Bjørn Andersen

Identifying and Acting on Early Warning Signs in Complex Projects

We consider identification of early warning signs (EWS) in projects. Project professionals are not good at detecting or acting on EWS. Barriers that lead to this are identified. The nature of EWS and their detection change with the evolving situation. Project assessments, typically part of gateways, are useful in identifying EWS connected to the formalities of the project. As complexity increases, assessments have more limited use, and the project is increasingly dependent on detecting EWS by informal “gut feeling.” Thus, knowledge, experience, and communication skills are increasingly important in complex situations. We conclude with a list of early warning signs.

Benchmarking supply chain management: finding best practices

Represents a more popularized adaptation of the complete report written as documentation of the benchmarking activity in the project SMArTMAN SME. Uses benchmarking in the SMArTMAN SME project to increase the knowledge about the supply chain management process and to enable the industrial partners to learn from best practice. Identifies other enterprises in Europe and their processes. A set of flow charts portrays what is considered to be a best practice process spanning the areas of procurement and supply chain management. This process has been designed by merging the best elements from each of the benchmarking partners’ processes into one generic process. Describes practices observed at the benchmarking partners that seem to be of “best practice” level and which were not suited for inclusion in the flow charts.

The Coming Revolution in Competence Development: Using Serious Games to Improve Cross-Cultural Skills

Approaches to competence development have tended to focus on training to reach a required level of performance in simple and reproducible contexts, rather than in the more complex and hard-to-replicate contexts that characterize real-world projects, especially projects that involve people from other cultures. This paper explores how the Serious Games approach can be exploited to create skills in dealing with cross-cultural issues in project management. The degree of difference this can make to real-world performance is so dramatic that managers who have experienced it are seeing it not as a way to add Incremental Improvements to TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) but as more of a Radical Innovation --- a revolutionary change. Some of the main skills required in project management are reviewed, and different models of cross-cultural analysis applied to understand how the challenges of managing projects are increased by cultural issues. Our testbed for this is an EU project TARGET that is developing the next generation TEL approach. We describe its approach and look at how the TARGET serious game can be designed to achieve enhanced cross-cultural skills in users.

Is there a tactical level of business processes

Purpose – As companies are facing an increased need for knowledge creation, innovation, improvement, and change, the processes that enable these matters should be identified. The purpose of this paper is to identify and find a way of classifying these processes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper conducted literature studies to identify what could be the tactical processes. This has then been exemplified through a case study in the automotive industry where the focus has been on the formal process descriptions and how decisions and roles are distributed.Findings – From the case study the paper can identify processes that could be classified as tactical, as they are not only “something between” the strategic and operational processes, but also different by nature, as they are related to certain dynamic elements of a company, such as knowledge creation, innovations and improvements.Research limitations/implications – To some extent the research is based on formal descriptions in systems and documents fr...