How environmental and organizational complexity affects opportunity recognition and exploitation in development projects

Principal Topic: Project structures are often created by entrepreneurs and large corporate organizations to develop new products. Since new product development projects (NPDP) are more often situated within a larger organization, intrapreneurship or corporate entrepreneurship plays an important role in bringing these projects to fruition. Since NPDP often involves the development of a new product using immature technology, we describe development of an immature technology. The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) F-35 aircraft is being developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and eight allied nations. In 2001 Lockheed Martin won a $19 billion contract to develop an affordable, stealthy and supersonic all-weather strike fighter designed to replace a wide range of aging fighter aircraft. In this research we define a complex project as one that demonstrates a number of sources of uncertainty to a degree, or level of severity, that makes it extremely difficult to predict project outcomes, to control or manage project (Remington & Zolin, Forthcoming). Project complexity has been conceptualized by Remington and Pollock (2007) in terms of four major sources of complexity; temporal, directional, structural and technological complexity (See Figure 1). Temporal complexity exists when projects experience significant environmental change outside the direct influence or control of the project. The Global Economic Crisis of 2008 - 2009 is a good example of the type of environmental change that can make a project complex as, for example in the JSF project, where project managers attempt to respond to changes in interest rates, international currency exchange rates and commodity prices etc. Directional complexity exists in a project where stakeholders' goals are unclear or undefined, where progress is hindered by unknown political agendas, or where stakeholders disagree or misunderstand project goals. In the JSF project all the services and all non countries have to agree to the specifications of the three variants of the aircraft; Conventional Take Off and Landing (CTOL), Short Take Off/Vertical Landing (STOVL) and the Carrier Variant (CV). Because the Navy requires a plane that can take off and land on an aircraft carrier, that required a special variant of the aircraft design, adding complexity to the project. Technical complexity occurs in a project using technology that is immature or where design characteristics are unknown or untried. Developing a plane that can take off on a very short runway and land vertically created may highly interdependent technological challenges to correctly locate, direct and balance the lift fans, modulate the airflow and provide equivalent amount of thrust from the downward vectored rear exhaust to lift the aircraft and at the same time control engine temperatures. These technological challenges make costing and scheduling equally challenging. Structural complexity in a project comes from the sheer numbers of elements such as the number of people, teams or organizations involved, ambiguity regarding the elements, and the massive degree of interconnectedness between them. While Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor, they are assisted in major aspects of the JSF development by Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Pratt & Whitney and GE/Rolls-Royce Fighter Engineer Team and innumerable subcontractors. In addition to identifying opportunities to achieve project goals, complex projects also need to identify and exploit opportunities to increase agility in response to changing stakeholder demands or to reduce project risks. Complexity Leadership Theory contends that in complex environments adaptive and enabling leadership are needed (Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey, 2007). Adaptive leadership facilitates creativity, learning and adaptability, while enabling leadership handles the conflicts that inevitably arise between adaptive leadership and traditional administrative leadership (Uhl-Bien and Marion, 2007). Hence, adaptive leadership involves the recognition and opportunities to adapt, while and enabling leadership involves the exploitation of these opportunities. Our research questions revolve around the type or source of complexity and its relationship to opportunity recognition and exploitation. For example, is it only external environmental complexity that creates the need for the entrepreneurial behaviours, such as opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation? Do the internal dimensions of project complexity, such as technological and structural complexity, also create the need for opportunity recognition and opportunity exploitation? The Kropp, Zolin and Lindsay model (2009) describes a relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO), opportunity recognition (OR), and opportunity exploitation (OX) in complex projects, with environmental and organizational contextual variables as moderators. We extend their model by defining the affects of external complexity and internal complexity on OR and OX. ---------- Methodology/Key Propositions: When the environment complex EO is more likely to result in OR because project members will be actively looking for solutions to problems created by environmental change. But in projects that are technologically or structurally complex project leaders and members may try to make the minimum changes possible to reduce the risk of creating new problems due to delays or schedule changes. In projects with environmental or technological complexity project leaders who encourage the innovativeness dimension of EO will increase OR in complex projects. But projects with technical or structural complexity innovativeness will not necessarily result in the recognition and exploitation of opportunities due to the over-riding importance of maintaining stability in the highly intricate and interconnected project structure. We propose that in projects with environmental complexity creating the need for change and innovation project leaders, who are willing to accept and manage risk, are more likely to identify opportunities to increase project effectiveness and efficiency. In contrast in projects with internal complexity a much higher willingness to accept risk will be necessary to trigger opportunity recognition. In structurally complex projects we predict it will be less likely to find a relationship between risk taking and OP. When the environment is complex, and a project has autonomy, they will be motivated to execute opportunities to improve the project's performance. In contrast, when the project has high internal complexity, they will be more cautious in execution. When a project experiences high competitive aggressiveness and their environment is complex, project leaders will be motivated to execute opportunities to improve the project's performance. In contrast, when the project has high internal complexity, they will be more cautious in execution. This paper reports the first stage of a three year study into the behaviours of managers, leaders and team members of complex projects. We conduct a qualitative study involving a Group Discussion with experienced project leaders. The objective is to determine how leaders of large and potentially complex projects perceive that external and internal complexity will influence the affects of EO on OR. ---------- Results and Implications: These results will help identify and distinguish the impact of external and internal complexity on entrepreneurial behaviours in NPDP. Project managers will be better able to quickly decide how and when to respond to changes in the environment and internal project events.

