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Article
Publication date: 18 July 2016

Klen Copic Pucihar, Matjaž Kljun, John Mariani and Alan John Dix

Personal projects are any kind of projects whose management is left to an individual untrained in project management and is greatly influenced by this individual’s personal touch…

1446

Abstract

Purpose

Personal projects are any kind of projects whose management is left to an individual untrained in project management and is greatly influenced by this individual’s personal touch. This includes the majority of knowledge workers who daily manage information relating to several personal projects. The authors have conducted an in-depth qualitative investigation on information management of such projects and the tacit knowledge behind its processes that cannot be found in the organisational structures of current personal information management (PIM) tools (file managers, e-mail clients, web browsers). The purpose of this paper is to reveal and understand project information management practices in details and provide guidelines for personal project management tools.

Design/methodology/approach

Semi-structured interviews similar to that in several other PIM exploratory studies were carried out focusing on project fragmentation, information overlap and project context recreation. In addition, the authors enhanced interviews with sketching approach not yet used to study PIM. Sketches were used for articulating things that were not easily expressed through words, they represented a time stamp of a project context in the projects’ lifetime, uncovered additional tacit knowledge behind project information management not mentioned during the interviews, and were also used to find what they have in common which might be used in prototype designing.

Findings

The paper presents first personal project definition based on the conceptualisations derived from the study. The study revealed that the extensive information fragmentation in the file hierarchy (due to different organisational needs and ease of information access) poses a significant challenge to context recreation besides cross-tool fragmentation so far described in the literature. The study also reveals the division of project information into core and support and emphasises the importance of support information in relation to project goals. Other findings uncover the division of input/output information, project overlaps through information reuse, storytelling and visualising information relations, which could help with user modelling and enhancing project context recreation.

Research limitations/implications

On of the limitations is the group of participants that cannot represent the ideally generalised knowledge worker as there are many different kinds of knowledge workers and they all have different information needs besides different management practices. However, participants of variety of different backgrounds were observed and the authors converged observations into points of project information management similarities across the spectrum of different professions. Nevertheless, its observations and conceptualisations should be repeatable. For one, some of the issues that emerged during this work have been to different extents discussed in other studies.

Practical implications

The empirical findings are used to create guidelines for designing personal project information management tools: support the selective focus on information with the division into core and supportive information; visualise changes in project information space to support narratives for context recreation; overcome fragmentation in the file system with selective unification; visualising project’s information relationship to better understand the complexity of project information space; and support navigating in project information space on two axes: time and between projects (overlaps through information).

Originality/value

The study presents a longitudinal insight into personal project information management. As such it provides a first formal definition of personal project from the information point of view. The method used in the study presented uses a new approach – sketching in which participants externalised and visualised personal information and projects they discussed. The insights derived from the study form design implications for personal project management tools for knowledge workers.

Details

Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 68 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-3806

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 23 December 2010

G.M. Ditchfield

It is not difficult to understand why the Sketches would be credited to Sharp. His death four years before the publication of Ricardo's Principles placed him within the period…

Abstract

It is not difficult to understand why the Sketches would be credited to Sharp. His death four years before the publication of Ricardo's Principles placed him within the period under discussion by Seligman. Sharp possessed an extremely wide range of interests and was a prolific writer on a remarkable variety of topics. By 1809 he was a prominent public figure and had produced more than 40 separate works, several of which had reached second or third editions. He had established a reputation as a controversialist and his oeuvre is certainly consistent with Seligman's generalisation that the ‘greater part of the economic literature’ between 1776 (the year of The Wealth of Nations) and 1817 consisted of ‘pamphlets dealing with current practical problems’ (Seligman, 1903, p. 336). Sharp had published on the conditions in West Africa, the illegality of the press-ganging of sailors, parliamentary reform, colonial law, frankpledge, a popular militia and public charities.

Details

English, Irish and Subversives among the Dismal Scientists
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-061-3

Article
Publication date: 29 March 2023

Christian Muntwiler and Martin J. Eppler

This article aims to explore the so-called illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) of managers regarding their understanding of digital technologies and examines the effect of…

Abstract

Purpose

This article aims to explore the so-called illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) of managers regarding their understanding of digital technologies and examines the effect of knowledge visualization one’s current understanding and decision making. Its purpose is to show that managers think they know more than they do and that this affects decision making but can be reduced through knowledge visualization.

Design/methodology/approach

In two experiments with experienced managers, the authors investigate the size and impact of the IOED bias in decision making and examine if sketched self-explanations are as effective as written self-explanations to reduce the bias.

Findings

The findings show that experienced managers suffer from a significant illusion concerning their explanatory understanding of digital technologies and that sketching one’s current level of explanatory understanding of these technologies supports the accurate calibration of one’s knowledge. The findings indicate that sketching knowledge is a helpful modality for the detection and subsequent recalibration of biased knowledge in domain-dependent decision making.

