Socio-Technical Aspect of Project Management
Sep 28
Tring Tring…Who is this? An IT system integrator Sir. I have a very interesting proposition for your organization that can reduce your cost of project management by 70%.
A sales man starts with this pitch often. But he doesn’t realize that now the old idea of project management in this ever changing world full of uncertainties is not valid anymore. Project Management needs refinement and therefore some value addition to make every cadre in IT game to become familiar about beyond project management and that calls the very essence of PEOPLE MANAGEMENT.
There are prominently two management practices:
Rational View – It deals with management tools and techniques around frameworks and methodologies for successful project deliveries. This view looks at how projects are managed using prescribed tools and industry standard practices for better decision making but also leaves a wide gap between human and technology factor.
Social / Behavioral View – It looks into social aspect of projects from human perspective. This view takes a deep insight into behavioral aspect of human psychology understanding business users and their mindset to deal with organizational complexities like ownership and relationship. Bordertown dvdrip
Often, project managers do not rely on Social/Behavioral view and do not give much credit to social aspect of project delivery and loose race in the field of socio-technological culture of technology A good example to start with would be London Ambulance Service Dispatching System (LASDS). The London Ambulance Service introduced a new computer-aided dispatch system in 1992 which was intended to automate the system that dispatched ambulances in response to calls from the public and the emergency services. This new system was extremely inefficient and ambulance response times increased markedly. Shortly after its introduction, it failed completely and LAS reverted to the previous manual system. The systems failure was not just due to technical issues but to a failure to consider human and organizational factors in the design of the system1
Socio-technical aspects cannot be sidelined as people are who drive technology, not always the other way around.
1 (Sommerville, 2004) - http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/resources/IanS/SE7/CaseStudies/LondonAmbulance/LASFailure.pdf
