tailieunhanh - Creating the project office 17

Creating the project office 17. This is a book about improving organizational performance by implementing a project office system that develops project management as a core competency and thus adds value to the organization. A project office consists of a team dedicated to improving the practice of project management in the organization. The improvement in organizational performance is achieved by obtaining more value from projects, making project management a standard management practice, and then moving the organization toward the enterprise project management concept | 138 Creating the Project Office unaware of potential negative consequences. It turns out that people often find themselves much worse off usually because they have a different interpretation of what is better for them. Anthropological studies are replete with descriptions of situations where people from outside a culture attempted to make life better for its members but actually made things worse from the point of view of those they were trying to help. Figure provides valuable modern lessons for change agents. Despite the fact that the proposed change looks good and righteous to you it may not look that way to others. It is possible that there will be unintended consequences to the proposed change and these consequences may do more harm than good. The change agent should be on the lookout for such unintended consequences and make adjustments to minimize them. In the Yir Yoront example distributing axes directly to women and children contributed to the confusion of FIGURE . UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES IN REAL LIFE. Spicer 1952 describes a typical example in Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians pp. 69-90 . Missionaries in Australia as part of their plan for raising native living standards made it possible for aboriginals to earn Western goods the missionaries considered improving. Under certain circumstances these goods were handed out gratis. The handouts included steel axes that replaced old stone axes. Perhaps unknown to the missionaries stone axes had gained a position of cultural significance in certain aboriginal tribes. For these tribes the introduction of the steel ax degraded their life as they experienced it. In the society of the Yir Yoront the process of making a stone ax helped to define masculinity. Only men were allowed to make stone axes and this required much skill to find a right wood for the handle and find a right tree for the gum. The stones were obtained from a distant quarry so this required trading during great ceremonies and fiestas. .