Developing critical thinking through student consulting projects

The authors present survey results from faculty at 44 universities on the role of student consulting projects in developing business students' critical thinking. They conclude that students can improve critical thinking by engaging in guided primary and secondary research to inform their business assumptions that underpin business planning and financial modeling in consulting projects. Results also suggest that instructors newer to the practice of using student consulting tend to emphasize objective results (e.g., application of disciplinary skills and research methods), whereas experienced users seem to focus on the subjective consulting process (e.g., managing client relationships and evaluating information quality and fit for the project).     

Community Connections to Enhance Undergraduate International Business Education: An Example of Business Consulting Projects

Practical project experience as a means of augmenting traditional classroom learning has long been viewed as a value adding curricular exercise. While students participating in the projects gain valuable skills that will enhance their personal marketability, successful projects also benefit the client companies involved and help enhance the image of the university. Substantial effort goes into planning and implementing such an experience and involves extensive coordination with multiple constituents. This article details how a project-based capstone experience was developed in partnership with the local business community and the College's Center for International Business as part of the degree requirements for a relatively new Bachelor of Science in International Business program.     

The Effects of Team Flexibility and Emotional Intelligence on Software Development Performance

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility and emotional intelligence have become critical issues for project management. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance and that between the emotional intelligence of teams and team outputs, there remains a gap in literature in respect to a holistic model. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility, emotional intelligence, and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal positive a relationship between the diversity dimension of software project team flexibility and emotional intelligence. The first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. The emotional recognition of team members for both themselves and their teammates appears to be another important factor affecting the speed to market and functionality of the new software products. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.     

Team Climate,Team Cognition,Team Intuition,and Software Quality: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity

Teams represent a prevailing approach to getting work done in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Although there is a widely held assumption that team-related capabilities determine the success of new product development projects, empirical research on team capabilities is scant. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, organizational learning theory, and situated learning theory, this study investigates the interrelationships among team climate, two information-processing capabilities (i.e., team cognition and team intuition), and software quality. As well, this study explores the moderating effect of project complexity between the information-processing capabilities and the quality of the software. In studying the data from 139 software development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling methods, we found that team climate has a direct influence on team cognition. Moreover, the findings showed that team cognition was positively related to the quality of the software product in general; in particular, this relationship was found to be far more significant when project complexity was used as a moderator. This finding indicates that the software development team’s ability to process information logically in order to interpret situations effectively allows the team to launch superior software products when unexpected and undesirable events make a project complicated and challenging to perform. In particular, managers should encourage teams to benefit from new ideas and make collective efforts for reaching goals. Managers should also enable teams to specialize in their tasks and improve their collective information-processing capabilities.     

Using current consumer issues to involve students in research

The value of involving students in research has been well documented. By including students in research, active and independent learning opportunities are provided, the importance of inquiry and investigation is emphasized, and connections between course material and the discipline become evident. Relevant opportunities for involving students in research projects can sometimes be elusive. Faculty time constraints limit the number of projects that can be undertaken and the number of students involved. Furthermore, many students become intimidated when told that they are required to carry out a research project. The purpose of this study was to use current consumer issues to involve undergraduate students in a relevant research project. The research project was implemented in class settings with teams of students. Faculty selected contemporary consumer issues based upon perceived student interest and experiences as consumers. By using issues of high relevance and familiarity to students and using the team approach within a course that faculty members were already assigned to teach, the issues of time constraint for the faculty members and increased levels of comfort for students were addressed. Prior to undertaking the project, students were instructed in appropriate research methods. Research methods utilized included student development of survey instruments, collection and recording of data, interpretation of data and presentation of results. Students became familiar with various research practices. By working as team members, the students’ comfort level for being involved in research increased; however, other common group challenges arose. Relevant, contemporary consumer issues carry high relevance and interest for student groups, helping generate enthusiasm for the research process. The focus on involving students in research continues to be emphasized. By using research topics related to student's experiences as consumers, students are more readily engaged in undertaking research projects. Through these relevant research projects, students’ consumer decision making is positively impacted.     

浅谈施工企业项目管理

根据目前建筑施工企业项目管理繁重,以及长期以来存在的企业项目管理中施工队伍素质差,管理水平低的状态的情况.分析企业如何满足施工工程要求,质量、安全文明施工和工期要求,如何将项目成本控制的组织措施、技术措施、经济措施,三者是融为一体、相互作用的.分析项目经理部如何建立项目成本控制中心,要以投标报价为依据,制定项目成本控制目标,各部门和各班组通力合作,形成以市场报价为基础的施工方案经济优化、物资采购、经济优化、劳动力配备经济优化的项目成本控制体系.     

