A Best Practice Process for Fleet Safety Training

This paper outlines a process for fleet safety training based on research and management development programmes undertaken at the University of Huddersfield in the UK (www.hud.ac.uk/sas/trans/transnews.htm) and CARRS-Q in Australia (www.carrsq.qut.edu.au/staff/Murray.jsp) over the past 10 years.

CONBPS : an expert system to improve the efficiency of the construction process

The aim of the research outlined in this paper is to develop a best practice process model for building projects based on the use of an expert system. The CONstruction Best Practice System (CONBPS) focusses on projects which are based on the traditional procurement strategy, using the JCT 80 standard form of contract. The model clearly identifies the sequence of construction activities. It also identifies the roles and responsibilities of the major parties on the building team and the issues within the project cycle, which can prove critical to project success. The system incorporates many user-friendly functions, including the provision of multi-choice icons and the provision of an on-line help function. Besides, it also provides interim and final reports which are used to advise the participants on the success factors that they have ignored and to which aspects they should pay more attention. A framework was initially developed focussing on the whole design process with a full knowledge-based system developed for the Inception Stage. CONBPS can be used as a teaching/learning tool to assist teachers and students to better understand the construction process. Also, it could prove useful to project managers and all the participants in the construction process.

Usability Requirements for Complex Cyber-Physical Systems in a Totally Networked World

Part 7: Cyber-Physical Systems

Re-engineering project planning processes : a best practice model for managing project phase integration issues

Competitive markets are increasingly driving new initiatives for shorter cycle times resulting in increased overlapping of project phases. This, in turn, necessitates improving the interfaces between the different phases to be overlapped (integrated), thus allowing transfer of processes, information and knowledge from one individual or team to another. This transfer between phases, within and between projects, is one of the basic challenges to the philosophy of project management. To make the process transfer more transparent with minimal loss of momentum and project knowledge, this paper draws upon Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) philosophies to develop a Best Practice Model for managing project phase integration. The paper presents the rationale behind the model development and outlines its two key parts; (1) Strategic Framework and (2) Implementation Plan. Key components of both the Strategic Framework and the Implementation Plan are presented and discussed.

Development of a new best practice model for building projects

Time, cost and quality are the traditional determinants of project success. The level of client satisfaction is a newly defined measurement of project success. Often the satisfaction level of construction clients is not high. The reasons for this situation are twofold, firstly due to the temporary organizational structure of construction team and secondly, the inefficient construction process. The traditional procurement route, whilst still the most popular in the building sector, is probably subject to most criticism. The primary aim of this research is to develop a new best practice model for building projects. This will enable the client’s project manager to identify best practice under the traditional procurement route before the work is executed. Within this model, the sequence of construction activities, the responsibilities of the parties and the critical aspect of each phase of the project are identified. This model can then be utilized at both the design and/ or the construction stage in order to secure project success.

Entrepreneurship education in non-business schools : best practice for Australian contexts of knowledge and innovation communities (Final Report)

In the current era of global economic instability, business and industry have already identified a widening gap between graduate skills and employability. An important element of this is the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates. This Teaching Fellowship investigated two sides of a story about entrepreneurial skills and their teaching. Senior players in the innovation commercialisation industry, a high profile entrepreneurial sector, were surveyed to gauge their needs and experiences of graduates they employ. International contexts of entrepreneurship education were investigated to explore how their teaching programs impart the skills of entrepreneurship. Such knowledge is an essential for the design of education programs that can deliver the entrepreneurial skills deemed important by industry for future sustainability. Two programs of entrepreneurship education are being implemented at QUT that draw on the best practice exemplars investigated during this Fellowship. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS) focuses on capturing the innovation and creativity of students, staff and others. The QIS is a physical and virtual meeting and networking space; a connected community enhancing the engagement of participants. The Q_Hatchery is still embryonic; but it is intended to be an innovation community that brings together nascent entrepreneurial businesses to collaborate, train and support each other. There is a niche between concept product and business incubator where an experiential learning environment for otherwise isolated ‘garage-at-home’ businesses could improve success rates. The QIS and the Q_Hatchery serve as living research laboratories to trial the concepts emerging from the skills survey. The survey of skills requirements of the innovation commercialisation industry has produced a large and high quality data set still being explored. Work experience as an employability factor has already emerged as an industry requirement that provides employee maturity. Exploratory factor analysis of the skills topics surveyed has led to a process-based conceptual model for teaching and learning higher-order entrepreneurial skills. Two foundational skills domains (Knowledge, Awareness) are proposed as prerequisites which allow individuals with a suite of early stage entrepreneurial and behavioural skills (Pre-leadership) to further leverage their careers into a leadership role in industry with development of skills around higher order elements of entrepreneurship, management in new business ventures and progressing winning technologies to market. The next stage of the analysis is to test the proposed model through structured equation modelling. Another factor that emerged quickly from the survey analysis broadens the generic concept of team skills currently voiced in Australian policy documents discussing the employability agenda. While there was recognition of the role of sharing, creating and using knowledge in a team-based interdisciplinary context, the adoption and adaptation of behaviours and attitudes of other team members of different disciplinary backgrounds (interprofessionalism) featured as an issue. Most undergraduates are taught and undertake teamwork in silos and, thus, seldom experience a true real-world interdisciplinary environment. Enhancing the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian industry is essential for the economic health of the country and can only be achieved by addressing the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates from the higher education system. This Fellowship has attempted to address this deficiency by identifying the skills requirements and providing frameworks for their teaching.

