International experiential diversity and performance at project organizations: The case of national football teams

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the link between diversity in project teams and team performance by examining the effects of players’ international career diversity on the performance of national football teams. Design/methodology/approach– The paper draws upon the literature on project organizations and experiential diversity in teams. Using data on players’ international career backgrounds and team performance from the FIFA World Cup 2006, the authors test two hypotheses linking experiential diversity in teams and a measure of relative team performance. The dataset includes detailed individual background profiles of the 736 participating players and performance data from the 64 games played at the tournament. Findings– The findings suggest that different types of experiential diversity have contrasting effects on team performance in a time‐limited project team setting. Research limitations/implications– These findings encourage team diversity researchers to further examine the impact of experiential diversity in teams on team process and performance outcomes in future research. Practical implications– The findings particularly highlight the need to carefully manage experiential diversity in project team settings in order to benefit from access to diverse tacit resources, while at the same time avoiding that the integrative capacities of teams becoming overstretched. Originality/value– The paper is a step towards a better understanding of how diversity of individual career backgrounds affects team performance outcomes in project teams.

Visualizing knowledge in project-based work

This article considers how visual practices are used to manage knowledge in project-based work. It compares project-based work in a capital goods manufacturer and an architectural firm. Visual representations are used extensively in both cases, but the nature of visual practice differs significantly between the two. The research explores the kinds of knowledge that are (and aren't) developed and made visible in strategizing and planning activities. For example, whereas the emphasis of project-based work in the former firm is on exploitation of knowledge and it visualizes its project context largely in commercial and processual terms, the emphasis in the latter is on exploration and it uses a wide range of visual materials to understand physical interdependencies across the project boundary. We contend particular kinds of visual tools can help project teams step between exploration and exploitation within a project, and articulate the types of representations, foci of attention and patterns of interaction involved. The findings suggest that business managers can make more deliberate choices about how knowledge is made visible, and can change visual practice to align the project with exploring and exploiting opportunities. It raises the question: What don't you see within your organization? The work contributes to academic debates about managing through projects, strategising and organizing, while the focus on visual representation disrupts the tacit-codified dichotomy in the broad debate on knowledge and learning, and highlights the craft skills central to strategizing and organizing.

Interdisciplinarity: perceptions of the value of computer-supported collaborative work in design for the built environment

This paper presents the findings from a study into the current exploitation of computer-supported collaborative working (CSCW) in design for the built environment in the UK. The research is based on responses to a web-based questionnaire. Members of various professions, including civil engineers, architects, building services engineers, and quantity surveyors, were invited to complete the questionnaire. The responses reveal important trends in the breadth and size of project teams at the same time as new pressures are emerging regarding team integration and efficiency. The findings suggest that while CSCW systems may improve project management (e.g., via project documentation) and the exchange of information between team members, it has yet to significantly support those activities that characterize integrated collaborative working between disparate specialists. The authors conclude by combining the findings with a wider discussion of the application of CSCW to design activity-appealing for CSCW to go beyond multidisciplinary working to achieve interdisciplinary working.

Role of knowledge in managing construction change

Purpose-Unplanned changes in construction projects are common and lead to disruptive effects such as project delays, cost overruns and quality deviations. Rework due to unplanned changes can cost 10-15 per cent of contract value. By managing these changes more effectively, these disruptive effects can be minimised. Previous research has approached this problem from an information-processing view. In this knowledge age, the purpose of this paper is to argue that effective change management can be brought about by better understanding the significant role of knowledge during change situations. Design/methodology/approach - Within this knowledge-based context, the question of how construction project teams manage knowledge during unplanned change in the construction phase within collaborative team settings is investigated through a selected case study sample within the UK construction industry. Findings- Case study findings conclude that different forms of knowledge are created and shared between project team members during change events which is very much socially constructed and centred on tacit knowledge and experience of project personnel. Originality/value- Building on the case study findings the paper finally offers a model that represents the role of knowledge during managing project change.

The METAFOR project: preserving data through metadata standards for climate models and simulations

Climate modeling is a complex process, requiring accurate and complete metadata in order to identify, assess and use climate data stored in digital repositories. The preservation of such data is increasingly important given the development of ever-increasingly complex models to predict the effects of global climate change. The EU METAFOR project has developed a Common Information Model (CIM) to describe climate data and the models and modelling environments that produce this data. There is a wide degree of variability between different climate models and modelling groups. To accommodate this, the CIM has been designed to be highly generic and flexible, with extensibility built in. METAFOR describes the climate modelling process simply as "an activity undertaken using software on computers to produce data." This process has been described as separate UML packages (and, ultimately, XML schemas). This fairly generic structure canbe paired with more specific "controlled vocabularies" in order to restrict the range of valid CIM instances. The CIM will aid digital preservation of climate models as it will provide an accepted standard structure for the model metadata. Tools to write and manage CIM instances, and to allow convenient and powerful searches of CIM databases,. Are also under development. Community buy-in of the CIM has been achieved through a continual process of consultation with the climate modelling community, and through the METAFOR team’s development of a questionnaire that will be used to collect the metadata for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) model runs.