Search results

Sustainable building development involves several stakeholders, team participants and their fulfilment can affect the performance and outcome of succeeding construction development. The effect of the individual or human component is one of the most desperate reasons for the realisation of any progress in the building sector. Organisations are developing an increasing number of project teams to meet diverse organisational goals as they acknowledge the value and importance of project teams. However, in order to ensure that the project team achieves positive results, management, particularly the project manager, must focus on crucial elements such as team satisfaction. Project success can be influenced by team satisfaction. The project leader usually oversees and manages the team, organising and managing project activities between stakeholders and other team members. The study found that gratitude, enhanced morale, increased responsibility, putting in extra effort and job quality are all reasons why team satisfaction might affect a construction project's success.

This chapter makes the case for imparting effective project management training and collaborative skills for information professionals. The authors identify the challenges of collaborative project work in online environments by reviewing the relevant project management literature within the library and information science (LIS) discipline and discussing the role of LIS schools in addressing project management and collaborative skills for information professionals.

The literature review revealed a significant lack of project management and collaborative skills among LIS professionals. However, most LIS schools are still falling short when it comes to offering project management courses on a regular basis. The authors examined the challenges of teamwork in online environments, identified project management strategies and approaches for successful teamwork, and proposed guidelines for strategic project management education for information professionals. It is recommended that information professionals should have the skills to prepare a team contract, develop a project schedule, create mechanisms for transparency and accountability, and use effective communication strategies through project management techniques.

In addition to reviewing the relevant literature on project management within LIS, and the challenges of teamwork in online environments, the authors analyzed the relevance of some collaborative concepts and frameworks that might be useful in managing collaborative projects. In particular, the implications of Tuckman’s (1965) team progression theory, lessons from Harvey’s (1988) Abilene paradox, and de Bono’s (1989) six thinking hats method were analyzed and discussed in managing collaborative projects.

By obtaining effective project management and collaborative skills, LIS professionals will be able to better meet the demands of contemporary libraries and information organizations.

In the spring of 2016, the University of Kansas Libraries piloted Research Sprints: One Week, One Project, a program aimed at cultivating relationships with faculty through deep project-based engagement.

Three faculty members, matched with a team of library experts, worked intensively to complete a research or pedagogic project for one week in May. Critical to the program’s success was the use of project management methodologies and tools. These tools were essential to identifying task dependencies, developing workflows, and documenting work processes.

The overall success of the Sprints demonstrated to faculty that library staff can be more than one-shot consultants; faculty collaborators learned first hand that the library can be a true partner throughout the scholarly process. As an approach to user engagement, Sprints pose some considerations for library management, including the need for robust staff training in project management and teambuilding, internal resistance to utilizing project management tools, difficulty finding staff time and resources to commit for a short but high-concentrated period, and the need to align projects with staff expertise and availability.

This chapter provides an assessment of the Sprints pilot, addressing some of the implications, potential benefits, and challenges of adopting and adapting Research Sprints to support library work. It will be of interest to project managers and library staff who are considering integrating project management methods into their outreach and services, and provides examples of how project management can inform library efforts to more deeply collaborate in advancing the scholarly work of local research and teaching communities.

Previous research on workplace meetings identified critical design features, leader behaviors, group dynamics, post-meeting actions, and other factors which help determine the effectiveness of the meeting. But as much as the authors acknowledge that meetings may differ from each other, much of the research appears to assume that it is meaningful to talk about “the meeting” as a single, generic entity (most commonly, the regularly scheduled staff or department meeting). In fact, though, there are several common types of meetings which vary among themselves in terms of a number of measurable parameters such as structure, meeting members, meeting leader, timing and duration, and scope. It is a gratuitous assumption that what the authors know about workplace meetings based on one especially common type applies to all workplace meetings. This chapter offers a historical review of previous attempts to classify meeting types; it then overviews several common types which deviate from the standard staff meeting paradigm, including project team meetings, debrief meetings, committee meetings, site-wide meetings, shift change meetings, and crew formation meetings. In comparing these types to the staff meeting, the authors identify some of the critical differences, thereby providing a first step toward a true taxonomy of meetings.

This chapter addresses how project teams achieve coordinated action, given the diversity in how team members may perceive and value time. Although synchronization of task activities may occur spontaneously through the nonconscious process of entrainment, some work conditions demand that team members pay greater conscious attention to time to coordinate their efforts. We propose that shared cognitions on time – the agreement among team members on the appropriate temporal approach to their collective task – will contribute to the coordination of team members’ actions, particularly in circumstances where nonconscious synchronization of action patterns is unlikely. We suggest that project teams may establish shared cognitions on time through goal setting, temporal planning, and temporal reflexivity.