Developing a best practice model of refugee maternity care

Background: About one third of refugee and humanitarian entrants to Australia are women age 12—44 years. Pregnant women from refugee backgrounds may have been exposed to a range of medical and psychosocial issues that can impact maternal, fetal and neonatal health. Research question: What are the key elements that characterise a best practice model of maternity care for women from refugee backgrounds? This paper outlines the findings of a project which aimed at developing such a model at a major maternity hospital in Brisbane, Australia. Participants and methods: This multifaceted project included a literature review, consultations with key stakeholders, a chart audit of hospital use by African-born women in 2006 that included their obstetric outcomes, a survey of 23 African-born women who gave birth at the hospital in 2007—08, and a survey of 168 hospital staff members. Results: The maternity chart audit identified complex medical and social histories among the women, including anaemia, female circumcision, hepatitis B, thrombocytopenia, and barriers to access antenatal care. The rates of caesarean sections and obstetric complications increased over time. Women and hospital staff surveys indicated the need for adequate interpreting services, education programs for women regarding antenatal and postnatal care, and professional development for health care staff to enhance cultural responsiveness. Discussion and conclusions: The findings point towards the need for a model of refugee maternity care that comprises continuity of carer, quality interpreter services, educational strategies for both women and healthcare professionals, and the provision of psychosocial support to women from refugee backgrounds.

Entrepreneurship education in non-business schools : best practice for Australian contexts of knowledge and innovation communities (Final Report)

In the current era of global economic instability, business and industry have already identified a widening gap between graduate skills and employability. An important element of this is the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates. This Teaching Fellowship investigated two sides of a story about entrepreneurial skills and their teaching. Senior players in the innovation commercialisation industry, a high profile entrepreneurial sector, were surveyed to gauge their needs and experiences of graduates they employ. International contexts of entrepreneurship education were investigated to explore how their teaching programs impart the skills of entrepreneurship. Such knowledge is an essential for the design of education programs that can deliver the entrepreneurial skills deemed important by industry for future sustainability. Two programs of entrepreneurship education are being implemented at QUT that draw on the best practice exemplars investigated during this Fellowship. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS) focuses on capturing the innovation and creativity of students, staff and others. The QIS is a physical and virtual meeting and networking space; a connected community enhancing the engagement of participants. The Q_Hatchery is still embryonic; but it is intended to be an innovation community that brings together nascent entrepreneurial businesses to collaborate, train and support each other. There is a niche between concept product and business incubator where an experiential learning environment for otherwise isolated ‘garage-at-home’ businesses could improve success rates. The QIS and the Q_Hatchery serve as living research laboratories to trial the concepts emerging from the skills survey. The survey of skills requirements of the innovation commercialisation industry has produced a large and high quality data set still being explored. Work experience as an employability factor has already emerged as an industry requirement that provides employee maturity. Exploratory factor analysis of the skills topics surveyed has led to a process-based conceptual model for teaching and learning higher-order entrepreneurial skills. Two foundational skills domains (Knowledge, Awareness) are proposed as prerequisites which allow individuals with a suite of early stage entrepreneurial and behavioural skills (Pre-leadership) to further leverage their careers into a leadership role in industry with development of skills around higher order elements of entrepreneurship, management in new business ventures and progressing winning technologies to market. The next stage of the analysis is to test the proposed model through structured equation modelling. Another factor that emerged quickly from the survey analysis broadens the generic concept of team skills currently voiced in Australian policy documents discussing the employability agenda. While there was recognition of the role of sharing, creating and using knowledge in a team-based interdisciplinary context, the adoption and adaptation of behaviours and attitudes of other team members of different disciplinary backgrounds (interprofessionalism) featured as an issue. Most undergraduates are taught and undertake teamwork in silos and, thus, seldom experience a true real-world interdisciplinary environment. Enhancing the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian industry is essential for the economic health of the country and can only be achieved by addressing the lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates from the higher education system. This Fellowship has attempted to address this deficiency by identifying the skills requirements and providing frameworks for their teaching.

