The Role of Management
April 25th, 2003 by HalI've written in this weblog about the linguistic action perspective as it applies to projects. Greg Howell and I have authored a paper to be presented at the International Group for Lean Construction in July 2003 at Virginia Tech. The paper is titled Foundations of Lean Construction: Linguistic Action. I can't publish the paper here ahead of time, but I've decided to explore some of the key points. I'll start by sharing an altogether different view of management.
Fernando Flores, often referred to as a practical philosopher, offered the following definition of management in his doctoral dissertation titled Management and Communication in the Office of the Future, 1982, University of California Berkeley.
Management is that process of openness, listening, and eliciting commitments, which includes concern for the articulation and activation of the network of commitments, primarily produced through promises and requests, allowing for the autonomy of the productive unit.
At the time he was speaking about the work in the offices of business. However, he could have been writing about projects.
Flores is saying that work is accomplished by eliciting commitments with one another. Management's task is to see to the effective workings of the systems and practices employed for making and delivering on those commitments. We can think of projects as temporary business endeavors. There is no time for the processes and systems to mature as they would in the usual business setting. Projects complete too quickly for that. The temporariness of projects calls for more attention, not less, at the outset of a project on the design of the systems and practices that together manifest the "articulation and activation of the network of commitment."
Examples of coordination systems and practices include forums for planning, agendas for detailing tasks and assignments, protocols for capturing commitments among participants, open-item lists for working off unresolved questions, routines for coordination meetings like the daily Scrum. Too often project teams default to what the leader did on the last project or whatever is called for in the company policy. This robs the project of an approach that fits the circumstances and complexities of the situation.
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