As the world is becoming more and more globalized, business has to take the global marketplace into serious consideration. This is not just about new markets to sell products in, but also where to locate production and where to source resources from. With the launch of new communication technology it has also become easier and easier to cooperate across national borders without having to meet face-to-face. This has led to an increased demand on project managers concerning how to manage the communication within their project teams since they now can have members located in different geographical locations. The main purpose of this research was to develop a deeper understanding about how project managers are managing communication within virtual teams. This was firstly done by through a literature review of the present knowledge in the field identifying five sub topics of interest. Communication channels Skills for effective communication Dealing with technology Dealing with differences in culture and language Managing trust and relationships These sub topics were used through the rest of the thesis as the structure of the argumentation. The empirical research consisted of a deductive interview study of four respondents within the ICT sectors in Sweden and Denmark. Through the analysis and the conclusions all the topics were discussed in detail, where we got to know more about how they can be used to manage communication in virtual project teams. Something that came up in the analysis was the role of corporate culture in dealing with challenges in virtual communication, which in the end was suggested as a main topic for future research. Different communication channels showed to be good for different things, both in terms of the efficiency of the communication but also for things such as facilitating engagement and accountability. There seem to be no clear understanding of what skills are required for efficient work in virtual teams, both in the present knowledge in the field and among the respondents. For managing technology it showed to be important to make sure that the technology works, that the team members know how to use it and why, and to find ways to warm up the media by making it more personal. Differences in culture and language were found to best be dealt with by building trust within the team and creating an understanding of the existing differences. Asynchronous communication showed to be effective for dealing with bigger language problems. The solutions for managing trust and relationships mainly revolved around social communication and getting to know each other better in the beginning, and around regular and predictable communication in the long run.

The world famous marketing master Elliott Ettenberg indicated in his new book ¡§ The Next Economy¡¨(2003), customer has become corporate main focus in new economy era. Increasing product added value and improving customer relations have been corporate prime objective. This has been obvious in Taiwan industry. With dramatic environment changes and aggressive market competition, performance improvement and sales team enhancement have been one of the most important topics in business administration. For electronic companies aiming to enter global market, an operation flow of quickly responding to market demand and customer satisfaction, especially in order taking, design and development, manufacturing, quality assurance, testing, packing, transportation, price and service, has been a major subject to be tackled under global competition and rapidly changing business environment. For a long time, many companies face the problem of numerous functional departments not being able to integrate, thus, customers are obliged to receive various and fragmental message. Functional departments often got shortcomings such as limited knowledge, incomprehensive thoughts and even departmental egoism. They normally don¡¦t emphasize on teamwork with other departments and are not able to provide valuable opinions. Their decision perspectives would be restricted, instead of being comprehensive. In addition, organization hierarchy often results in slow problem-solving responses. They also lack of customer-oriented concepts. Their staff is more loyal to the department than to projects or customers. One of the effective and often seen solutions is to set up a cross-product or cross-functional account team. For efficient operation of such project organization, some companies would set up a project office to assist or monitor the progress of projects. Project management is one of the rapidly growing territories in business administration. Through in-depth interviews and literature retrospective study, this research attempts to understand the operation model of project office in view of customer and service orientation; via empirical observations, interviews and analysis of subject project office real operation, the research tempts to tackle major issues on project office operation. From a broad view, the management of a project office is part of project management, but its characteristics and management model is different from project deployment. This research expects to establish an operation and management model of project office and provide appropriate recommendations as reference to its practical operation.

With the technology advance day by day, it is becoming the common way to accomplish the challenges of difficult engineering by project management method. Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) theory is competent, why is it difficult to push this theory when face practical works? Today, most project managerial are according to the nine major knowledge fields of PMBOK and five major processes, though it is the methodology of a theory, the practical demands for projects seemed too complicated. Because the project manager often unable to bring the skills into full play even be the problem of the project, and members of the project lack basic understanding for the project. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a simple but effective way, overcoming the Non-Architecture-Oriented Project Management (NAOPM) approach, to accord with the practices of the project. Architecture is structure and process in one unity. Architecture-Oriented Project Management (AOPM) is namely the project managerial model that project managerial structure elements and project managerial processes unity. From the structure view, AOPM can be resolved out a lot of structure elements and " People " is the most important structure element. The structure elements have their own operations and interactions among them generate processes. There are three golden rules to build the AOPM model. First, select the structure elements of project management. Second, set up the operations of the structure elements. Third, combine structure and process in one unity finally. Comparing AOPM with NAOPM logically, the former one could assign jobs in an easy way. Therefore, each member of the project could fully understand his responsibility and reduce the whole risks. Besides, AOPM is able to describe the entire project completely. Because of the ability to cope with the variable environment, it could reduce effectively the waste caused by repeat working and inobservance. For one simple and practical method to manage a project, and AOPM is approved in fact to be an extremely good one. For any enterprise, the key factor of a project¡¦s success relies on the leaders and individuals. NAOPM failing to assign managed rules to each individual for a project is elaborated in the context. The major contribution of this research is to integrate structure and process in one unity. In the future, we suggest a software implementation of AOPM tool is developed. Afterward, we can use this AOPM software tool to guide an enterprise the planning, execution and management of a project.