The Economics of Business Process Design: Motivation,Information and Coordination Within the Firm

This paper presents a transaction cost analysis of the internal business processes of firms. Business processes are collections of activities which are technologically or managerially linked so that they jointly affect value added. Their organisation is characterised by their ‘architecture’—the allocation of responsibilities amongst individuals and groups and communication between them for information and coordination—and their incentive structure. The overall costs of organisation are determined by losses due to imperfect motivation of process members, which flows from the incentive structure, and imperfect information and coordination, which flow from the architecture, together with the resource costs associated with incentives and architecture. Perfect motivation corresponds to ‘team behaviour’ and a quantitative model, based on team theory, indicates how the best architecture depends on the degree interaction between activities comprising the business process.     

Analytic collaboration in virtual innovation projects

Researchers attend to innovation and collaboration issues. Yet, the relevant literature devotes scant attention to the relationship between collaboration effectiveness and virtual innovation team context, while there are clear indications that both subjects relate with growing concerns in today's business setting. This article reviews extant literature and state-of-the art collaboration systems, and elucidate dynamic contextual factors among virtual innovation team members. The results show the antecedents and interrelationship among these factors, suggesting an optimal collaboration model for virtual innovation project teams. This paper documents the empirical observations of a virtual innovation project for advanced textile manufacturing technologies, and examines the due collaboration taking place among different project participants. Understanding the set of contextual factors emerging from virtual innovation projects can help managers classify, and employ the most effective collaboration mechanism for enhancing the corresponding project performance and effectiveness pragmatically.     

Integration of planning and execution in service innovation

The purpose of this article is to elaborate two activities included in innovation: planning and execution. We use four dimensions – decision making, organization, process, and external interaction – as the analytical framework. Building on five empirical case studies in the Finnish residential sector, the article identifies various approaches to integrating planning and execution during the development process. Furthermore, the article identifies four integrative mechanisms that relate to each of the four analytical dimensions. The key proposition is that the integration between planning and execution is the driving force for innovation, and that the locus of this integration is the practical engagement of actors with specific aims, problems, and means at hand related to the emerging solution. Finally, the article identifies the availability of, or access to, service-provision resources and the customer interface as a key enabler of this integration.     

Supporting innovation and venture development in established companies

Accumulated research findings call into question the ability of established corporations to develop and manage new ventures successfully. This article argues that the problem comes in large part from failing to differentiate between the requirements of administrative management—geared to managing existing activities and holding things in place to ensure continuation of already-developed activities—and the requirements of entrepreneurial management—designed to create change by developing something new. The two kinds of management are in tension and may interfere with each other, but every established organization needs both in order to get both innovation and efficiency.Innovations and new ventures have four particular characteristics that account for their special management requirements: uncertainty, knowledge-intensivity, competition with alternative courses of action, and boundary-crossing. Thus entrepreneurial management to support creation of the new puts a stress on such features as visionary leadership, “patient money,” planning flexibility, team continuity/stability, and interfunctional cooperation. But the usual requirements of administrative management in established corporations contradict these principles. Thus some companies try to set their new ventures apart from the old to avoid conflicts in management requirements. However, this this only partially solves the problem.All companies need both to manage ongoing activities and to create new ones—with the proportions of each depending on the nature of the business. They need to strike a balance between administrative and entrepreneurial management. The problem of venture development in established corporations occurs when administrative management comes to dominate and innovation is not valued sufficiently. The command system of administrative management needs to be replaced by a mutual adjustment system.High innovation companies build mutual adjustment into their design. They allow flexibility to move into an entrepreneurial mode. They are characterized by broader jobs: structures built around small business units or functionally complete project teams; cultures stressing the ability of people to contribute more over time; and easy access to the key “power tools” of information, support, and resources.A more entrepreneurial corporation minimizes hard-and-fast rules and procedures governed by a rigidly defined command structure and emphasizes instead flexibility and broadly-skilled sets of employees in flexible units that can be grouped or regrouped as changing circumstances require.Large corporations must institute deliberate programs to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, including removing the roadblocks of unnecessary administrative requirements; encouraging integration across departments and functions: changing budgeting and accounting procedures and providing internal venture capital and special project funds; discretionary time; and new business performance measures.     