This article examines the effect of the customer focus (CF) group of competencies, which includes communication and negotiation skills, on project performance as measured by reaching the internal and the overall budget, the quality, and the deadline goals.

The multiple regression model was based on a dataset from Trimo, an engineering and production company of prefabricated buildings.

The inverted U-shaped relationship of the CF group has been proven to exist with all project goals.

The present study provides a starting-point for further empirical research on the international construction sector, projects, teams, and competence research.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce library and information science professionals to the idea of combining the tools and techniques of project management and change management to support the success of their projects. Combining these two methodologies can assist professionals not only in carrying out their projects efficiently, helping them to meet project objectives, but can also increase the likelihood that their project objectives will be accepted by their organizations.

This chapter provides an overview of project management and change management methodologies with numerous examples from academic and practitioner literature and supplements them with concrete, specific examples of how these tools and techniques were implemented in an information management project.

This chapter contributes to the development of change management and project management competencies for librarians by providing explanations of project management and change management which include advice and evidence from the literature combined with examples of how these techniques and processes were applied in a library and information management project. This chapter should therefore serve as an educational tool for library and information management practitioners seeking either to develop their project management and change management skills or to apply these techniques to their own projects.

Articles which combine project management and change management methodologies are rare. This chapter takes these concepts and applies them in a library and information management setting in a way that should be practical and approachable to library and information science practitioners.

This chapter describes the change efforts and action research projects at a Dutch multinational which, over a period of 25 years, produced in one of its businesses a zigzag path toward collaborative leadership dynamics at the horizontal and vertical interfaces. The chapter also identifies the learning mechanisms that helped achieve this transformation. Changing the patterns at the vertical interfaces proved to be a most tricky, complex, and confusing operation. The data show that organizations need hierarchical interfaces between levels, but are hindered by the hierarchical leadership dynamics at these interfaces. The data furthermore show that competitive performance requires more than redesigning horizontal interfaces. A business can only respond with speed and flexibility to threats and opportunities in the external environment when the leadership dynamics at agility-critical vertical interfaces are also changed.

Leadership is a crucial driver of project performance. While traditionally, the project leader was considered as the exclusive source of leadership behavior, recent research indicates that particularly dispersed projects may profit from joint leadership efforts by all project members. However, leadership functions in dispersed projects are likely to differ from those in a face-to-face context. In this chapter, we specify shared leadership functions for the domain of geographically dispersed project teams with high levels of task uncertainty. Arguing that shared leadership in dispersed teams occurs through interrelation of individual and team actions, we specify a dispersed screening function as well as self-, other-, and team-directed interrelation functions and develop propositions on how these functions are related to project performance. Furthermore, we point to motivational aspects of shared leadership and discuss the role of the vertical leader in developing and facilitating shared leadership.

This paper deals with the organizing of interactive product development. Developing products in interaction between firms may provide benefits in terms of specialization, increased innovation, and possibilities to perform development activities in parallel. However, the differentiation of product development among a number of firms also implies that various dependencies need to be dealt with across firm boundaries. How dependencies may be dealt with across firms is related to how product development is organized. The purpose of the paper is to explore dependencies and how interactive product development may be organized with regard to these dependencies.

The analytical framework is based on the industrial network approach, and deals with the development of products in terms of adaptation and combination of heterogeneous resources. There are dependencies between resources, that is, they are embedded, implying that no resource can be developed in isolation. The characteristics of and dependencies related to four main categories of resources (products, production facilities, business units and business relationships) provide a basis for analyzing the organizing of interactive product development.

Three in-depth case studies are used to explore the organizing of interactive product development with regard to dependencies. The first two cases are based on the development of the electrical system and the seats for Volvo’s large car platform (P2), performed in interaction with Delphi and Lear respectively. The third case is based on the interaction between Scania and Dayco/DFC Tech for the development of various pipes and hoses for a new truck model.

The analysis is focused on what different dependencies the firms considered and dealt with, and how product development was organized with regard to these dependencies. It is concluded that there is a complex and dynamic pattern of dependencies that reaches far beyond the developed product as well as beyond individual business units. To deal with these dependencies, development may be organized in teams where several business units are represented. This enables interaction between different business units’ resource collections, which is important for resource adaptation as well as for innovation. The delimiting and relating functions of the team boundary are elaborated upon and it is argued that also teams may be regarded as actors. It is also concluded that a modular product structure may entail a modular organization with regard to the teams, though, interaction between business units and teams is needed. A strong connection between the technical structure and the organizational structure is identified and it is concluded that policies regarding the technical structure (e.g. concerning “carry-over”) cannot be separated from the management of the organizational structure (e.g. the supplier structure). The organizing of product development is in itself a complex and dynamic task that needs to be subject to interaction between business units.