Best practice in peer-led curriculum content : informing an interactive program to improve passenger safety among high school seniors

Despite ongoing improvements in behaviour change strategies, licensing models and road law enforcement measures young drivers remain significantly over-represented in fatal and non-fatal road related crashes. This paper focuses on the safety of those approaching driving age and identifies both high priority road safety messages and relevant peer-led strategies to guide the development school programs. It summarises the review in a program logic model built around the messages and identified curriculum elements, as they may be best operationalised within the licensing and school contexts in Victoria. This paper summarises a review of common deliberate risk-taking and non-deliberate unsafe driving behaviours among novice drivers, highlighting risks associated with speeding, driving while fatigued, driving while impaired and carrying passengers. Common beliefs of young people that predict risky driving were reviewed, particularly with consideration of those beliefs that can be operationalised in a behaviour change school program. Key components of adolescent risk behaviour change programs were also reviewed, which identified a number of strategies for incorporation in a school based behaviour change program, including: a well-structured theoretical design and delivery, thoughtfully considered peer-selected processes, adequate training and supervision of peer facilitators, a process for monitoring and sustainability, and interactive delivery and participant discussions. The research base is then summarised in a program logic model with further discussion about the quality of the current state of knowledge of evaluation of behaviour change programs and the need for considerable development in program evaluation.

Habitat for Humanity: Calibrating Best Practice Against the MDGs

Poverty alleviation lies at the heart of contemporary international initiatives on development. The key to development is the creation of an environment in which people can develop their potential, leading productive, creative lives in accordance with their needs, interests and faith. This entails, on the one hand, protecting the vulnerable from things that threaten their survival, such as inadequate nutrition, disease, conflict, natural disasters and the impact of climate change, thereby enhancing the poor’s capabilities to develop resilience in difficult conditions. On the other hand, it also requires a means of empowering the poor to act on their own behalf, as individuals and communities, to secure access to resources and the basic necessities of life such as water, food, shelter, sanitation, health and education. ‘Development’, from this perspective, seeks to address the sources of human insecurity, working towards ‘freedom from want, freedom from fear’ in ways that empower the vulnerable as agents of development (not passive recipients of benefaction).

Recognition of the magnitude of the problems confronted by the poor and failure of past interventions to tackle basic issues of human security led the United Nations (UN) in September 2000 to set out a range of ambitious, but clearly defined, development goals to be achieved by 2015. These are known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The intention of the UN was to mobilise multilateral international organisations, non-governmental organisations and the wider international community to focus attention on fulfilling earlier promises to combat global poverty. This international framework for development prioritises: the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a global partnership for development. These goals have been mapped onto specific targets (18 in total) against which outcomes of associated development initiatives can be measured and the international community held to account. If the world achieves the MDGs, more than 500 million people will be lifted out of poverty. However, the challenges the goals represent are formidable. Interim reports on the initiative indicate a need to scale-up efforts and accelerate progress.
Only MDG 7, Target 11 explicitly identifies shelter as a priority, identifying the need to secure ‘by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers’. This raises a question over how Habitat for Humanity’s commitment to tackling poverty housing fits within this broader international framework designed to allievate global poverty. From an analysis of HFH case studies, this report argues that the processes by which Habitat for Humanity tackles poverty housing directly engages with the agenda set by the MDGs. This should not be regarded as a beneficial by-product of the delivery of decent, affordable shelter, but rather understood in terms of the ways in which Habitat for Humanity has translated its mission and values into a participatory model that empowers individuals and communities to address the interdependencies between inadequate shelter and other sources of human insecurity. What housing can deliver is as important as what housing itself is.

