Meier / Blom / Maikranz Project Management

MBA Essentials
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-7568-5436-3
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 190 Seiten

Companies are increasingly developing into dynamic and project-oriented organizations. Globalization, innovations and organizational dynamics require more and more projects, and thus a more project-oriented corporate organization and management. As a rule, managers as well as employees already work parallel to their line function in projects or completely from project to project. At the same time, cross-company and especially international value chains lead to the cooperation of cross-departamental and intercultural teams. For this, the specialists and executives need above all knowledge and experience in project management and the corresponding concepts as well as in the special form of cooperation, team development and communication. Because the most problems in project management are not caused by project goals and methods, but by the many different problem-solving behavior and attitudes, e.g. between engineers and business people, different departments or the different country cultures. The international IT project specialist Tom DeMarco puts it in a nutshell (in Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams: The major problems of our work are not so much technological as socio-logical in nature. In terms of content here, in contrast to traditional professional textbooks, not only the technologies are priority, but also the social and intercultural aspects of project work. The book is aimed equally at students of all disciplines with a focus on managerial and project-related work as well as practitioners and entrepreneurs in all private business sectors as well as in NGOs, public projects or PPPs as public-private partnership.

Professor Harald Meier, studies in Business Administration and Economics and PhD, University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, after commercial vocational training working in banks, consulting, further education and NGOs in Germany and abroad, founder of the International Institute for Training Quality Certification (IfTQ-Cert) and working for certification agencies in the academic and professional educational sector world-wide.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meier, Harald

Blom, Herman

Maikranz, Frank C.

Meyer, Rüdiger

Stein, Torsten

Weber, Frank

Leseproben

2. Business Organization and Project Management

2.1 Changes in Organizations

2.1.1 Organizational Theory

Companies are and (e.g. with communication structures, work processes), which (e.g. functions, processes, hierarchies) and at the same time. A distinction must be made here

• as a formal structure that represent the system or subsystems, and
• as processes of task execution.

Organizational structures are changing very dynamically today, e.g. due a re-organization, temporary projects or agile organizational processes. In addition, every organization has informal structures and processes, e.g. through unconscious group dynamics or agreements among themselves, in order to do things more easily and quickly.

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Fig. 2.1: On the way to the Line Organization

Moses obviously behaved like an entrepreneur or a managing directors and often a department or a team manager or also project managers: They want to decide everything on their own. But, as organizations grow the decision-making processes also become more complex and lengthy. The is overloaded with day-to-day operations and cannot concentrate on the important strategic tasks of corporate management. Jethro therefore gave Moses the still important advice to delegate (as we name it today ) and to introduce a hierarchical management structure.

Organizations are not only dependent on the objective corporate purpose (products, services), they are also shaped by the expectations and behavior of employees and other important stakeholders with direct influence, as well as the age and history of the organization (see chap. 1.1.2, theory of ).42

In addition, the industry and its markets influence the organizations and there are constitutional frameworks such as legislation and site conditions. The large number of these influencing variables shows that there is no ideal form of organization for a company purpose.

• : Up until the mid-20th cent. it was primarily assumed that work efficiency could be increased through a scientific-systematic analysis of work and the resulting technicalrational work planning. Workers were in sense of the so-called (Taylorism) viewed mechanistically. The worker as a was considered a manipulable, cost-effective production factor that behaved purely rationally and could be motivated by economic incentives. The organizational consequences of this were the differentiation of tasks and functions (planning, organizing, motivating, controlling) and management as a clear hierarchy – the efficiency of the organization was the focus of all considerations.43
• : The new image , emerged in the mid-20th cent. where employees were seen as motivated by social needs, they seek contact and social recognition ( approach according to Mayo). In contrast to , the dependence of work performance on the variation of physical conditions was less assumed than on psychosocial conditions that determine work performance. Organizational consequences were the development and promotion of teamwork, recognition of employees by managers and the team. Management instruments were also geared towards the needs for recognition (e.g. bonuses, titles such as foreman), belonging and identity.
• today, an employee is seen as a with an individual personality and looking for self-realization. Organizations are complex and interdisciplinary social structures with corresponding diverse individual employee requirements. To integrate classical and neoclassical organizational theory means: there is no generally correct organization. In a company this means, among other things, that supervisors should show a general leadership style (e.g. cooperative), but that it should be adapted to the individual situation of the employee and the work situation.

Fig. 2.2: Change in Corporate Organization44

In the meantime, a fundamental paradigm shift has also taken place in business administration. Organizational design theory completed. The principle of hierarchy, on which conventional organizational structures are based (see chap. 2.2), is increasingly being questioned45 as being innovatio, inhibiting and inflexible, and new organizational forms are being demanded: 46

Until the 1980s, prevailing conviction was that competitive advantages could primarily be achieved through the consistent exploitation of the advantages of mass production and the inherent standardization of work processes. However, the ever faster changing competitive conditions require time, cost and quality advantages:

• An individualized client orientation leads, among other things, to less routine in the work process, to more innovation and shorter product life cycles. This eliminates the efficiency advantages associated with classic hierarchical organizational structures. First and foremost, organizations should no longer ensure stability, but dynamics in the operational value creation and communication process.
• A significantly higher qualification level of the staff and increasing teamwork requires for these team members more personal responsibility and shorter decision-making processes.
• ICT technology enables all employees to be involved immediately in decision-making, which means there are no costs for central coordination by traditional managers.

Organizational forms as alternatives to traditional hierarchical concepts incl. team, process, network and agile organizations as well as temporary organizations such as project organizations.

2.1.2 From Line- to Project Organization

The traditional and still most widespread organizational types incl. forms of line organization, often extended with staff-line teams (permanent) and/or projects (temporary). Large companies can also be managed in whole or in part as divisions, business areas that are largely independent economically and/or legally as subsidiaries. Irrespective of this, there are also parts as fractal (designing itself as required), fluid (continuously adapting), virtual (pseudo) or matrix organizations (cross-sectional functions) for controlling selected strategies (e.g. quality management). In practice, organizations are often mixed forms and emerged in the course of corporate development.

Line Organization principles

The most important feature of the line organization (fig. 2.3) is the principle of : the line is the sole means of delegation, thinking and acting in the organization are based on hierarchies and the...