Originality/value

This article is the first to explore the effect of sketched knowledge externalization on the calibration of explanatory knowledge of managers. It extends the literature on both, the IOED and on knowledge visualization as an instrument of knowledge calibration.

Details

Management Decision, vol. 61 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0025-1747

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 November 2015

Charlie D. Frowd, William B. Erickson, James M. Lampinen, Faye C. Skelton, Alex H. McIntyre and Peter J.B. Hancock

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of seven variables that emerge from forensic research on facial-composite construction and naming using contemporary police…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of seven variables that emerge from forensic research on facial-composite construction and naming using contemporary police systems: EvoFIT, Feature and Sketch.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper involves regression- and meta-analyses on composite-naming data from 23 studies that have followed procedures used by police practitioners for forensic face construction. The corpus for analyses contains 6,464 individual naming responses from 1,069 participants in 41 experimental conditions.

Findings

The analyses reveal that composites constructed from the holistic EvoFIT system were over four-times more identifiable than composites from “Feature” (E-FIT and PRO-fit) and Sketch systems; Sketch was somewhat more effective than Feature systems. EvoFIT was more effective when internal features were created before rather than after selecting hair and the other (blurred) external features. Adding questions about the global appearance of the face (as part of the holistic-cognitive interview (H-CI)) gives a valuable improvement in naming over the standard face-recall cognitive interview (CI) for all three system types tested. The analysis also confirmed that composites were considerably less effective when constructed from a long (one to two days) compared with a short (0-3.5 hours) retention interval.

Practical implications

Variables were assessed that are of importance to forensic practitioners who construct composites with witnesses and victims of crime.

Originality/value

Using a large corpus of forensically-relevant data, the main result is that EvoFIT using the internal-features method of construction is superior; an H-CI administered prior to face construction is also advantageous (cf. face-recall CI) for EvoFIT as well as for two further contrasting production systems.

Details

Journal of Forensic Practice, vol. 17 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-8794

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 31 October 2008

Amelia Breytenbach and Ria Groenewald

Although several collections have been digitized and made available in the University of Pretoria's Institutional Repository, a pilot study has not been done to measure the…

Abstract

Purpose

Although several collections have been digitized and made available in the University of Pretoria's Institutional Repository, a pilot study has not been done to measure the project management and workflow. The collections available in the repository at the time of this project were all long‐term projects. There was a need to identify a project small enough to conform to normal project management requirements to use as an example to establish the planning and workflow of future projects. The purpose of this study is to determine the outcome and quality of the final web‐ready institutional repository product against specific digitization project goals.

Design/methodology/approach

A collection of anatomical sketches in the custody of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, Department of Anatomy and Physiology was identified as a possible collection that could comply with the above criteria. The different sketches in the Elephant collection could be digitized in phases, making it an ideal project for future comparison. In each phase a number of tasks were identified which the various role players should complete during the workflow process. Each phase would be compared to the previous completed phases to measure the outcomes and progress made in quality and time. Through successful interaction and collaboration between the Library and the Department of Anatomy and Physiology during the digitization process, valuable tacit knowledge could be preserved for future use in the field of Veterinary Science.

Findings

The completed project delivered on key areas such as the electronic availability of the collection through metadata description. Basic preservation of the physical collection was undertaken as necessary and the physical as well as the digital collections were archived for future use. The conclusion will describe the lessons learned and how it can be applied in future projects to the advantage of the institution.

Practical implications

The paper provides a very useful case study for other academic libraries that want to develop their own digital collections.

Originality/value

This paper offers practical help to libraries starting with digitization. It supplies valuable information for project management, planning of workflow and estimate time frames for completing a specific task in the digitization process.

Details

OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, vol. 24 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1065-075X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 June 2015

Ece Kumkale Açikgöz

Structuring the outline for an architectural design studio experience has a significant role in students’ meaningful design experiences. Meaningful experience is related with…

Abstract

Structuring the outline for an architectural design studio experience has a significant role in students’ meaningful design experiences. Meaningful experience is related with students’ receptivity and idea generation for the ill-structured problems of architectural design. This identification influences the study, which investigates the application of a model for structuring the design studio experience, organized to occur in two phases; problem reception and problem solving. The model employs a combination of two different techniques with a special focus on reflexivity. It completes the extensions level required for the ICE Approach with the C-Sketch ideation technique by employing their adapted versions for architectural design studio practice. The common features of these techniques are their adaptability to any problem, explication centered and process oriented natures, focus on effective brainstorming and suitability on design teamwork studies. There is a remarkable potential to correlate the results of the two techniques.

The model was processed within a vertical design studio at Gazi University, Department of Architecture. It enabled getting use of diverse backgrounds within a design team by structuring the collective design process and optimizing the contribution rates of the team members. The method was employed to guide the design study of the experimental group of two teams with ten members in total. The control group was the randomly selected two teams from other teams that did not apply the model, with eleven members in total. The members of the two groups were applied a semi-structured questionnaire at the end of the semester, with a special focus on the internal consistency within the answers of the members of a single team. The results of the qualitative study indicated that the explication based structuring of the design studio experience has had a positive impact on achieving consistency and coherency in the design processes of the experimental groups.