The construction industry is not performing as desired by the stakeholders that compose it. Several authors and practitioners have claimed that moving the industry towards a more integrated approach to project delivery could notoriously improve the overall performance of the industry. The main purpose of this dissertation was to obtain a unified framework for project integration, by identifying the critical success attributes for achieving project integration, the different levels of importance of attributes other than the critical success attributes to improve the integration process, and by determining if there are major differences among the perceptions of respondents depending on their role in the industry. In addition, this study also sought to identify potential associations between the integration attributes and the different project performance or project success criteria. In order to develop this framework and to identify the potential associations between integration attributes and project performance, a survey was conducted. The sample of the survey was composed of construction industry practitioners; it included owners, facility managers, engineers, specialty consultants, general contractors, subcontractors, among other professionals. The sample size was 264 respondents. The main method used for developing the framework was the Thurstone Scaling Method of Successive Interval Procedure; in addition, this method was complemented and validated using correlation analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis and analysis of the means. According to the perception of respondents, 19 attributes out of the 45 attributes under study, were identified as critical for successfully achieving project integration. In addition, four other categories of importance were identified and the other integration attributes were categorized accordingly. No major differences were found between the perceptions that different project participants had in regard to the importance of the different attributes to achieve project integration, leading to the conclusion that the perception of respondents in regard to this matter is very homogeneous. The potential impact of the 45 attributes on 12 performance criteria was analyzed. According to the perception of respondents, most of the integration attributes have different levels of impact on the different performance criteria; however there is not a clear relationship between the level of importance for achieving project integration and the level of potential impact on the different performance criteria. Most of the integration attributes are divided in two groups depending on their behavior across all integration criteria; in addition there are three groups that have one attribute each. The potential impact of each of these groups differs from one performance criterion to the other; however there are some performance criteria where the behavior of the groups is similar. The groups have a similar behavior on cost, time, and productivity; they also behave similarly on quality and owner satisfaction; on functionality and user satisfaction; and on health and safety and environmental impact and sustainability.

This study looks at the differences in lean project management between projects done in the public sector and projects done in the private sector. The private sector consist of companies around Sweden, while municipalities are representing the public sector in this study. This study is based on the understanding that the lean philosophy can have advantages for the efficiency of project management, both for the private and the public sector, knowing that there are differences in the nature of these organizations. This thesis begins with an introduction that explains the theory that is important for this research, and that describes the research gap that has been found. The research gap is the basis for the research questions. After defining the research questions, an examination has been done on existing literature about the concepts of lean, project management, project managers, and lean project management. Prior research gives ideas about the challenges project managers encounter, and shows in what way lean can influence the efficiency of projects. As part of this qualitative research, and with an inductive approach, 12 semi-structured interviews have been conducted. During this interviews, project managers and persons with a connection to projects in the different organization were asked to describe projects in their organizations. This study is exploratory and has a cross-sectional design as the center of attention was on different organizations from both the private and the public sector in different parts of Sweden. In the analysis the results of the interviews are categorized and interpreted. The results show that projects are used in every organization, making use of, in almost every case, a project model which makes sure that different projects are run in similar ways. Although different organizations make use of the principles of lean, no organization is implementing the ideas completely. Major differences that have been found are differences in the background of the project manager, the level of standardization of projects, and differences in efficiency that in many situations are caused by legislation. It became clear that projects in the private sector are organized in a stricter way, with experienced project managers that follow project models strictly. In the public sector projects are mostly led by project managers that are interested in a certain project, and in those organizations project models are not followed strictly. As for lean projects, we have found no real evidence that any organization is currently having projects organized according to the lean principles. This can be expected however, seeing that lean project management is a generally unexplored part of the lean philosophy.

