PUBLICATIONS

This post is autonomous but can be seen as a complement to my previous post technology & organization. I treat here the dynamic aspect of the relation between technology & organization in industrial companies.

Medium & large industrial companies (oil & gas, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, equipment manufacturing, automotive…) tend to have different structures. Let’s see why.

This post analyzes the unforeseen bureaucratic effect brought by managerial succession.

This post reviews the main misalignments Project Management may suffer within a company.

The rationalizing of the Project Manager’s role & responsibilities has somehow both improved & hindered some of the key aspects of project management.

Indeed, an emphasis on the project management community to develop further common values has been made over the last decades. A framework of trainings is generally thought through at corporate levels.

On the positive side, such source of culture has enabled lately to build mobility bridges for Project Managers (PM) within the companies, from one BU to another.

On a less positive side, the PM role has become more constrained, to the detriment of the whole company.

It is easy to fall in the trap of the cultural stereotype when negotiating internationally. Do not let it ruin your “date”.

Scheduling is omnipresent in business. All functions use it, from manufacturing & supply to strategy & finance. Unfortunately, scheduling is like a gremlin: If you don’t master it, soon this nice little gizmo will turn itself into a beast wreaking havoc.

In this post you can read “organization” & “environment” not only as they are (a company within its environment) but also as a subgroup within a group.

A century ago, in 1916, while WWI was raging, Henri Fayol, who was 75 years old and still at the head of a mining corporation, published his General & industrial management, the 110-page founding book of modern business management.

Five years earlier Frederick Taylor had released his Principles of scientific management. But where Taylor focused on operations’ management, and gave his views of mangement as seen from shopfloor, Fayol concentrated on business management as seen from the general manager.

Henri Fayol's work has had so much impact on the way we manage that he should be known at least as much as Frederick Taylor, if not more.

To lead, you must have an efficient method of investigating the social conditions surrounding you. If the check is correct, the way forward to act will naturally show itself.

Apart from a 1-year Japanese evening class in my last year of engineering school, and a trolleybus project

for Mexico with Japan-based Mitsubishi as customer, my Japanese fluency remains meagre but few words have stayed, thanks to lean management. 

For those unfamiliar with the latter term, holacracy is one of the latest & hotest models of organizational structure. Its core concepts are:

• Decision-making and authority are deemed to be distributive: The structure, built on groups or circles, is a mix of:
• • Linking pins; theorized by Likert* more than 50 years ago; a forerunner of psychology into management.
  • Autonomous teams; which emerged after WWII and developed by Trist*, one of the organizational development fathers, himself heavily influenced by Lewin*, a pioneer of applied psychology.
• People are mission-driven rather than sitting in concrete-style roles.
• Communication is agile**: stand ups…

No Wonder that, with such a definition, holacracy attracts many entrepreneurs & managers, young or not.

Holacracy comes from holon, a Greek word used in philosophy to describe something which is, at the same time, the whole thing and a part of it.

The term was used by Koestler* in 1967 but has regained interests since Robertson’s* release in 2010. Koestler

was influenced by Simon*, the Nobel-prized father of “bounded rationality”.

New prophets see holacracy as the answer to the “Mephistophelian” model of taylorism, its pyramidal structure, & other evils of "typical" management.

We all have seen this slide passed on inkedin a few times with many likes on it, or elsewhere.

Yet, due to an apparently “classic” bug with the comment button, I could not reply. So here it is.

A maturity model is a powerful tool that enables a company to self-assess & to build a strong basis for its optimal growth. Don’t go changing your company without one.

 This post is the last of a series of three posts in which we will overview the basic definitions, yet sometimes not so well applied, of Portfolio, Program & Project management.

We focus here on the bottom layer:

This post is the second of a series of three posts in which we will overview the basic definitions, yet sometimes not so well applied, of Portfolio, Program & Project management.

We focus here on the middle layer:

This post is the first of a series of three posts in which we will overview the basic definitions, yet sometimes not so well applied, of Portfolio, Program & Project management.

We focus here on the top layer: