User:Randyfisher/MP/Topics Old

Revised Thinking
(exploring congruence between organizational innovation, and structures, processes, and culture to support it)
 * How can the Open Source Distributed Leadership culture / practices initiate, sustain and scale innovation within projects?

Titles

 * The Paradox of Control: Project Management, Communication and Cultural Resistance
 * critical success factors

Links

 * '''Research Questions
 * References
 * Project Management Docs (Treasury Board, Canada)
 * Wayne's initial thoughts on my research outline - perceptual barriers to OERs

Articles

 * See my article on Complexity & Self-Organization

Project Internal Issues - Project Team

 * Ownership, buy-in
 * Project definition
 * Scope
 * Governing Structure / Reporting Relationships
 * Work expectations (i.e., google - 20% time focused on innovation)
 * Leadership (Distributed)
 * Individual competencies
 * Resources
 * Technologies
 * Collaboration
 * Project metrics - M&E, reporting
 * Processes
 * Culture
 * Values, beliefs
 * Openness
 * Individualism, convergence / alignment with organizational aims; checking in / reconciling different interpretations
 * tensions...
 * Performance

Project Internal / Organizational Internal (OI) - Interface

 * Process
 * Structure
 * Communications (including project metrics)
 * Education / awareness / buy-in - complexity, emergence, self-orgn
 * Performance

Organizational Internal

 * Support, Resources
 * Communications
 * Power, control, authority, decision-making, predictability, interests, structure, personalities, role, role legacy (i.e., what person used to do, power base)
 * Stakeholder Relationships
 * employees, managers, funders, Board of Directors / Governors
 * Culture (open / closed)
 * Trust
 * Values, beliefs
 * Organizational rules, policies
 * How can project development contribute to organisational transformation - within organization?
 * What is nature of relationship with Project? What will happen over lifecycle of project - if success or failure? What are models?
 * skunkworks
 * project unit
 * embedded alliance / merger
 * other models
 * eventually, spinoff - what type of relationship is possible? (financial, non-financial, agreements, staff, etc.)
 * Knowledge Transfer / Models for Collaboration / Leading Practices

Hudson Class, Assignment 1
1. WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM SOLVING INTERVENTION? Hypothesis 1: High-performing project teams benefit from a cultural mapping intervention at different stages in the project management process. Hypothesis 2: When team members are oriented towards greater cultural awareness and understanding about their peers, they will exhibit less anxiety and resistance. 2. HOW DO YOU PLAN TO MEASURE SUCCESS?

Identify cultures and subcultures within the project team Identify stages of cultural adaptation within the project management process. Comparisions between stages of cultural adaptation and project management stage Comparisons between control group and non-control group ~ those without the intervention.

3. WHAT ARE SOME REAL WORLD EXAMPLES?

Many projects do not achieve their objectives, in either time-to-market or quality, because of misunderstanding of sorts.

Focus on 'cultural misunderstanding' generally takes place for joint-venture project teams (i.e., between countries), not the composition of a specific project team comprised of different cultures (i.e., an ERP project at a university).

4. WHAT’S YOUR BASIC RESEARCH DESIGN? Short answer: I don't know ~ and any advice would be appreciated. That being said: Introduce Cultural Mapping Tool into a project to assess the following:

their awareness of cultural difference / clashes within the project their level of anxiety / resistance at different project phases how their coping strategies affect their productivity.

5. NAME AT LEAST ONE KEY CONTINGENCY SUCCESS They include: the support and resources from the project sponsor; project duration; and relative importance of project relative to others; and project dependencies. 6. WHAT’S YOUR MESSAGE BEYOND WHAT’S OBVIOUS? High performing project teams benefit from knowledge of internal cultural differences --> using this knowledge to cope and improve productivity.

7. WHAT KEY RESOURCES ARE YOU DRAWING ON? Allen, David and Kern, Thomas. (2001). Enterprise Resource Planning Implementation: Stories of Power, Politics, and Resistance Source IFIP Conference Proceedings; Vol. 194 pp. 149 - 162 ISBN:0-7923-7420-7 - http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=722242&dl=GUIDE&coll=GUIDE

Babbie, E. (2005) The Basics of Social Research. New York: Wadsworth (Third Edition—Paperback); ISBN #0-534-51904-0.

Brewerton, P. and Millward, L. (2001). Organizational Research Methods. Sage Publications (Paperback); ISBN: 0-7619-7101-7.

Audiences (Samples)

 * Educators / Education Specialists - in primary, secondary, tertiary (higher ed). vocational or professional development
 * setting (classroom-based or online); and
 * type of institution (public or private)
 * Instructional / Learning Designers
 * Learners / Students
 * Administrators / Program Managers
 * Policy Makers
 * Opinion Leaders
 * Other / Related

Narrowing Down the Field

 * Choose a target group of educators who might have significant leverage and influence for other educators...
 * Find out what precisely which content and formats are likely to 'reach them', and to provide practical examples of "potential uses" that they are interested in....That will help increase adoption.

Characteristics / Attributes

 * Innovators, Early Adopters - Geoffrey Moore's - Crossing the Chasm methodology

Issues

 * the degree to which these folks actually have some awareness and/or experience with Open Educational Content and/or open source technology
 * how will this limit the composition of the focus groups (research design)
 * would this distort results if I limit the focus group / survey to that group (i.e., would they be pre-disposed to using open content?)
 * A. I believe there is wide variation among users - and their pre-disposition to do certain things. But point well-taken.