There are more or less 900 000 farm workers in South Africa. Among these approximately 600 000 are permanently employed, while the rest are seasonal workers. It is estimated that six to seven million people are currently living on farms, which implies that up to seven people are dependent on the wages of a single farm worker. In order to improve the situation of farm workers, the Department of Labour implemented the minimum wage system for farm workers on 1 March 2003. The argument is posed, however, that many farm workers would lose their jobs because of the sectoral stipulations. Unemployment has far-reaching consequences. Farm workers who have lived on farms before, have to resettle and adapt to new social structures, such as community structures and new codes of conduct. In order to adapt to social change, it is argued that training agencies could use project management as a suitable management tool to launch empowering interventions. The analysis of the social conditions in which farm workers find themselves ought to be undertaken on the basis of a specific theory on changes. From this perspective certain theories of social change have been identified. Empowerment is discussed as a process of change. This means an increase in influence and control by acquiring knowledge and skills by means of the necessary training. While theorists on conflict view conflict as the main driving force in change, empowerment is considered to be the process by means of which change can be managed effectively. For the rest the principles of project management are discussed to show that the project cycle is based on project management principles. If project management principles and the project cycle are applied as yardsticks during an empowerment project, the chances of being successful will be much better than when launching an unstructured and unplanned project. The most important conclusion to be made from this research is that the management of change by means of empowerment projects is of decisive importance to unemployed farm workers. Empowerment projects for unemployed farm workers are the first steps in the direction of effective management of social change and sustainable development in South Africa. / Thesis (M. Ontwikkeling en Bestuur)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

Software development processes such as the Waterfall process and Extreme Programming are Project Management Methods (PMMs) which are well known and widely used. However, conventional Project Management (PM) lacks the process concepts expressed in PMMs, and the connection between PMMs and PM is not much explored in the literature. Our research problem is to make this connection. We present data models for PM and PMM, in a framework that can articulate the PM-to-PMM relationship, illustrating with simple examples. Tools and visualizations created in terms of our framework can make use of the familiarity, history and context of project management tools, and the prescriptiveness and reactivity of PMMs, and we believe these may assist the management of complicated projects, such as IT projects. Project Mentor, a prototype Java/XML implementation of the framework semantics, can create and then revise a PMM-aware project, conforming to a specified PMM. The PM-to-PMM connection is persistent in project data, and we describe a visualization of the footsteps of a PMM in project data that does not rely on the state of a PMM process. The visualization can also be used by Project Mentor, to indicate the state of a PMM. We test for possible applications of our framework with a case study and survey of some existing project data, and conclude with a description of further work.

The construction industry has had difficulty adopting project management software effectively and in a widespread manner. This thesis seeks to uncover common problems preventing the adoption of new software for construction project management, and to find a method to design more successful software. Construction project managers working at universities in the state of Georgia were selected as the specific group to study. To better define the functions of project management software, as well as uncover benefits both realized and anticipated, research was conducted. A Situation Awareness based approach was selected to result in proposing a prototype application that would specifically match the mental model of the study group. To define the mental model, a Goal Directed Task Analysis method was used by way of an online survey and in-person verification. In order to collect the survey data, a web based Goal Directed Task Analysis application was created and tested as a part of this thesis. Using the survey data, a proposed design for a prototype application was proposed. The application design was specifically made to fulfill the needs of project managers like those in the study group. The GDTA method proved effective in producing a software design. Recommendations to create and test the proposed prototype application are provided as a next step.

There are more or less 900 000 farm workers in South Africa. Among these approximately 600 000 are permanently employed, while the rest are seasonal workers. It is estimated that six to seven million people are currently living on farms, which implies that up to seven people are dependent on the wages of a single farm worker. In order to improve the situation of farm workers, the Department of Labour implemented the minimum wage system for farm workers on 1 March 2003. The argument is posed, however, that many farm workers would lose their jobs because of the sectoral stipulations. Unemployment has far-reaching consequences. Farm workers who have lived on farms before, have to resettle and adapt to new social structures, such as community structures and new codes of conduct. In order to adapt to social change, it is argued that training agencies could use project management as a suitable management tool to launch empowering interventions. The analysis of the social conditions in which farm workers find themselves ought to be undertaken on the basis of a specific theory on changes. From this perspective certain theories of social change have been identified. Empowerment is discussed as a process of change. This means an increase in influence and control by acquiring knowledge and skills by means of the necessary training. While theorists on conflict view conflict as the main driving force in change, empowerment is considered to be the process by means of which change can be managed effectively. For the rest the principles of project management are discussed to show that the project cycle is based on project management principles. If project management principles and the project cycle are applied as yardsticks during an empowerment project, the chances of being successful will be much better than when launching an unstructured and unplanned project. The most important conclusion to be made from this research is that the management of change by means of empowerment projects is of decisive importance to unemployed farm workers. Empowerment projects for unemployed farm workers are the first steps in the direction of effective management of social change and sustainable development in South Africa. / Thesis (M. Ontwikkeling en Bestuur)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

