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This book examines practically useful management and people skills,
and looks at competencies from the micro, meso, and macro- lens. At
the micro- level, the book examines a range of competencies needed
for managing oneself and others in a project environment, such as
personality style, cognitive skills, communication skills, and
emotional intelligence. The book will also includes discussion on
strategies for managing emotions of self and others effectively. At
the meso- level, the book discusses basic structure,
characteristics, and importance of different types of teams such as
virtual teams, project teams, domain specific teams, and
heavy-weight teams in organizations to enhance productivity and
delegate accountability. It also explores team processes, including
structure, culture, supporting systems, performance and incentive
systems, and their impact on team productivity. In addition, the
book includes a discourse on skills to manage a multi-generational
workforce (a combination of baby boomers, X and Y generation), a
challenge faced by project managers in current scenario. Finally,
at the macro- level, the book captures the role of culture in a
project context; emerging leadership styles in projects,
maintaining relationship with internal and external stakeholders;
role of power, politics and influence in relationship building
(social networks and social capital); and managing conflicts and
negotiations. The book presents ethical considerations in managing
projects; relationship between projects and sustainability;
societal responsibilities of projects; advantages and disadvantages
of forms of control in projects (behaviour and outcome control). It
is positioned primarily for practitioners although it is a relevant
and useful resource and reference for academics and students of
project management and management studies courses.
Project management (PM), traditionally employed to implement
projects, has developed into Organizational Project Management, as
organizations are increasingly using projects to deliver
strategies. The emergence of program and portfolio management has
also contributed to this move. PM researchers need to become more
innovative in their research approaches. They need to connect with
the broader currents of social science in relevant fields, such as
organization theory. Outside the specific field, there is a great
deal that can usefully be imported, transformed, and translated so
that it is fit for project management research purposes. More
trans-disciplinary, translational, and transformational approaches
for conducting project-related research are required, and this book
goes a long way to providing foundations for them. The book
encompasses reflections on fundamental questions underlying any
research, such as the type of knowledge sought, as well as the
epistemological and ontological assumptions. It broadens research
methods and theory perspectives, drawing on contemporary
approaches, such as action research, soft systems methodology,
activity theory, actor-network theory, and other approaches adopted
in related scientific and technological areas that are only
recently being adopted. To achieve this, the book's editors have
necessarily been eclectically interdisciplinary in their
contributor list. They have included contemporary research methods
and designs from areas allied to project research - such as
organization science, organizational studies, sociology, behavioral
science, and biology - providing innovative invitations to research
design and methodological choice. Overall, this book makes a
significant contribution to the maturation and development of
project management research as a specialty in the broader social
sciences, one that is a less-reliant handmaiden or under-laborer to
purely technical issues, but which appreciates that any material
construction is always a social construction as well, one that
implies episteme and phronesis, knowledge and wisdom, as well as
techne or technique. Project managers may not realize it, but the
most important aspects of what they manage are the meanings,
interpretations, and politics of projects, and not merely the
technical aspects. (Series: Advances in Organization Studies - Vol.
29)
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