How Australia’s Indigenous people are positioned within health service sites by our presence and by our absence

De Certeau (1984) constructs the notion of belonging as a sentiment which develops over time through the everyday activities. He explains that simple everyday activities are part of the process of appropriation and territorialisation and suggests that over time belonging and attachment are established and built on memory, knowledge and the experiences of everyday activities. Based on the work of de Certeau, non-Indigenous Australians have developed attachment and belonging to places based on the dispossession of Aboriginal people and on their everyday practices over the past two hundred years. During this time non-Indigenous people have marked their appropriation and territorialisation with signs, symbols, representations and images. In marking their attachment, they also define how they position Australia’s Indigenous people by both our presence and our absence. This paper will explore signs and symbols within spaces and places in health services and showcase how they reflect the historical, political, cultural, social and economic values, and power relations of broader society. It will draw on the voices of Aboriginal women to demonstrate their everyday experiences of such sites. It will conclude by highlighting how Aboriginal people assert their identities and un-ceded sovereignty within such health sites and actively resist on-going white epistemological notions of us and the logic of patriarchal white sovereignty.

Coordinated research support services at Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a large multidisciplinary university located in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. QUT is increasing its research focus and is developing its research support services. It has adopted a model of collaboration between the Library, High Performance Computing and Research Support (HPC) and more broadly with Information Technology Services (ITS). Research support services provided by the Library include the provision of information resources and discovery services, bibliographic management software, assistance with publishing (publishing strategies, identifying high impact journals, dealing with publishers and the peer review process), citation analysis and calculating authors’ H Index. Research data management services are being developed by the Library and HPC working in collaboration. The HPC group within ITS supports research computing infrastructure, research development and engagement activities, researcher consultation, high speed computation and data storage systems , 2D/ 3D (immersive) visualisation tools, parallelisation and optimization of research codes, statistics/ data modeling training and support (both qualitative and quantitative) and support for the university’s central Access Grid collaboration facility. Development and engagement activities include participation in research grants and papers, student supervision and internships and the sponsorship, incubation and adoption of new computing technologies for research. ITS also provides other services that support research including ICT training, research infrastructure (networking, data storage, federated access and authorization, virtualization) and corporate systems for research administration. Seminars and workshops are offered to increase awareness and uptake of new and existing services. A series of online surveys on eResearch practices and skills and a number of focus groups was conducted to better inform the development of research support services. Progress towards the provision of research support is described within the context organizational frameworks; resourcing; infrastructure; integration; collaboration; change management; engagement; awareness and skills; new services; and leadership. Challenges to be addressed include the need to redeploy existing operational resources toward new research support services, supporting a rapidly growing research profile across the university, the growing need for the use and support of IT in research programs, finding capacity to address the diverse research support needs across the disciplines, operationalising new research support services following their implementation in project mode, embedding new specialist staff roles, cross-skilling Liaison Librarians, and ensuring continued collaboration between stakeholders.