Quality is often claimed as the 3rd dimension of any project: the success of a project depends on the management of time, cost and quality. However, quality is a much more elusive substance and its management can be problematic. This thesis examines some of the models proposed for managing quality in projects and considers their relevance via a number of case studies. The present study aims to provide a foundation from which a methodology for the management of quality in projects can be evolved. The general definition of “quality” is still discussed and its interpretation in the specific area of project management is open to debate. In this thesis it has been found useful to consider three levels of quality management in the project environment, broadly equivalent to those usually accepted in operations management: quality control, quality assurance and total quality management. Various methods of quality control have been employed in projects for many years. The emphasis of the present study is on the project management equivalents of quality assurance and total quality management and to examine whether they fulfil the true need. A major element of successful quality management is the establishing of constructive methods of feedback. Feedback is also often claimed to be a vital ingredient of successful project management: learning from past successes, and failures. A conduit to provide feedback is often problematic due to the very nature of projects and their finite lifespan. Mainstream thinking believes that standard quality systems employed in the production and operation environment can be incorporated effectively in project management thus increasing operational consistency and reducing the risk of activity or project failure. However, is the model of quality embedded in these systems relevant to projects with their characteristics of uniqueness and long time scales? Initial debate assumed that existing quality management systems would be of benefit in projects, which exhibited a lower level of uniqueness and were closer to an operations management perspective. A literature review followed to gauge the level of importance attached to quality systems and its role in the project process. This determined that there was a need to investigate what existing quality systems, contributed in a purely project environment and what impact they had on improving project success especially in regard to the uniqueness of the projects and to the size of the project organization involved. In addition, the impact an industry-standard quality system had on project organizations compared to project organizations that did not possesses any formal system. To compare and contrast the conventional approach to quality in projects, the complementary areas of systems thinking and system dynamics were explored. Examining an alternative field to quality management was beneficial in providing a different perspective on how systems can be modelled evaluated and applied to real-world applications. This part of the research contributed significantly to the formation of the ideas and opinions on the way in which the concept of quality should be promoted in project management. In particular, the identification of mental models and the use of graphical representations to describe, illustrate and model the tangible and intangible entities found in most types of system. The use of a case study methodology was seen as the most valid way of attaining a holistic view of the complete project process and exploring the salient issues surrounding quality and projects. The fieldwork carried out to facilitate this goal, comprised of a restricted number of in-depth case studies, which encapsulated complete projects. An essential part of this process was the use of participant observation and in part action research, as these approaches increased the access to the available qualitative data whilst being mutually beneficial to the research and to the organisations involved. The scope of the case studies carried out was governed by a number of constraints: • The availability of suitable projects. • The timespan of the available projects matching that of the research, consequently the projects studied are on a relatively small scale. • The organizations in which the action research process could be a valid exchange of services. • The reluctance of organizations in certain industries to allow access to data on projects in particular activities that had led to project failure. The alternative models and techniques offered by systems thinking and system dynamics were explored to see if they could deliver more insights into the diverse aspects of project quality and how feedback in systems can be effectively represented. From the four case studies carried out, it is evident that there is a need for a fundamental revision on how quality is both defined and measured in project management. There is a need for greater emphasis on the acquisition and retention of knowledge by project organizations including the ability to disperse that knowledge by a practical and useful medium. Existing quality management systems still exhibit their origins, which do not take into account the uniqueness and instability of the project environment. In practice, the demand for registration to an industry-recognised quality standard appears to discriminate against the smaller project organization. The impact on the larger organizations is no less significant due to the creation of ‘underground’ parallel working practices, which are a significant waste of resources. The veneer of compliance to a global standard does not help the project organization learn or accumulate knowledge. In conclusion, this thesis proposes that project management needs an alternative methodology to provide a more practical method of project feedback, to enhance the ability of future projects. This thesis puts forward a foundation for this methodology based upon the valuable attributes of the models identified during the research in addition to the value of the case studies compiled. The aim for the implementation of a practical quality system has to be based on a reappraisal of what its purpose is. Therefore, it is proposed that the objective of any system would be to capture knowledge, store and redistribute that knowledge in a manner that makes a positive contribution to future project success. Emphasis is placed on increasing success by the acquisition of knowledge, in contrast to the traditional quality concepts of decreasing risk by the control of activities. In essence a shift from existing mechanistic systems towards more neurocybernetic systems. The increasing capabilities of communication and information technologies make the practicalities of creating this type of system perfectly feasible.