Kong Bieng Chuah

Project‐based action learning as learning approach in learning organisation: the theory and framework

Concept of “organisational learning” has been widely advocated as one of the solutions for organisational development, especially for those companies requiring high level of technology and knowledge. While being applied to the entire organisation, the concept of organisational learning can also be applied to specific function or project teams, which can be named as “project” based organisations. This paper presents a new approach of learning for the project‐based teams, which integrates learning and project in one, towards organisational learning ideals. Performance evaluation mechanism is also developed. With the developed evaluation, three dimensions of team performance, within the scope of project action‐learning framework would be measured. It would tell the team where it stands at a particular point of time. In order to track the critical variables required to reach the goals, the developed measurement system framework will be adopted in the implementation phase.

Evaluation of Design Alternatives' Environmental Performance Using AHP and ER Approaches

This paper proposes an approach to evaluate the environmental performance of design alternatives during new product development (NPD) processes. The use of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches with life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology to evaluate design alternatives environmental performance during NPD processes is first discussed. The proposed approach integrates an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) with evidential reasoning (ER) in the environmental performances evaluation and prioritization of different design options. A case study is described to illustrate the use of the proposed method.

PAL in action: a company's OL experience

Purpose – The paper aims to describe the development and introduction of the project action learning (PAL) framework as the OL vehicle in a companys move towards a learning organization.Design/methodology/approach – This is a longitudinal case study of this company‐based LO and OL project. The paper describes the development and implementation experiences of PAL within the company, located in the Pearl River Delta of Southern China.Findings – This paper describes the first four rounds of the PAL implementation within the case company. This is a work in progress. To date a very successful start to PAL implementation has been reported.Practical implications – After a successful start of the PAL implementation, the authors and the sponsoring company anticipate a continued propagation of PAL activities as the main OL vechicles of the company.Originality/value – This is a useful case reference for LO and OL development and implementation in industrial organization particularly for manufacturing enterprises in...

A hybrid approach for environmental impact evaluation of design options

Abstract The strengthened environmental regulatory requirements and general awareness of the need for environmental conservation worldwide, design for environment has become a key design criterion in new product development processes. Due to their resources-consuming attribute and the prerequisite expert knowledge in environmental sciences for the impacts interpretations, the existing forms of product-oriented environmental impact assessment methods are impractical to be adopted by product designers in small-and-medium enterprises. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a generally accepted quantitative approach to assess a product’s environmental impact. However, a full LCA study often requires a considerable amount of data and therefore, it is regarded as not a handy tool for product design evaluations particularly at the initial design stage. This leads to our intention to develop an immediately applicable approach for decision-makers to evaluate the design options. The proposed approach integrates Analytic Hierarchy Process and Fuzzy Theory, with Evidential Reasoning (ER) to support the environmental impact evaluations of design options. A case study is carried out to demonstrate its applicability to prioritize the environmental impact of various design options. A symmetrical triangular distribution is introduced for calculating the expected utility and for testing the sensitivity of results.

Organizational Learning as a Continuous Process, DELO

Current literature on OL has different focuses, e.g. learning motivation; collective or team learning; learning process or system; learning culture; knowledge management; organizational development; and continuous improvement. Different perspectives are used to study OL by researchers from different disciplines. It can be said that there is no single framework for the study of OL. To have a better understanding of OL, it is thus critical to explore how an organization may be transitioned into an LO and how its OL process is initiated, driven, enabled, facilitated and measured. This chapter introduces OL as a continuous process called DELO (driving, enabling, learning and outcome). Each of the core components along the DELO process is discussed in detail.

Evaluation of Design Alternatives’ Environmental Impact by Integrating Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process and Evidential Reasoning Approach

Today “ecodesign” is a necessary consideration in the product development process. With increasing general awareness of the need for environmental production and more stringent regulatory requireme...

Performance and efficacies in project-based action learning teams

This paper presents the empirical data obtained from a four-year case study on the implementation of a Project-Based Action Learning (PAL) framework. The study explores the correlation between performance and the various actors within the PAL setting. It extends the research on team learning and Organisational Learning (OL) beyond its boundaries through a four-year study in a real case company. The anticipated impacts of this research are twofold: to justify how a PAL approach is used as an OL driver and explore the various actors in the PAL setting who contribute to the PAL teams performance.

Knowledge contribution as a factor in project selection

Project selection is a crucial decision-making process in many organizations. By adopting a project-based learning perspective, this study sets out to develop a framework to integrate organizational knowledge development with project selection. We utilize various knowledge management models to create a structured evaluation metric to measure project contribution to organizational knowledge. A project selection model, which involves project knowledge contribution as one of the evaluation perspectives, is proposed. Results of a focus group study effectively validate the proposed evaluation metric. The article concludes with an empirical implementation of the model in an electronic component manufacturing company.

Development of the customer centric data visibility framework for the enhancement of the trust of SME customers in cloud services

Cloud computing is a pervasive technology and platform in IT for several years. Cloud service providers have developed and offered different service platforms to accommodate different needs of enterprise subscribers. However, there still exists the situation of enterprise customers hesitation and reluctance to deploy their core applications using cloud service platforms. The term data visibility has been widely used in the IT industry especially from ICT product and solution vendors. However, there is not any practice guideline, nor standard in industry to define this term. This paper defined the characteristic and dimensions of data visibility, from conceptual model to framework architecture of customer centric data visibility (CCDV) on cloud platform. It propose to apply CCDV as reference model or practice guideline on cloud computing service, with enhancement of data visibility which can earn the trust from enterprise customer in adopting public cloud service.

Environmental Impact Evaluations on Product Design Alternatives Using the Combined Evidential Reasoning with Fuzzy Set

Owing to the rise of societal awareness and hence governmental quest for environmental conservation worldwide, environmental friendliness in products has become a critical design consideration for all manufacturers during new product development. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive method to quantitatively assess the environmental burdens of products or services. However, such studies are difficult to carry out at the early product development process because of uncertain or limited product information. Also, LCA is a time and resource-consuming methodology. This paper proposes a shortcut approach to support product designers to carry out the environmental impact evaluations especially in the initial product development stage. This paper discusses the key challenges of implementing environmental impact evaluation in new product development. The combined Evidential Reasoning (ER) and Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) approach is applied to handle the uncertain information of the environmental data and deficiency of LCA. The result demonstrates the superiority of the combined ER and FST for evaluating several design alternatives while the uncertain information has been considered.