Potential Barriers

 * Skill development
 * Use of new technologies
 * Concern about a shift in roles (from teacher to facilitator);
 * Concern about losing control over their work (which may include receiving credit where credit is due)
 * Concern about intellectual property and copyright issues;
 * Lack of understanding about the rationale and use of open educational content (or OERs;
 * Concern about financial compensation; or inadequate budgetary resources;
 * Personal insecurity and / or feelings of a lack of competence or inadequacy;
 * Fear regarding others’ perception of their actions (i.e., within their institution; or in their peer community)
 * Concern about their negatively affecting their professional reputation;
 * Direction and / or mandate from their superiors
 * The overall operating context
 * Educator’s prior experience with open educational content (or OER’s)
 * Lack of awareness about availability of this resource and practical exposure to potential uses? (thanks Steve Page!)

Thoughts About Innovation
Very well done, thoughtfully developed paper. (House, Unit Three, Topic Two Metaphor Paper_

I found this passage quite interesting - The development of new understandings “can transform the autopoietic processes of self-reference through which a system produces and reproduces its basic sense of identity” (Morgan, 2006, p. 259). This can be achieved through a learning process wherein the system is presented with new information about itself and its environment, enabling those within the system to view the organization in a different way."

My thought is, that this in and of itself represents a culture change which is far easier to talk about than to do. Also, there is a self-referential (reflection) piece that has to occur, which creates greater readiness for both personal transformation, and organization culture transformation.

In my work for Jeff Frakes' course on Performance Consulting, I'm referring to an article in the Winter 2008 edition of the OD Practitioner "Energetics and OD", by Alla Heorhadi and John Conbere (pp. 36-39). Their central thesis that there are "subtle energy fields that underly physical objects and events"....which in turn can be useful "tools for diagnosing and healing individual and group problems." (My review of the article will be posted today, on WikiEducator - http://www.wikieducator.org/OMD/622/Individual_Performance )

As the organization moves from one culture or image to another, many folks can be left behind....and create great resistance, which impedes the ability to move and create / sustain momentum....

What are your thoughts regarding the "Learning Process" that Morgan talks about...Do you think that there is any upfront design work (and followup too) that needs to be done, in order to facilitate greater effectiveness of this Learning Process?

Hi randy ... you wrote:

What are your thoughts regarding the "Learning Process" that Morgan talks about...Do you think that there is any upfront design work (and followup too) that needs to be done, in order to facilitate greater effectiveness of this Learning Process?

While I would need to think about your question ... I found myself thinking about the concept of learning. What does learning mean to different people? We learners here @ Fielding and in the 'business' of learning, may hold a particular definition / value of learning that others may not hold. I find myself caught by surprise by those folks who want to share their own knowledge and expertise and are unwilling/unable/unaware of the notion of actively engaging in their own learning. Asking the question, "what do I think I know about this / that?  and ... what do I not have any awareness about this / that?"

Randy I will go back to your question ... and wanted to share these thoughts that popped up in my head ...

thanks .. Randy

Now we're both thinking and learning!

Yes, I find it hard to understand why someone might not necessarily be engaged in reflecting about their own learning - maybe that has to do somewhat with the actual design of the training....

I think the best Homework is not to assign any work, other than to reflect on what happened during the day of 'training', according to some guidelines or questions, and then do a debrief first thing the next morning...to integrate... and repeat the next night....

Then the integration begins.... :-)

Randy

Interesting question, Randy - I found myself thinking about the learning chapter when I read this statement in Group D's cultural paper:

But it is important to note that a strong culture is not necessarily a successful culture unless it encourages a healthy adaptation to the external environment!

You can see how a culture pointed away from responsiveness and adaptation would quickly run into trouble. It reminded me of the metaphor of learning organizations, and how, without the addition of the double-loop learning (the self-reflective, learning about the learning step), an organization might stand to accelerate in a direction toward bureaucratization. As Morgan says,

"Different sectors of the organization thus often operate on the basis of different pictures of the total situation, pursuing sub-unit goals almost as ends in themselves.

The existence of such divisions tends to emphasize the distinctions between different elements of the organization and fosters the development of political systems that place yet further barriers in the way of learning...Under these circumstances, single-loop learning systems are reinforced and may actually serve to keep an organization on the wrong course" (Morgan, 2006. p. 86).

So yes, I think there's a lot to this idea of the reflective step and how necessary it is in open-ended systems. And while I'm very new to Integral ways of thinking, it seems like the necessity of understanding the boundaries/differences in different points of view might also be critical.

Reg,

I can certainly understand your perspective about successful organizations....makes sense to me...

I think one of the challenges to innovation, is this creep towards buraucratization, administration and control over time....In some org's the image changes from flux and transformation, to interests, conflict and power, and really a hybrid....particularly if the organization has had to downsize or the market has changed from under it....and for example, the VC's or funders want to get a rein on expenses, and perhaps exit more quickly....then, there's a move to greater top-down control....which is the antithesis of why many funders get involved in creative ventures in the first place....it's a balancing act, really...

Totally with you on the double loop learning - reflection, and at least having the benefit of it, is just SO valuable....not only for individuals, but for groups, teams, communities within an organization....