Details

Open House International, vol. 40 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0168-2601

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 June 2015

Anna Katrine Hougaard

Architectural drawing is changing because architects today draw with computers. Due to this change digital diagrams employed by computational architectural practices are often…

Abstract

Architectural drawing is changing because architects today draw with computers. Due to this change digital diagrams employed by computational architectural practices are often emphasized as powerful structures of control and organisation in the design process. But there are also diagrams, which do not follow computational logic worth paying attention to. In the following I will investigate one such other kind of diagram, a sketch diagram, which has a play-like capacity where rules can be invented and changed as you go. In that way, sketch diagrams are related to steered indeterminacy and authorial ways of directing behaviour of artefacts and living things without controlling this behaviour completely. I analyse a musical composition by John Cage as an example of a sketch diagram, and then hypothesize that orthogonal, architectural drawing can work in similar ways. Thereby I hope to point out important affordance of architectural drawing as a ¬hybrid between the openness of hand-sketching and the rule-basedness of diagramming, an affordance which might be useful in the migrational zone of current architectural drawing where traditional hand drawing techniques and computer drawing techniques are being combined with each other.

Details

Open House International, vol. 40 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0168-2601

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 9 November 2015

Cristina Fodarella, Heidi Kuivaniemi-Smith, Julie Gawrylowicz and Charlie D. Frowd

The paper provides a detailed description of standard procedures for constructing facial composites. These procedures are relevant to forensic practice and are contained in the…

Abstract

Purpose

The paper provides a detailed description of standard procedures for constructing facial composites. These procedures are relevant to forensic practice and are contained in the technical papers of this special issue; the purpose of this paper is also to provide an expanding reference of procedures for future research on facial composites and facial-composite systems.

Design/methodology/approach

A detailed account is given of the interaction between practitioner and witness for producing a facial composite. This account involves an overview of the Cognitive Interview (CI) and the Holistic CI (H-CI) techniques used to obtain a description of the face of an offender (target); the authors then describe how this information is used to produce a composite from five popular face-production systems: Sketch, PRO-fit, Electronic Facial Identification Technique (E-FIT), EvoFIT and EFIT-V. An online annex is also made available to provide procedural information for additional composite systems.

Practical implications

The work is valuable to forensic practitioners and researchers as a reference for interviewing techniques (involving a CI or an H-CI) and using facial-composite systems.

Originality/value

The authors provide an accessible, current guide for how to administer interviewing techniques and how to construct composites from a range of face-production systems.

Details

Journal of Forensic Practice, vol. 17 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2050-8794

Keywords

Case study
Publication date: 20 January 2017

Paul W. Farris and Rajkumar Venkatesan

This case is intended to be part of a first-year MBA marketing course, or a second-year elective in advertising, integrated marketing communications, market research, or marketing…

Abstract

This case is intended to be part of a first-year MBA marketing course, or a second-year elective in advertising, integrated marketing communications, market research, or marketing analytics. The case provides students with examples of two real advertising experiments and the challenges involved in executing the experiments. It allows for a discussion of the need for advertising experiments, and also, at a more general level, the need to measure the return on marketing. Biases surrounding the field experiments allow for a discussion of the problems with establishing a causal relationship between advertising and sales.

Details

Darden Business Publishing Cases, vol. no.
Type: Case Study
ISSN: 2474-7890
Published by: University of Virginia Darden School Foundation

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 26 October 2020

Lisa Thurlow

This paper aims to consider the realities and problematics of applying a grounded theory (GT) approach to research, as a novice, within a mixed methods study during post graduate…

5063

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to consider the realities and problematics of applying a grounded theory (GT) approach to research, as a novice, within a mixed methods study during post graduate research. Its intention is to provide the novice user with a framework of considerations and greater awareness of the issues that GT can expose during research activity.

Design/methodology/approach

Using empirical evidence and a comparative approach, the paper compares the efficacy of both the classic Glaserian and Straussian models. It observes the effects of a positivist academic environment upon the choice of approach and its application. This study was specific to design education; however, its reliance upon a social science epistemology results in findings beneficial to research novices across broader disciplines.

Findings

GT presents the novice researcher with several potential pitfalls. Most problematic were the immutable, positivist institutional requirements, researcher a priori knowledge, the reliance upon literature for the research proposal and structure of the proposal itself. These include suspension of the notion that the purist use of either model can be applied in the current academic environment, the need for a close relationship with the data and toleration of a non-linear process with unexpected results.

Originality/value

The practicalities of GT research are often reflected upon by the academy, but use by novice researchers is little considered. The findings from this study provide a novel set of guidelines for use by those embarking on GT research and particularly where the requirements of formal education may cause a conflict.

11 – 20 of over 12000