6.2 Conflicting objectives You have just seen how an objective to maximise market share may not be compatible with an objective to maximise profits. Businesses may have multiple objectives, many of which conflict. Think, for example, how difficult it would be for an oil refinery to both maximise profits and minimise the effect upon the environment of its production activities. Similarly, maintaining high product quality while minimising costs would be extremely difficult. Imagine if a business was struggling. Its
5.4.2 The main body of the interview Your main objective is to gather information. A practical target is to expect the candidate to talk for 70 per cent of the time. Example 2 describes the kind of conduct to avoid when interviewing. 3.3 Person–organisation fit This approach stresses that people's behaviour and performance are strongly influenced by the environment in which they find themselves. So being successful in a job in one organisation does not necessarily imply success in a similar job in another. In assessing the suitability of a job applicant a manager should explore the reasons why a person has performed well in their existing job and consider whether similar conditions apply in the new job. Advocates of the person-organisation fit appro References 3.6.1 Saying thank you and acknowledging current contribution Probably the single most important way of retaining people's support and goodwill is to say thank you promptly and to demonstrate that you have noted and valued whatever it is they have contributed. If you do not have the systems to guarantee that supporters are thanked appropriately, then you cannot seriously expect to move anyone anywhere – be it up a pyramid, into a kite or round a matrix. References 4.2.3 Restating the problem If your analysis of the problem and its possible causes is thorough, it should enable you to rewrite the problem statement to include the causes. If you can clarify your objective by defining a desired end-state, you are more likely to produce a good solution. 3.1 Introduction Communication on project work is the glue that holds everything together! (Young 1998) The success of a project is principally determined by its stakeholders, including sponsors and project team, and you can only know how you are doing by keeping channels of communication open. In this section, we examine briefly some of the issues involved in communicating with all people involved with the 2.5 Project meetings schedule You need to decide early on what meetings are essential to the monitoring process. All your stakeholders will expect to receive reports at regular intervals, whether formally or informally. So you need to ask yourself: Who needs to be informed? About what? How often? By what means? Effective communication involves giving information, collecting information and listening to people. To ensure the 1.3 Motivating and preparing staff Motivation is important. In resourcing the project it may be worthwhile to build in a reward system that helps to motivate. This depends on the availability of the resources to make this possible. Even if the material rewards are good, the conditions in which staff work and the relationships between them always affect performance. A project manager is often able to influence conditions and culture. The tasks allocated to staff must be realistic and achievable, and it is helpful to agree these Introduction The focus of this unit is on implementing a project. The first part considers how the activities of a project start. Although planning and action run side by side, it is often difficult to initiate action to progress the first tasks. Once things start to happen, the project enters a new stage. Management of the project changes, from stimulating the initial action to monitoring and reviewing it in order to control the project's progress. Control systems are essential in managing a project of a 2.2.2 Mass production In many industries, craft manufacturing began to be replaced by mass production in the 19th century. Mass production involves producing goods in high volume with low variety – the opposite of craft manufacturing. Customers are expected to buy what is supplied, rather than goods made to their own specifications. Producers concentrated on keeping costs, and hence prices, down by minimising the variety of both components and products and setting up large production runs. They developed aggress 2.7 Multiple-cause diagrams As a general rule, an event or outcome will have more than one cause. A multiple-cause diagram will enable you to show the causes and the ways in which they are connected. Suppose, for example, that you were asked to explain why a work group was under-performing. You could use a multiple-cause diagram both to help you to construct the explanation and to present it. 2.6 Mind mapping The term mind mapping was devised by Tony Buzan for the representation of such
things as ideas, notes and information, in radial tree diagrams — sometimes also called
spider diagrams. These are now very widely used — try a web search on ‘Buzan’, ‘mind map’
or ‘concept map’. 2.4 Systems thinking ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’ is a good place to start thinking about systems. A car is more than its individual components. We can think of a football team as being more than a collection of individual players or a family being more than a group of people who share the same name. Each of these examples – the car, the football team and the family – can be seen as systems. Individual parts of a system are connected together in some way for a purpose. Example 2.1.2 How a force-field diagram can help The diagram is a useful expositional or presentational device. When you are presenting an analysis or proposal, the diagram will enable you to describe (and distinguish between) the reasons for a change. It will enable you to do the same for the reasons why a change may be resisted. The diagram will be an explicit prompt for exploring the restraining forces. The more a manager finds out about these, and the earlier, the better placed the manag 1.6.2 Using the matrix The results of the evaluation reflect the scores that are awarded to each option and the weightings that are attached to the different criteria. A change in one or the other (or in both) will lead to a change in the results. Accordingly, when you construct a matrix of this kind be sure to think hard about the scores and weightings. A matrix like this can be used in many ways, for example, when interviewing applicants as part of a selection process. 1.2.1 Selecting the scales The scales that are used determine the look of the graph. For example, if the horizontal distance between ‘Year 1’ and ‘Year 6’ shown in Figure 2 were doubled, the line would be stretched to double its present length. If the horizontal distance were halved, 2.4 Reasons against social marketing Arguments against the use of social marketing can be based on the following:
Cost – Social marketing programmes can cost considerable amounts of money. Criticisms of these expenditures are heightened as they are often financed by public money in times of resource constraints and therefore have a high opportunity cost. A related issue is that of the problems involved in assessing the success of these programmes. The long term nature of behavi References