The project-management approach in the “systematic management” of innovative start-up firms

This paper presents the principal results obtained by applying the project- management approach to strategic planning and operations management of innovative start-up firms' key activities. This approach is used to implement Drucker's view of entrepreneurship as a systematic discipline and his recommendation that innovation be treated using his principle of systematic innovation.As is well known, the management of growth in an innovative start-up firm is a difficult problem facing that organization. During this particular stage of the firm's development, many interdependent activities need to be performed under the conditions of uncertainty and limited resources. In these cases, flexibility and contingency planning are necessary. The fact that there exists no generally accepted approach that an entrepreneur can utilize, however, results in chaotic situations in many such enterprises.The start-up firm cannot utilize the formalized management systems and procedures available and useful in large firms. In addition, a disorganized, chaotic, random management-decision process will seldom provide desirable results in such firms. Viewing the firm as a project to be managed with specific tasks, activities, precedence relations, durations, and milestones presents an opportunity to utilize project-management techniques, including the critical-path method (CPM).Recent research has demonstrated that project-management methodology and its computer- software applications are applicable to small, innovative start-up firms. By utilizing a microcomputer, one can analyze any start-up business for flaws in management or organization and can chart a more productive path for achieving the firm's strategic goals. Project management using computers is not new: it has been used for years for major aerospace, utility, and construction projects. Only recently, however, have microcomputers and software become inexpensive enough to allow small firms to utilize this approach.The project-management approach collects information about a start-up firm, including all of its planned activities consistent with its evolving business plan, and then utilizes a microcomputer and inexpensive, readily available project-management software to process the information collected. Among the outputs are a “GANTT chart,” which indicates when the various activities should begin and end; a “Job Report,” which provides the earliest and latest possible deadlines for starting and ending each activity; and a “Milestone Report,” which indicates when each key event is to be accomplished according to the strategic business plan. These status reports are extremely valuable to the CEO and to the management team as the firm is kept on course according to its strategic plan.This methodology has been applied to 20 innovative start-up firms in northern California, including a computer graphics company, a semiconductor-equipment manufacturer, and firms that develop software for professional athletes, educators, ophthalmologists, and radio-station managers. In addition, the project-management approach has been applied to plan and schedule Stanford University's current centennial fund-raising campaign.Results indicate that the CEO and the entire management team are able to plan, schedule, and control the innovative start-up firm's multiplicity of activities in a systematic way. The firm is also able to modify its strategic plan based on a review of its updated status reports and to modify its operations plans accordingly. Current research is under way to develop similar systematic methods for managing innovations in large organizations.     

Three facets of satisfaction and their influence on the performance of innovation teams

This study investigates and demonstrates the mediating effect of job satisfaction between team deftness and team comprehension and the performance of 168 project teams involved in major innovation projects for their companies.The study demonstrates that there are at least three independent facets of job satisfaction: instrumental satisfaction with the way the task is progressing, social satisfaction with the way the team members interact with one another and the organization, and egocentric satisfaction with the individuals' perceived benefits to themselves.Previous studies have shown that innovation team performance is directly correlated with the two antecedents of performance: team deftness, which reflects how effectively the team works to achieve the innovation's purpose and team comprehension, which reflects how the team understands the linkages among key variables driving the innovation outcome. The study argues that these different facets of satisfaction differentially affect the ways in which team performance is affected by deftness and comprehension.There are three major results:

• 1.1. Social satisfaction mediates the relation between team deftness and performance—as social dissatisfaction of the team increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its deftness in accomplishing the project's purpose.
• 2.2. Instrumental satisfaction mediates the relation between team comprehension and project performance—as instrumental dissatisfaction increases, it appears to impede the ability of the team to deploy its comprehension to accomplish the project's purpose.
• 3.3. Egocentric satisfaction does not appear to mediate the relation between team deftness and project performance.

Some managerial implications of these results are discussed.     

Macrocognition in Collaboration: Analyzing Processes of Team Knowledge Building with CoPrA

Sophisticated collaboration software allows teams that are dispersed in space and time to work together. Nevertheless, to reach their common goals, distributed teams—and the professional facilitators who support them by intervention techniques—are faced with the communication challenges arising from dispersed settings, including task coordination and effective information exchange. When distributed teams use collaboration software, however, traces of their collaboration are left behind. These traces provide an underused source of data which can be analyzed and be used to inform the design of interventions aimed at improving collaboration in distributed teams. This paper investigates the untapped potential for understanding collaboration, and in particular, the macro-cognitive processes of team knowledge building. These processes rely on information shared and knowledge structures developed by team members which are also referred to as team cognition. We performed a qualitative content analysis applying the COllaboration PRocess Analysis technique, CoPrA, and a framework for measuring team knowledge building. Communication data was collected from 18 participants assigned to six distributed teams. While working collaboratively on a problem-solving task teams were supported with synchronous collaboration software. The results show that by using a cognitive perspective on teams, all the hypothesized processes of team knowledge building could be identified in collaboration traces. Moreover, our analysis shows that CoPrA enables us to identify key characteristics of (1) team behavior, e.g., whether teams are rather solution-oriented or problem minded, show consensus-oriented behavior, withhold evaluative arguments, discuss ideas in breadth and/or depth, or spend much effort on coordination as well as (2) behavior of team members, e.g., who show non-participation, are willing to share or predominantly guide coordination. Future research could adopt this approach to improve our understanding of the dynamics of collaboration patterns and its effects on team performance to inform collaboration facilitation in distributed settings.     

