Project Success: A Multidimensional Strategic Concept

This article presents projects as powerful strategic weapons, initiated to create economic value and competitive advantage. It suggests that project managers are the new strategic leaders, who must take on total responsibility for project business results. Defining and assessing project success is therefore a strategic management concept, which should help align project efforts with the short- and long-term goals of the organization. While this concept seems simple and intuitive, there is very little agreement in previous studies as to what really constitutes project success. Traditionally, projects were perceived as successful when they met time, budget, and performance goals. However, many would agree that there is more to project success than meeting time and budget. The object of this study was to develop a multidimensional framework for assessing project success, showing how different dimensions mean different things to different stakeholders at different times and for different projects. Given the complexity of this question, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and two data sets were used. The analysis identified four major distinct success dimensions: (1) project efficiency, (2) impact on the customer, (3) direct business and organizational success, and (4) preparing for the future. The importance of the dimensions varies according to time and the level of technological uncertainty involved in the project. The article demonstrates how these dimensions should be addressed during the project’s definition, planning, and execution phases, and provides a set of guidelines for project managers and senior managers, as well as suggestions for further research.     

Strategic planning in government-dependent businesses

As the role of government has expanded in various countries, standard distinctions between the public and private sectors have become blurred. This paper explores the special context within which strategic planning must take place in organizations with a very high dependence on government. Four types of government dependency are considered: ownership dependency (public enterprises); regulation dependency (private, regulated firms); input-dependency (e.g. non-profits dependent on state funding); and output-dependency (e.g. defence contractors who sell a considerable portion of their output to governments).Despite their seeming differences, all four types of government-dependent organizations (GDOs) experience five distinctive problems that seriously limit the relevance of traditional planning models (or what are often referred to as ‘rational, comprehensive models’). They are: fragmented strategic decision-making authority; heightened goal ambiguity; politicization of strategic decision-making; short-term orientation and internal bureaucratization.The concepts of strategy and strategic planning are as relevant to Government dependent organizations (GDOs) as they are to other kinds of firms, although the planning system has to be designed somewhat differently. Six tentative guidelines for designing the planning system in GDOs are presented in the paper: (1) plans must be ‘negotiated’ rather than ‘formulated’ in GDOs; (2) outsiders must be involved in the planning process; (3) socio-political issues must be integrated with technoeconomic tissues; (4) top management must play an active role in running the system, especially in managing interfaces with government; (5) the planning system should emphasize flexibility over discipline or rigor and (6) plans must be written up with the expectation that much of their contents could become public knowledge.The paper concludes with the view the GDOs may have a lot to learn from one another despite superficial differences in institutional status (public vs private) and nature of goals (for- profit vs not-for-profits).     

Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships between Design Characteristics and Outcomes of Strategy Workshops

Strategy workshops, also known as away days, strategy retreats and strategic ‘off‐sites’, have become widespread in organizations. However, there is a shortage of theory and evidence concerning the outcomes of these events and the factors that contribute to their effectiveness. Adopting a design science approach, in this paper we propose and test a multidimensional model that differentiates the effects of strategy workshops in terms of organizational, interpersonal and cognitive outcomes. Analysing survey data on over 650 workshops, we demonstrate that varying combinations of four basic design characteristics – clarity of goals and purpose, routinization, stakeholder involvement and cognitive effort – predict differentially these three distinct types of outcomes. Calling into question conventional wisdom on the design of workshops, we discuss the implications of our findings for integrating further the strategy process, strategy‐as‐practice and strategic cognition literatures, to enrich understanding of the factors that shape the nature and influence of contemporary strategic planning activities more generally.     

Strategic planning in an age of uncertainty

Strategic planning and decision making in the face of uncertainty have always presented a serious challenge to top management, but the present scale of uncertainty is unprecedented. Decision makers used to be able to rely on the past to predict the trends of the future. Now they are increasingly being forced to make important decisions that depend upon highly uncertain external factors for which the past offers little guidance. In all areas of business and government, there is a vital need to understand and implement procedures that enable decision makers to deal more effectively with uncertainty for planning and allocating their organizations' resources.Because of differences in their social, political and economic environments, European and Japanese managers are today affected by many acute areas of uncertainty— such as industrial democracy, floating exchange rates, changing social and political values, growing environmental awareness, government regulation, technological change, pollution control regulation, energy cost, and raw material availability—earlier than their counterparts in the U.S.A. These uncertainties affect not only private sector manufacturing industries, but also financial and service industries as well as nationalized industries and government organizations.This article shows how ineffective methods of dealing with uncertainty can lead to serious mistakes with costly consequences. The cost of overconfidence and people's natural but futile tendency to ignore or to try to eliminate uncertainty is illustrated by the crises seen recently in the world steel and shipbuilding industries. The article then demonstrates how decision analysis procedures that focus directly on the major decision points in the strategic plan enable executives not only to include uncertainty directly in their strategic planning, but also to increase their understanding of the decision process and their ability to communicate the results to others.     

