has given rise to a new risk management approach, i.e. enterprise risk management. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the necessity, benefit, approaches and methodologies of managing risks in healthcare. It compares and contrasts between the traditional and enterprise risk management approaches within the healthcare context. In addition, it introduces bow tie methodology, a prospective risk assessment tool proposed by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management as a visual risk management tool used in enterprise risk management.

This is a critical review of published literature on the topics of governance, patient safety, risk management, enterprise risk management and bow tie, which aims to draw a link between them and find the benefits behind their adoption.

Enterprise risk management is a generic holistic approach that extends the benefits of risk management programme beyond the traditional insurable hazards and/or losses. In addition, the bow tie methodology is a barrier-based risk analysis and management tool used in enterprise risk management for critical events related to the relevant day-to-day operations. It is a visual risk assessment tool which is used in many higher reliability industries. Nevertheless, enterprise risk management and bow ties are reported with limited use in healthcare.

The paper suggests the applicability and usefulness of enterprise risk management to healthcare, and proposes the bow tie methodology as a proactive barrier-based risk management tool valid for enterprise risk management implementation in healthcare.

In the midst of a major corporate reorganization and an ever‐changing industry landscape, how does a corporate real estateorganization successfully build enterprise alliances and create integrated approaches to problem solving in order to 1) realign the real estate portfolio and 2) achieve optimal real estate portfolio efficiencies? The answer lies in the use of enterprise program management approaches to identify stakeholders and to invest in lifecycle management. This case study will examine how Sprint Enterprise Property Services successfully adopted the use of enterprise program management principles in order to achieve significant gains in process improvements, to transform a traditional work environment, and to institute a dynamic long‐term vacancy reduction plan for the corporate real estate portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate efforts to manage institutional complexity in a state-owned enterprise, the roles of explicated values in these efforts and how these values interact with each other and other influential management controls.

Exploratory case study in StateEnt, a state-owned enterprise that faces institutional complexity. The analysis is based on interviews, observations and documents and concepts from the management control literature and institutional logics are applied.

Findings from this study suggest that a structural differentiation have separated two logics in different departments and two of the explicated values have become symbols of these logics taking on various roles in negotiations. Tension between the departments is heightened because the departments legitimize logic enactment through mobilizing different socio-technical dyads of management control. The division of responsibility between these departments still ensures that they need to collaborate and make compromises. The study also finds that exogenously imposed constraints have a significant influence on organizational activities, which is further strengthened due to internally developed management controls embedded in the same logic.

The study contributes with deeper understanding of values as control, and how these interact with other control forms to influence organizational activity. Herein, the importance of regulatory controls in state-owned enterprises is also highlighted. A limitation of this study is the limited size of the organization under investigation.

The explicit emphasis on values as a control in studies on management control issues in institutionally complex environments is underemphasized in the literature.

Useful courses satisfy, among other principles, the principles of content and process relevances. They also cut, in the participant′s mind, positive images of the trainer, the course and the course‐offering institution.