Where have all the workers gone? Exploring public sector workforce planning

Governments undertake extensive planning of many services and functions, but tend to neglect planning of public service workforces. Disruptions to public service delivery, such as shortages of nurses and doctors, have rejuvenated interest in workforce planning, but many organisations struggle to do it effectively. This historical study examines the capacity of central personnel agencies to predict workforce risks and support workforce planning, using a study of the Queensland public service. It identifies lack of workforce data as a barrier to effective workforce planning, as a result of factors such as changes in the direction of the central personnel agency, lack of appreciation for the value of comprehensive central workforce data, and limited agency human resource (HR) skills or capacity.

Service employee behaviour : the role of compliance and risk taking

This paper looks at the decision-making process that determines the amount of effort frontline service employees will expend in delivering a service in a business-to-business context. Using theories in behavioural economics and interactional and social psychology, the paper develops and presents a model of employee decision-making. Managerial implications, which have the potential to enhance the marketing of business-to-business services and directions for future research in this area, are indicated.

Schizophrenia Housing and Supportive Relationships

Schizophrenia can be a very disabling illness that affects between 0.5% and 1% of the population. This illness has a great personal impact on the individual sufferer, their family and friends. In addition, it makes significant demands on health services and the community in general. This paper reviews the literature on housing and supportive relationships for people with schizophrenia. The literature reports that people's experience of their schizophrenia is that it not only causes symptoms, but often impacts on their ability to maintain the basic resources in life. These resources include the ability to maintain reasonable quality housing, which seems to further impact negatively on their illness and their ability to maintain supportive social relationships. People with schizophrenia (and people in general) rely on their social relationships and family to maintain their mental health. The loss of social relationships and inability to maintain quality housing seem to be related - if people cannot maintain quality housing, they find it difficult to maintain supportive social relationships.

Health law : scope, sources and forces

• For the purposes of this chapter, “health law” encapsulates regulation of the medical and health professions, the administration of health services and the maintenance of public health to the extent that it is connected to the provision of health services. • There are diverging views as to whether health law can be regarded as a discrete “area of law”. • Health law draws on other areas of law such as tort law, criminal law and family law. It is also draws upon other disciplines, most notably medical and health ethics. • Social and economic forces have influenced the development and direction of health law, and these forces may become even more influential as the century develops. • The increasingly globalised world has implications for Australia’s health systems and raises questions and creates commitments in respect of the international community. • Technological developments, including in respect of treatment, diagnosis and information management, create ongoing challenges for health law. • Patient rights, human rights and consumerism are increasingly key drivers in the development of health law. • Health law is significant to contemporary Australian society because of the gravity of the topics that fall within its ambit, its social relevance to so many aspects of human existence and endeavour, the important role it plays in protecting the vulnerable, and the extent to which it engages with fundamental principles of justice.