Competitive procurement strategies: Building strength and reducing vulnerability

Current economic conditions and resource constraints call into question many of the implicit assumptions to which traditional strategic planning models subscribe. An attempt is made to bridge the gap between product/market decisions and concerns for present and future resource availability. The author develops the notion of strategic procurement planning as an approach to make more salient the potential competitive ramifications of procurement related decisions and for better integrating purchasing into the corporate planning process.     

Optimal Acquisition of FMS Technology Subject to Technological Progress*

In order to gain competitive advantage, a firm must link its technology choice to its total manufacturing strategy and business unit's goals. A dynamic model is presented to examine the strategic decision concerning the acquisition of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) technology. A major contribution of this model is its ability to capture the strategic benefits of FMS with respect to economies of scope and technological progress. Decisions such as the timing and size of new technology acquisition and the scrapping of conventional capacity are explored as a firm plans for the upgrading of its facility to meet future dynamic strategic goals. This model may be used to assist with strategic planning because it identifies the critical relationships and trade-offs between various exogenous forces (such as market growth or decay, the cost of acquiring flexible manufacturing systems, and the rate of technological progress) and the decision variables considered.     

Strategic planning in a changing corporate environment

Strategic planning is about nothing, if it is not about attempting to achieve desirable futures. In the past this has often been seen as an excuse, or indeed a necessity, for fixed goals which are constantly timed. Such a state of planning has, fortunately, for a long time now been discredited and this paper concentrates upon the concepts of strategic planning within the changing corporate environment, an environment which therefore has to effect both the goals as well as the process of planning. Furthermore, the author concentrates upon the concept of a planning, allocating, and monitoring cycle of strategic planning which sets the strategic planning concept within a process cycle as well as within an effective allocative structure. The author considers this latter point an extremely important one since, as he says, ‘planning can become a very sterile and barren activity if it is not viewed integrally with acting and doing’. Finally, this paper concentrates on the important fact that planning must, within a dynamic environment, be an iterative and a learning process.     

Organizations in the Public Sector in Hong Kong: Core Government, Quasi-Government and Private Bodies with Public Functions

Twenty-five years ago, the Hong Kong government was lauded as the model of a small, restricted government which was most suited to capitalist economic growth. Since that time, the government and the organizations which it has created have expanded to such an extent that there has been widespread concern that the public sector has grown too large. This article examines the reasons for the rapid growth in the size of the public sector, reflects on the organizational forms outside the traditional civil service that have been adopted, and analyzes the attempts that have been made to reduce the public bureaucracy by corporatizing and privatizing some of the services that it provides. Central to the argument presented is the question of whether an ideological commitment to small government or other functional and political factors have been the critical determinants of organizational change.     

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility and Value Creation among Large Firms: Lessons from the Spanish Experience

Can corporate social responsibility (CSR) be a source of good and a wellspring of innovation, competitive advantage and value creation for the firm? Although CEOs and government leaders insist in public that CSR projects create value for the firm, privately they admit that they do not know if CSR pays off. To address this question and drawing on experience for the Spanish context, we test one of the few efforts to model how the strategic management of CSR may contribute to improving firm profitability (Burke and Logsdon, 1996). To do this, we examine the impact of three strategic CSR variables – visibility, appropriability, and voluntarism – on value creation among large Spanish corporations. The conclusions from these findings suggest that managers need to understand how CSR is similar to and different from other traditional corporate market activities if they are to pursue value creation through CSR. We also suggest avenues for future research to explain how CSR may be integrated into firm processes to create resources (assets) and capabilities (routines) that may lead to competitive advantage and superior economic performance.     