Examples of the ways in which Habitat for Humanity projects engage with the MDG framework include the incorporation of sustainable livelihoods strategies, up-grading of basic infrastructure and promotion of models of good governance. This includes housing projects that have also offered training to young people in skills used in the construction industry, microfinanced loans for women to start up their own home-based businesses, and the provision of food gardens. These play an important role in lifting families out of poverty and ensuring the sustainability of HFH projects. Studies of the impact of improved shelter and security of livelihood upon family life and the welfare of children evidence higher rates of participation in education, more time dedicated to study and greater individual achievement. Habitat for Humanity projects also typically incorporate measures to up-grade the provision of basic sanitation facilities and supplies of safe, potable drinking water. These measures not only directly help reduce mortality rates (e.g. diarrheal diseases account for around 2 million deaths annually in children under 5), but also, when delivered through HFH project-related ‘community funds’, empower the poor to mobilise community resources, develop local leadership capacities and even secure de facto security of tenure from government authorities.

In the process of translating its mission and values into practical measures, HFH has developed a range of innovative practices that deliver much more than housing alone. The organisation’s participatory model enables both direct beneficiaries and the wider community to tackle the insecurities they face, unlocking latent skills and enterprise, building sustainable livelihood capabilities. HFH plays an important role as a catalyst for change, delivering through the vehicle of housing the means to address the primary causes of poverty itself. Its contribution to wider development priorities deserves better recognition. In calibrating the success of HFH projects in terms of units completed or renovated alone, the significance of the process by which HFH realises these outcomes is often not sufficiently acknowledged, both within the organisation and externally. As the case studies developed in the report illustrate, the methodologies Habitat for Humanity employs to address the issue of poverty housing within the developing world, place the organisation at the centre of a global strategic agenda to address the root causes of poverty through community empowerment and the transformation of structures of governance.

Given this, the global network of HFH affiliates constitutes a unique organisational framework to faciliate sharing resources, ideas and practical experience across a diverse range of cultural, political and institutional environments. This said, it is apparent that work needs to be done to better to faciliate the pooling of experience and lessons learnt from across its affiliates. Much is to be gained from learning from less successful projects, sharing innovative practices, identifying strategic partnerships with donors, other NGOs and CBOs, and engaging with the international development community on how housing fits within a broader agenda to alleviate poverty and promote good governance.

Developing a best practice model for partnership practice between specialist palliative care and intellectual disability services: a mixed methods study

Background: The lack of access to good quality palliative care for people with intellectual disabilities is highlighted in the international literature. In response, more partnership practice in end-of-life care is proposed. 
Aim: This study aimed to develop a best practice model to guide and promote partnership practice between specialist palliative care and intellectual disability services. 
Design: A mixed methods research design involving two phases was used, underpinned by a conceptual model for partnership practice. 
Setting/participants: Phase 1 involved scoping end-of-life care to people with intellectual disability, based on self-completed questionnaires. In all, 47 of 66 (71.2%) services responded. In Phase 2, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with a purposive sample recruited of 30 health and social care professionals working in intellectual disability and palliative care services, who had provided palliative care to someone with intellectual disability. For both phases, data were collected from primary and secondary care in one region of the United Kingdom. 
Results: In Phase 1, examples of good practice were apparent. However, partnership practice was infrequent and unmet educational needs were identified. Four themes emerged from the interviews in Phase 2: challenges and issues in end-of-life care, sharing and learning, supporting and empowering and partnership in practice. 
Conclusion: Joint working and learning between intellectual disability and specialist palliative care were seen as key and fundamental. A framework for partnership practice between both services has been developed which could have international applicability and should be explored with other services in end-of-life care.

An empirical and logical exploration of the strategic compatibility of best practice and product innovation : preliminary insights from Australian and New Zealand manufacturing industry

In an attempt to enhance debate focused on an established academic controversy, this study re-investigated selected data from the 1994 AMC survey of Australian and New Zealand manufacturing practices to test the hypothesis that best practice and product innovation may be incompatible generic business strategies. A modification of Robert G. Cooper’s Stage-Gate product development model was used as a theoretical framework to create a measurable construct of ‘product innovation’ as a strategy and compare two groups: firms committed to a best practice strategy (BPs) and firms not utilising best practice (Non-BPs). Eight variables were scrutinised. After logical critique was added to statistical data analysis, four major insights emerged.

(1) Tests yielded several statistically significant but substantively inconclusive results because both studied groups had nearly identical profiles in rating innovation as the factor of lowest importance to commercial success and because the definitional framework which guided construction of the survey instrument treated innovation as a second-order issue. (2) Currently, best practice and product innovation are logically incompatible by definition. (3) Even if the definition of best practice were changed, it is likely that the additional key process of innovation would remain incompatible with the existing key process of benchmarking. (4) However, until the definition of best practice does make an attempt to include innovation as a key process rather than an outcome, testing any hypothesis of strategic compatibility between a best practice focus and an innovation focus will be both empirically difficult and logically unnecessary.