An initial technology roadmap for home automation : home and personal life management

Home Automation (HA) has emerged as a prominent ¯eld for researchers and in- vestors confronting the challenge of penetrating the average home user market with products and services emerging from technology based vision. In spite of many technology contri- butions, there is a latent demand for a®ordable and pragmatic assistive technologies for pro-active handling of complex lifestyle related problems faced by home users. This study has pioneered to develop an Initial Technology Roadmap for HA (ITRHA) that formulates a need based vision of 10-15 years, identifying market, product and technology investment opportunities, focusing on those aspects of HA contributing to e±cient management of home and personal life. The concept of Family Life Cycle is developed to understand the temporal needs of family. In order to formally describe a coherent set of family processes, their relationships, and interaction with external elements, a reference model named Fam- ily System is established that identi¯es External Entities, 7 major Family Processes, and 7 subsystems-Finance, Meals, Health, Education, Career, Housing, and Socialisation. Anal- ysis of these subsystems reveals Soft, Hard and Hybrid processes. Rectifying the lack of formal methods for eliciting future user requirements and reassessing evolving market needs, this study has developed a novel method called Requirement Elicitation of Future Users by Systems Scenario (REFUSS), integrating process modelling, and scenario technique within the framework of roadmapping. The REFUSS is used to systematically derive process au- tomation needs relating the process knowledge to future user characteristics identi¯ed from scenarios created to visualise di®erent futures with richly detailed information on lifestyle trends thus enabling learning about the future requirements. Revealing an addressable market size estimate of billions of dollars per annum this research has developed innovative ideas on software based products including Document Management Systems facilitating automated collection, easy retrieval of all documents, In- formation Management System automating information services and Ubiquitous Intelligent System empowering the highly mobile home users with ambient intelligence. Other product ideas include robotic devices of versatile Kitchen Hand and Cleaner Arm that can be time saving. Materialisation of these products require technology investment initiating further research in areas of data extraction, and information integration as well as manipulation and perception, sensor actuator system, tactile sensing, odour detection, and robotic controller. This study recommends new policies on electronic data delivery from service providers as well as new standards on XML based document structure and format.

A comparison of the driving behavior between remunerated and volunteer drivers

Introduction: Past research suggests that some groups of work-related drivers practice more safe driving behavior than others. However, no research to date has compared the driving behavior of those remunerated for their services and volunteer work-related drivers. As such, based on a theoretical discussion of the organizational and social contexts in which work-related driving occurs, this study hypothesized that volunteers would report safer driving behavior compared with remunerated drivers. Methods: One-hundred and ninety remunerated drivers and fifty-nine volunteers completed a self-reported driving behavior questionnaire. Results: Some support was found for the hypotheses, as volunteers reported more safe driving behavior than remunerated drivers. Specifically, volunteers reported less inattention and tiredness while driving compared to remunerated drivers. Conclusions: The results suggested that organizations need to formalize the roles and responsibilities of the work-related driver, and better integrate driving within the wider occupational health and safety system.

Women who miscarry : the effectiveness and clinical utility of the Kessler 10 questionnaire in screening for ongoing psychological distress

Background: Early pregnancy loss has been linked to enduring psychological morbidity. Aims: This study aimed to investigate the utility of the Kessler 10 (K10) questionnaire as a brief screening instrument to identify women at risk for the development of psychiatric diagnoses three months post-miscarriage. Method: Participants were 117 consecutive women presenting at a public hospital emergency department and receiving a diagnosis of miscarriage. Main outcome measures: K10 screen for psychological distress and the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders to determine psychiatric diagnoses. Results: A majority of women (81.2%) experienced elevated levels of distress initially, 24.8% in the very high range. They were not at increased risk of psychiatric diagnoses at three months compared with the general population; however, they were significantly more likely to report subsyndromal symptoms at this time compared with the general population. The baseline K10 score was the only significant predictor of distress at follow-up (r = 0.45, P < 0.001). The receiver operating characteristic curve shows that a cut-off of 14 on the K10 has suitable sensitivity (97%) and specificity (82%) for predicting ongoing psychological distress in women who miscarry. Conclusions: The K10 is effective in identifying women at risk for ensuring psychological symptoms following miscarriage.

