Search results for "project manager"

Closing and Reporting

2014

It often happens that closing and reporting do not deserve particular attention from the contractor or consultant Project Manager, however, they are important. This chapter analyzes diverse situations that imply risk specifically related to an owner being dissatisfied owing to a deficiency of documentation in quantity and quality handed over, or perhaps due to a lack of quality in finishing concrete work, or through failure to clean the site. The chapter analyzes these aspects, pointing out that closing-out a project is a process as important as the rest of the processes in the project’s life cycle, and examines the need to produce a good Technical Memory that must incorporate a string of i…

A Project Manager Suitability Parameter in Project Accomplishment

2009

One the most critical aspect in project management is how to assign the project managers (PMs) to projects, especially whenever the PMs can lead more than one project. The present paper proposes a parameter (PME) to evaluate the PM in accomplishing a specific project useful for a next phase of assignment. The PME takes into account the technical skills, the leadership behavior and the relationships with project’s stakeholders. These parameters are aggregated by a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) that well emulates the decision process of the experts by means of a rule-based inference engine. Moreover, to better define the PME, a procedure, based on the discordance concept, is proposed to compar…

Replacement of the Project Manager Reflected Through Activity Theory and Work–System Theory

2010

Replacement of the project manager (RPM) is a known phenomenon in information systems (IS) projects, but scant attention is given to it in the project management or IS literature. Given its critical effects on the project business, the organization, the project team, and the project manager, it should be studied in more depth. We identified factors which make RPM occurrences inherently different and we show that work-system theory and activity theory give comprehensive lenses to advance research on RPM. For the future research on RPM we identified three objectives: experiences on RPM, process model for RPM, and organizational culture’s influence on RPM occurrences.

Pitfalls in Remote Team Coordination: Lessons Learned from a Case Study

2008

As companies become more and more distributed, multi-site development is becoming a norm. However along with the new opportunities, geographic distribution is proven to increase the complexity of software engineering introducing challenges for remote team communication, coordination and control. In this article we present an illustrative singe-case study with an intra-organizational intra-national context focussing on the effect of geographic distribution on team coordination practices and how this influences remote team performance. Based on our findings we conclude that a) distribution significantly influences the nature of coordination; b) remote team coordination mechanisms can't be cho…

Translingual Practices in Global Business : A Longitudinal Study of a Professional Communicative Repertoire

2018

This chapter draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a Finnish engineer’s communicative repertoire that develops in the process of professional migration. The participant first works as a factory intern in Germany, then as a project engineer and project manager in Finland, and latterly as an operations manager in China. Here, repertoire is viewed through dynamic and flexible translingual practices, in which people follow, appropriate and invent norms, combine and shuttle between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources and modalities in the transnational work space in order to meet, interact, make meaning and build relationships and, ultimately, do their jobs. The data selected…

Project manager assignment by fuzzy inference and mathematical programming

2008

How is Project Success Affected by Replacing the Project Manager?

2007

Components of software development risk: how to address them? A project manager survey

2000

Software risk management can be defined as an attempt to formalize risk oriented correlates of development success into a readily applicable set of principles and practices. By using a survey instrument we investigate this claim further. The investigation addresses the following questions: 1) What are the components of software development risk? 2) how does risk management mitigate risk components, and 3) what environmental factors if any influence them? Using principal component analysis we identify six software risk components: 1) scheduling and timing risks, 2) functionality risks, 3) subcontracting risks, 4) requirements management, 5) resource usage and performance risks, and 6) person…

Using Activity Theory in Developing Instructial Tools for Project Management Studies

2014

Competence and skills of the project manager are significant to project success. The skills needed in project managers’ work cannot be learned only by reading the books or a lecture hall; one learns them by practice. Therefore, an important challenge for educational institutions is to develop pedagogical practices that allow students to participate in working life projects and to confront real-life problems. Project-based learning (PBL) offers a model that enables students to practice the skills and competences needed in working life projects by utilizing real-world work assignments in time-limited projects. Using PBL method alone does not necessarily guarantee learning result. In order t…

Typical and Individual Doctoral Processes and Lifecourses: The Types of Narratives of the Project Manager, the Survivor and the Seeker

2015

One task of the doctoral education is, globally as well as nationally, to produce and renew the highest expertise and knowledge in a high quality and efficient way. Even though in this global time the high-quality knowledge and skills are a competition factor which the success of the societies is expected to be able to lean on, also the doctoral students and their individual factors are significant. The accelerating global change is strongly reflected at the individual level: an attempt is made to respond to the changing expectations and to prepare individually and diversely. The individual doctoral students and the graduating doctors come from different everyday lives and contexts. The gra…