A key component of well managed project portfolios is the skilled management of life-cycle stage gate reviews. Prior to deciding on whether to authorize the next stage of the project, astute IT Project Sponsors dialogue with their teams on important business and technical aspects of a project. This interactive session, lead by two skilled facilitators and using the forum format, will draw on the insights of experienced practitioners. After an overview of the session agenda, participants will first identify questions that they think are important at each respective gate review. Next, participants will zero-in on the questions they feel are the most critical for sponsors to ask at each gate review prior to making Go/No Go decisions. Then, the facilitators will lead a debriefing segment. Finally, arrangements will be made to ensure that participants can receive the session output following the conference.

Profile analysis is proposed as a means for advancing empirical change process research. In the context of organizational studies, a profile can be viewed as a set of sequentially arranged factors that expresses the relative strength of individual factors and holistic patterns inside or between organizational entities. To demonstrate the utility of the approach in change process research, profile analysis was employed in a cross-sectional study. Hypotheses related to Lewin’s three-step model of change were tested using data obtained from managers involved in change implementation. Results confirmed a progression through Lewin’s unfreezing-movement-refreezing sequence during implementation. Profiles that reflected higher systematic use of change process factors were also found related to implementation success. Many future research opportunities are apparent, such as investigating interorganizational change profile types and using profile analysis to enhance longitudinal research designs.

Understanding the impact leadership has on corporate success and business transformation continues to gain the attention of both the business press and management researchers. A key thread of research on leadership focuses on understanding what the leaders of successful companies do to set their companies apart from their peers. In previous studies, transformational leadership has been shown to correlate with business results. However, relatively little is known about the development of transformational leadership. The authors propose a methodology to expand this knowledge by examining the life and career experiences of leaders alongside their tendencies toward the behaviors characteristic of a transformational leader. Through this methodology we expect to identify the experiences which are positively correlated to transformational leadership.

approach to optimize operation and maintenance costs for operating nuclear power plants June 2006IAEA-TECDOC-1509 Integrated approach to optimize operation and maintenance costs for operating nuclear power plants June 2006The originating Section of this publication in the IAEA was:

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The traditional, top-down-control dominated hierarchical organization is supposedly becoming a thing of the past. Nevertheless, many CEOs stay with tradition, even though high-velocity environments and knowledge-based technologies call for more emphasis on lower-level networks and distributed intelligence and responsibilities. As a result, management is often ineffective. This paper proposes a fundamentally different approach featuring the “coevolution of causalities. ” The formal figure of entangled top-down and bottom-up causal forces in coevolutionary interaction offers a novel conceptual framework allowing us to rethink how organizations most effectively respond to constraints such as quality, cost, flexibility, and innovation in changing environments. We use a longitudinal study of a large international cosmetics firm to illustrate how our theory plays out during the corporation’s formative years, as it pursues the challenge of explicating the relationship between the parent company and its various subunits. We focus on how intertwined causal forces are used to manage the control/autonomy mix at different stages of the firm's development, eventually returning to profitability. One might think that the top-down hierarchical organizational form dominating history has become a thing of the past. The bureaucratic form, blamed for centralized hierarchy, inertia, and rigidity, and viewed as a leftover from the industrial standardization era, has been routinely