4.3 Managing projects and project teams Projects take place within organisations whose structures, philosophies and cultures affect how work is planned and carried out. I shall briefly discuss organisations and how they go about planning as they relate to projects. Projects also exist within a social environment consisting of people who are affected by and have an influence on the outcome of projects.
3.2.2 Group size Another significant feature of a work group is its size. To be effective it should be neither too large nor too small. As membership increases there is a trade-off between increased collective expertise and decreased involvement and satisfaction of individual members. A very small group may not have the range of skills it requires to function well. The optimum size depends partly on the group's purpose. A group for information sharing or decision making may need to be larger than one for prob
2.8 Why do (only some) teams succeed? Clearly, it is not possible to devise a set of rules which, if followed, would lead inexorably to team effectiveness. The determinants of a successful team are complex and not equivalent to following a set of prescriptions. However, the results of poor teamworking can be expensive, so it is useful to draw on research, experience and case studies to explore some general guidelines. What do I mean by ‘team effectiveness'? – the achievement of goals alone? Where do the achievements of indivi
2.3.7 New types of team In addition to the traditional types of teams or groups outlined above, recent years have seen the growth of interest in two other important types of team: ‘self-managed teams’ and ‘self-organising teams’. During the 1990s many organisations in the UK became interested in notions of empowerment and, often as a consequence, set up self-managed or empowered teams. An Industrial Society Survey (1995) commented: 2.3.3 The matrix team In a matrix team, staff report to different managers for different aspects of their work. Matrix structures are often, but not exclusively, found in projects. Staff will be responsible to the project manager for their work on the project while their functional line manager will be responsible for other aspects of their work such as appraisal, training and career development, and ‘routine’ tasks. This matrix project structure is represented in Figure 2. 2.3 Types of teams Different organisations or organisational settings lead to different types of team. The type of team affects how that team is managed, what the communication needs of the team are and, where appropriate, what aspects of the project the project manager needs to emphasise. A work group or team may be permanent, forming part of the organisation's structure, such as a top management team, or temporary, such as a task force assembled to see through a particular project. Members may work as a group 2.1 What is a group? Our tendency to form groups is a pervasive aspect of organisational life. As well as formal groups, committees and teams, there are informal groups, cliques and cabals. Formal groups are used to organise and distribute work, pool information, devise plans, coordinate activities, increase commitment, negotiate, resolve conflicts and conduct inquests. Group working allows the pooling of people's individual skills and knowledge, and helps compensate for individual deficiencies. It has been 4.5.2 Commercial copolymers The main reason for copolymerizing different monomers is to adjust the physical properties of a given homopolymer to meet a specific demand. SBR elastomer, for example (Table 1), based on 24 wt% styrene monomer shows better mechanical properties and better resistance to degradation than polybutadiene alone. By increasing the s 3.1 Primary sources of synthetic polymers The most important primary sources of synthetic polymers are crude oil, natural gas and, to a minor extent, coal. Because all are primarily fuels rather than sources of materials, the manufacture of polymers is susceptible to changes in price or supply. However, this is also true of other materials, since fuel costs are an important component of metal, ceramic and glass manufacture where very high reaction temperatures are needed for reduction of ore to metal and/or smelting. Where polymer ma 2.7.1 Thermosets There are some limitations to the concept of the repeat unit when applied to crosslinked polymers, the thermosets. This is because of the complexity of the crosslinking reactions, the way molecules link together chemically during thermoset processing. For example, phenolic resins (the basis for materials like Bakelite) are prepared initially as prepolymers, i.e. polymers of low molecular mass (ca. 1000) by reaction between phenol and formaldehyde ( 2.5.2 Polymer families But how do small changes in chain configuration for a given family of polymers affect their properties? A very clear example of slight changes in the repeat unit structure is exhibited by polyamides, polyesters and polyurethanes. They are all polymers linked together by a particular kind of functional group, which gives the name to each family. Their backbone chain may either be aliphatic or aromatic in nature, although here we'll only be examining trends for the aliphatic polymers. One way o 2.3.1 Structural isomerism In the saturated hydrocarbons, whose structural formulae are shown in Figure 16, it is not possible to form distinct isomers with just three or less carbon atoms linked together. There is only one way in which one carbon and four hydrogen atoms can be linked together, the single compound being methane, CH4. A simila 2.4 Models as part of systems work Thinking systemically involves identifying systems relevant to some situation, and models are invariably used as part of this process. An example of this forms part of Checklands' Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1981). One aspect of this methodology concerns the formulation of a root definition of some system that is relevant to the situation of interest and the construction of a conceptual model of this system. The root definition is a concise, verbal description of what a 2.3 Some general categories of model The preceding text has probably suggested several examples of different types of model to you, and at a very broad level, we can categorise the sorts of model we are likely to use in systems work as
Mental models: We have already seen how the ways in which we think and act are shaped by these. As well as the internal representations discussed in Section 2.1, mental models also include language and linguistic models, in particular the metaphors that we use in thinking and talking 1 Preamble I have assumed that you have come to this unit because you are interested in the use of models as part of a systems or systemic approach to some situation. This means that I expect certain things of you: You to have an interest in understanding and interacting with some situation which you find puzzling, intriguing, worrying or which you are trying to manage. You believe the situation involves more than ju 4.4 The use of systems engineering in organisations: different organisational arrangements Hall identified three different organisational arrangements that might provide a framework within which systems engineering work could take place within the organisation. The first of these, which he termed the departmental form and regarded as the lowest level of arrangement, was essentially a temporary team of specialists brought together, under the management of a team leader, to undertake a specific project. The team consisted of members of each of the specialist development departments a Stage 2: The situation analysed The first step is to develop a picture (called in soft systems terminology a rich picture) that encapsulates all the elements that people think are involved in the problem. Once the rich picture has been drawn, the analyst will attempt to extract ‘issues’ and key tasks. Issues are areas of contention within the problem situation. Key tasks are the essential jobs that must be undertaken within the problem situation. 1.9 Increasing complication, complexity and risk: summary The three levels of change problem, simplicity, complication and complexity, can be associated with craft, engineering and systems engineering knowledge. The three categories of change problem represent different levels of uncertainty of what needs to be done and how to do it. The greater uncertainty brings increased risk. Although we tend to be risk averse we will take on greater risk if the returns are commensurate with doing so. Human experience can be divided into three worlds. The Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following source for permission to reproduce material within this unit: 4.5.2 10 Gigabit Ethernet The standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet (IEEE 802.3ae, lOGbE) was approved in July 2002. The main use of lOGbE, initially at least, is for backbone networks which interconnect 10, 100 or 1000 Mbit/s Ethernet hubs. These hubs might be widely separated geographically, so the standard includes physical layer specifications specifically for WAN (wide area network) applications as well as LAN applications. The WAN specification is for operation at slightly under 10 Gbit/s, 9.95328 Gbit/s, so as to be
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