5,971 research outputs found
Making a difference? - evaluating an innovative approach to improving project delivery capability in a UK government department
No full textThe UK Government has introduced measures in recent years aimed at improving project delivery capability in government departments, including the establishment of departmental Centres of Excellence (CoE) of Project and Programme Management (PPM) – ‘super programme offices’ charged with ‘embedding best practice’.This paper presents a case study of an innovative approach to the introduction of a CoE for IT-enabled change projects that includes a central team of highly skilled, experienced managers to intervene directly as required in problematic projects. The positive impact of this approach is compared with that of a previous conventional CoE focused mainly on ‘best practice’ process implementation, where no direct impact could be seen.Taken together with research literature from a number of disciplines, the case study supports the view that the conventional CoE approach of embedding ‘best practice’ control processes may have little success in improving project delivery. It highlights the importance of direct intervention using experience-based, context-sensitive skills in improving project performance, and points to the essential role of organisational power, politics and rhetoric in ‘making a difference’.<br/
Visualising roaming within eduroam
No full textThe eduroam federated access service is a valuable tool for supporting collaboration and resource sharing worldwide, with its primary purpose being to facilitate seamless wireless roaming between users at participating institutions. There are over 100 participating sites in the UK that have joined the UK instance of eduroam known as the JANET Roaming Service (JRS). However, while the JRS is gaining traction in deployment, there is a lack of visualisation tools for users, site administrators or JANET managers to understand and see the general roaming patterns. This paper will describe the implementation of and demonstrate a number of three-dimensional, interactive visual representations of eduroam log data from the JRS. These visualisations give a comprehensive overview of JRS roaming in the UK that, for example, communicate the ‘value’ of the service in a single image [Figure 1], give overviews at the institutional level [Figure 2] and provide diagnostic information to the service operators [Figure 3]. The software is open source and is being developed with a view to it being offered for adoption by other NRENS and the international core eduroam infrastructur
Managing business change projects: a social practice perspective
No full textThis research responds to calls from several fields (including project management and organisational change) questioning the engineering paradigm of objective rationality, systems control and universally-applicable structured methods underpinning conventional ‘best practice’ approaches to managing business change projects. The call is for better understanding of the reality of business change projects as experienced by the people working on them, and for improved theory based on that. This research seeks to explore whether more effective approaches to delivering benefits from business change in organisations could be developed by taking a social practice perspective - focusing on the dynamic and complex processes of social interaction, power relations, and social construction of day-to-day reality.To address these questions, an 18-month ethnographic, participant/observer study has been carried out within a large UK public sector organisation, observing events and behaviours on a day-to-day basis from a practitioner’s perspective, using narrative to capture the complexity of the social reality of project life with all its uncertainty, politics, and emotion. This fieldwork, combining both objectively-observed and subjectively-interpreted findings,identifies some generic intersubjective ‘key aspects’ of business change projects. These ‘key aspects’ have then been interpreted using theoretical concepts from five leading theoretical frameworks (Giddens’ structuration theory, Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Actor-network theory (ANT), Weick’s sensemaking, and Strauss’s symbolic interactionist theory of action).A multi-level theoretical model rooted in the epistemological characteristics of social reality is developed from the relationships emerging from the empirical findings and by employing some of the most relevant theoretical constructs. The model is found to be consistent with practice-based research findings from research into project success in general, and with some approaches to managing uncertainty in projects. The implications of the model for practice are explored, directing attention away from control procedures and detailed planning to a range of more productive management interventions
Do dolphins benefit from nonlinear mathematics when processing their sonar returns?
No full textAn interview with author Tim Leighton about the paper
Does the Disinfection of Public Water Supplies Increase Antibiotic Resistance Levels?
No full textFaculty advisor: Tim LaParaThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).O'Leary, Emma; LaPara, Timothy. (2018). Does the Disinfection of Public Water Supplies Increase Antibiotic Resistance Levels?. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/196284
Opportunities for linking young surveyors across professional surveying member organisations and FIG
No full textTim Di Muzio on 'Sabotage'
No full textIn a series of essays published in 2013 and 2014 on capitaspower.com, political economist Tim Di Muzio explored the concept of ‘sabotage’ as it applies to capitalist power. I recently rediscovered these essays and was so impressed by them that I have reposted them here as a single piece.
About the author: Tim Di Muzio is a researcher at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of numerous books, including Debt as power, Carbon capitalism, and The 1% and the Rest of us
1996-1997 Tim Gautreaux
No full textTim Gautreaux is the author of three novels and two earlier short story collections. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and GQ. After teaching for thirty years at Southeastern Louisiana University, he now lives, with his wife, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. (Photo credit: Randy Bergeron)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/grisham_res/1023/thumbnail.jp
First person - Tim Petzold
No full textFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Tim Petzold is first author on ‘ Connexin 41.8 governs timely haematopoietic stem and progenitor cell specification’, published in BiO. Tim conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Julien Bertrand's lab at the Department of Pathology and Immunology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, Switzerland. He is now a postdoc in the lab of Holger Gerhardt at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, Berlin, Germany, investigating developmental biology – previously his focus was on how blood stem cells develop and now it has shifted to how the vascular system develops
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