交通工程项目物流管理问题探讨

科学合理地进行物流规划与管理是优化实现交通工程项目目标的重要保证。本文基于交通工程项目物流活动特点的分析,针对目前交通工程项目物流管理中存在的主要问题,提出了加强交通工程项目物流管理的措施。     

Coordinating Loosely-Coupled Work in Construction Inspection Activities

Inspections represent key activities in construction projects. They allow coordinating the work of the main contractor and the subcontracted companies participating in the project. Today the inspection activities and the coordination process are done using information recorded into paper-based blueprints. As a consequence of it, coordinating the activities derived from inspection processes become expensive, slow and error-prone. This paper presents a mobile shared workspace, named COIN (Construction Inspector), which helps the participants in a construction project to overcome these limitations. COIN was particularly designed to be used on tablet PCs, but it is able to run on several computing devices. This workspace has been tested in a controlled work scenario. The preliminary results are highly positive, indicating this proposal could have an important impact on the construction management process.     

SUPPLIER EVALUATION IN A DYADIC RELATIONSHIP: AN ACTION RESEARCH APPROACH

This article describes an Action Research (AR) framework applied to the supplier evaluation environment of a telecommunication company. Within this AR framework, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used because the methodology can successfully delineate evaluation problems and then outline a desirable path. This leads management to continuously review and improve complex systems or processes. The DEA methodology coordinates the supplier evaluation inputs and reconciles what can be very diverse performance measures and even more diverse weights applied by evaluation team members. Finally, dyadic interdependence can be demonstrated by identifying the impact of changes in buyer performance attributes on each supplier's capacity to accommodate and adjust.     

Introduction on the European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF)

This article describes the European Corporate Sustainability Framework (ECSF). This framework addresses complex issues such as Corporate Sustainability, Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Change. It is a conceptual framework based on the tradition of the quality management approach and the concept of phase-wise development. The framework is based on several theories and models, all proven individually over several decades. These theories are the Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory (ECLET) of Professor Graves, The Four Phase Model^© (Hardjono), EFQM's Business Excellence Model, Kaplan and Norton's Business Balanced scorecard, the research deliverables of the project The European Way to Excellence and the SqEME^® methodology. All these models, theories and/or studies belong to the interpretative sociology (Milwax Burell and Morgan, 1992). The aim of the ECSF is to support organizations in their implementation of Corporate Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility (CS-R) by addressing the ambiguity and complexity of these issues.     

Human resource strategies in post‐WTO China

China's rapid economic growth has presented numerous opportunities and challenges for foreign firms there. As firms have increased their presence in China, their concerns are increasingly focused on implementing successful human resource management (HRM) practices. To shed light on effective HRM for foreign firms in China, we conducted interviews with senior managers, private equity specialists, and management consultants there. Using a framework of human resources deliverables, we propose several keys to successful HRM in China. HRM is crucial for firms' success in post‐WTO China, and managing human resources there poses distinctive challenges to commonly held “Western” assumptions about effective HRM. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Full‐life‐cycle economics: An evaluation methodology for information technology projects

This article presents a methodology for the examination and evaluation of proposed information technology projects. Through an examination of successes and failures in estimating project costs and benefits, a number of weaknesses have been identified. The areas of “hidden”; costs and intangible (or at least difficult to quantify) benefits have been particularly difficult to estimate. The methodology presented here seeks to retain the strengths of older methodologies, while addressing these identified weaknesses. This methodology, while not a substitute for good judgment, provides a framework for the standardization of economic analysis. As such, it provides both management and clients with a better basis for decisions regarding investments in information technology.     

Maximizing the Potential of Contemporary Workplace Monitoring: Techno‐Cultural Developments,Transactive Memory,and Management Planning

Nonintrusive data collection and analysis technologies are increasingly being used to monitor worker behavior in the global workplace. This essay explores the factors that can affect the extent to which management, work teams, and even individuals can benefit from real‐time data monitoring of worker productivity, coordination, and performance. Leveraging organizational information processing and transactive memory systems theories, I develop a theoretical framework for how access to real‐time data can impact team coordination activities and how the implementation of work monitoring technology and analytics might be best approached. Last, I present a set of future research opportunities that supply chain scholars should pursue to examine how the real‐time monitoring of work affects team performance.