[Management Index] [Systems Approach] [Setting objectives] [Participatory Project Management] [Quality and Risk] [Organising]

Managing Objectives and Participation

"Management by objectives" provided a useful tool to handle and establish a structured set of objectives, from those general, applied to the whole organisation, to those particular, more specific, applied to a department or working group within it. Its main weakness relies on the restricted level of freedom given to parts to choose ends or objectives. It is a top down approach where strategic decisions are centralised and tactical decisions are decentralised to the lower levels. "Management is responsible for clarifying the charter, rationale, and performance challenge for the team, but management must also leave enough flexibility for the team to develop commitment around its own spin on that purpose, set of goals, timing and approach." (Katzenbach, 1993:113).

Beneficiary Participation

Outputs are directed towards users, consumers or beneficiaries. In spite of this, beneficiaries are considered in a passive manner in all the stages of the project. This certainly has been the cause of failure for a number of projects. The introduction of measures that enable beneficiary participation in the planning, implementation and further stages will also have a remarkable effect on the reduction of risk and conflicts. Increased financial returns are also expected from this practice. In the context of social programmes, it would facilitate the achievement of full cost recovery with no subsidies.

Together with the special focus on users, their corresponding community represents a critical domain to handle. The local communities are increasingly more aware of their rights. Mobilisation of opinion, persuasion and project championing through local leaders are elements to be deeply rooted in the planning and implementation of the enterprise.

Building links with institutions

Projects involve the interaction and participation of institutions at local, statal and federal or central level. They are paramount to the success of the project, so it is important to know what institutions intervene, their procedures, policies and idiosyncrasies. It could also involve the participation of financial institutions and organisations from other countries.

Interactions between the firm and other organisations create a very complex web of relations with special and/or conflictive interests. A manager has to understand that the institutions that participate have different objectives. Within them it is even possible to find conflict groups. By knowing this and knowing how they function and interrelate, project managers have more tools to avoid or dissolve bottlenecks, to get support or to pull whatever strings are necessary to get things done.

Collaborative Project Management

Collaborative management attempts to reconcile the different objectives or interests of the stakeholders. As social systems, organisations find it difficult to reach single optimal result that satisfies all needs. In that sense, the concept of efficiency and efficacy, are beyond the maximisation of output found in the mechanistic approach to management.

When an organisation pursues the optimisation of every component it produces disappointing results. This is because, "the performance of a system is not the sum of the performance of its parts taken separately, but the product of their interactions" Ackoff (1994:23). An optimum path is reached through the combination of subprocesses working at different rates of efficiency. That is, subprocesses could be working below "acceptable levels" while the whole system may be reaching optimal results.

This is the reason why a manager should be concerned with the system as a whole, and in particular the interactions between components. The only way to develop efficient interactions is through participation and cooperation. This is what is called collaborative management, a system that focuses on how organisations, groups or individuals interact, integrating their particular interests to fulfill their needs. The following section will study organisations and teams which are the main agents to achieve collaborative schemes, leading to a better overall performance of a firm:

[Management Index] [Systems Approach] [Setting objectives] [Participatory Project Management] [Quality and Risk] [Organising]

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