Compliance, peritoneal dialysis and chronic kidney disease : lessons from the literature

Poor patient compliance with peritoneal dialysis (PD) has significant adverse effects on morbidity and mortality rates in individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD). It also adds to the resource burdens of healthcare services and providers. This paper explores the notion of PD compliance in patients with CKD with reference to the relevant published literature. The analysis of the literature reveals that ‘PD compliance’ is a complex and challenging construct for both patients and health professionals. There is no universal definition of compliance that is widely adopted in practice and research, and therefore a lack of consensus on how to determine ‘compliant’ patient outcomes. There are also multiple and interconnected determinants of PD compliance that are context-bound, which healthcare professionals must be aware of, and which makes producing consensus of measuring PD compliance difficult. The complexity of the interventions required to produce even a modest improvement in PD compliance, which are described in this paper, are significant. Compliance with PD and other treatments for CKD is a multidimensional, context-bound concept, that to date has tended to efface the role and needs of the renal patient. We conclude the paper with the implications for contemporary practice.

Using a design led disruptive innovation approach to develop new services : practising innovation in times of discontinuity

Organisations face increasing competition from new firms in emerging markets and their past superior products may no longer provide competitive advantage in markets based on different cost and value differentials. A shift in design practices from product solutions to health services which are accessible and affordable by all is required. This paper explores a design led approach to innovation to assist medical device companies develop new services and experiences and reshape their notions of the nature, development and deployment of health care services. This approach uses design tools and methodologies that are grounded in the authentic understandings of stakeholder experiences, to assist an organisation create a vision of likely future health care scenarios. Through this process, organisations can explore the complexities in the delivery of future health care services in new and emerging markets allowing them to tailor product and service solutions which focus on being accessible and affordable by all. The industry based case study for the design of health services in carried out in emerging economies. The contribution of this work in advancing research into design innovation and future research directions are also presented.

The relationship between Australians and the overseas graves of the First World War

The purpose of this thesis is to outline the relationship that existed in the past and exists in the present, between Australians and the War Graves and Memorials to the Missing. commemorations of Australians who died during the First World War. Their final resting places are scattered all over the world and provide a tangible record of the sacrifice of men and women in the war, and represent the final result by Official Agencies such as the Imperial, and later, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and its agency representative, the Office of Australian War Graves, of an attempt to appropriately commemorate them. The study follows the path of history from the event of death of an individual in the First World War, through their burial; temporary grave or memorial commemoration; the permanent commemoration; the family and public reaction to the deaths; how the Official Agencies of related Commonwealth Governments dealt with the dead; and finally, how the Australian dead are represented on the battlefields of the world in the 21st century. Australia.s war dead of the First World War are scattered around the globe in more than 40 countries and are represented in war cemeteries and civil cemeteries; and listed on large „Memorials to the Missing., which commemorate the individuals devoid of a known graves or final resting place.

Assessing the potential impact of web services on business processes

Though web services offer unique opportunities for the design of new business processes, the assessment of the potential impact of Web services on existing business information systems is often reduced to technical aspects. This paper proposes a four-phase methodology which facilitates the evaluation of the potential use of Web services on business information systems both from a technical and from a strategic viewpoint. It is based on business process models, which are used to frame the adoption and deployment of Web services and to assess their impact on existing business processes. The application of this methodology is described using a procurement scenario.

Understanding shared services : an exploration of the IS literature

In a competitive environment, companies continuously innovate to offer superior services at lower costs. ‘Shared Services’ have been extensively adopted in practice as a means for improving organizational performance. Shared Services are considered most appropriate for support functions and are widely adopted in human resource management, finance and accounting, and more recently employed as an information systems (IS) function. As computer-based corporate information systems have become de facto and the backbone of administrative systems, the technical impediments to sharing have come down dramatically. As this trend continues, CIOs and IT professionals need a deeper understanding of the Shared Services phenomenon. Yet, analysis of IS academic literature reveals that Shared Services, though mentioned in more than 100 articles, has received little in depth attention. This paper investigates the current status of Shared Services in IS literature. The authors present a detailed review of literature from main IS journals and conferences. The paper concludes with a tentative operational definition, a list of perceived main objectives of Shared Services, and an agenda for related future research.