Credibly reducing information asymmetry: Signaling on economic or environmental value by environmental alliances

This article focuses on strategic alliances that strive for economic profit while contributing to environmental sustainability. These so-called environmental alliances operate on a spectrum between the goals of economic and environmental value. New environmental alliances signal in announcements to their external stakeholders where they position themselves on this spectrum of alliance goals in order to reduce information asymmetry and enhance their credibility. In this article, we predict the type of external signal that environmental alliances send by studying alliance processes and structures that embed the latent alliance goals. We built an original dataset by combining data on 389 environmental alliances from the SDC Platinum database for the period 2013–2017 and data on signals in 650 alliance announcements. Our findings show that announcements signaling on economic value are mainly used by environmental production and marketing joint ventures, thereby reducing the information asymmetry on their latent goal of economic value. Conversely, announcements signaling on environmental value are mainly used by environmental R&D contracts that focus on the latent goal of environmental value. Our article thus illustrates that alliances aim to enhance their credibility by achieving signal fit between external signals and latent alliance goals. Even though environmental alliances operate on a spectrum of economic and environmental value, we demonstrate that they prefer to avoid sending mixed messages and hence only signal on one of the alliance goals. Our article contributes to the literature on environmental alliances by applying signaling theory to explain these counterintuitive findings and to improve our understanding of how environmental alliances aim for credibility through their communication on their alliance goals.     

Understanding managers' preferences for internal markets versus business planning: A comparative study of German and U.S. managers

Internal markets and centralized business planning are alternative organizational designs for coordinating the economic activities within a firm. While some preliminary theory about when to use each exists in the literature, little is known about how managers understand and decide when to use one or the other. The study develops and tests in samples of German and U.S. managers a preliminary theory about factors that influence the preferences of managers for internal markets or planning as alternative modes of coordination. Managers' preferences are influenced by key constructs of internal markets and planning theory (the perceived limits of planning, speed and efficiency of markets, motivation potential of markets), but also by differences in their institutional contexts (national government and business context, company culture, and recent company experience with planning and internal markets). The study is the first to explore the substitutability of internal markets and planning within the strategic decision process of managers, closer to where it becomes reality.     

现阶段我国政府债务“警戒线”的反思及债务风险的防范

通常人们依据债务规模的“警戒线”来衡量政府债务风险 ,认为我国政府债务风险已经较高。本文对此作了探讨并得出结论：前面的结论实际上很难成立 ,我国积极财政政策还有较大的空间。我国债务风险主要在于经济增长对债务资金可能形成的持久依赖。防范债务风险的根本措施是坚持深化改革、促进结构调整 ,主要依靠民间投资和消费拉动经济增长。国债资金应该用于支持体制改革和结构调整。随着积极财政政策在我国的运用 ,对我国政府债务风险的讨论也越来越多。一般对债务风险的判断都是基于国债负担率、赤字率、债务依存度、偿债率这样一些指标。…     

Macroenvironmental analysis for strategic management

Macroenvironmental analysis is an integral part of systematic strategic planning. Even though the literature on macroenvironmental analysis is fragmented, there are useful guidelines for making sense out of this complex and important aspect of strategic planning. This article highlights five important questions managers should ask about macroenvironmental analysis, develops a model for the process, and summarizes what research and experience tell us about each question.     

Governing the Circular Economy in the City: Local Planning Practice in London

ABSTRACT

There is interest in the circular economy as a framework for transition from a linear take-make-dispose model of production and consumption, to a circular model which decouples economic growth from resource consumption. However, there is limited understanding of how that applies to the city through governance lens. This paper examines evidence from 28 municipalities in London to unpack the ‘government’ and ‘governance’ of circular economy in the city. It examines the ‘governmentality’ of circular economy in planning practice and reflects on what austerity localism and scalar politics might mean for the planning and governance of circular economy in cities.     

The role of strategic planning in small business

One of the important reasons for the tremendous interest in corporate strategy and strategic planning is that managers realize that a good strategy greatly increases the likelihood of a firm's success. Strategic planning is not the only reason for success, but there have been several studies which show that firms that plan their strategies are more effective. Taking the relationship of strategy and success as given, this paper considers the need to develop strategic planning for small businesses, and summarizes the findings of a recent survey on strategy of small businesses.Sixty-two minority and 58 non-minority small businesses were studied in this survey. A Likert-type questionnaire was used for the study. The survey indicates that the small businessmen fail, cope, and learn in the struggle for survival. Judgment, experience and intuition seem to play a more important role than any well structured technique of strategic planning. The businessmen were found to be ‘growth maniacs’, since growth may be the most tangible manifestation of achievement. The study leads to the conclusion that efforts should be made to improve the planning knowledge of this vital sector of economy.     

Planning for local government— a grass-roots approach

This paper describes the creation of the Placentia Tomorrow Project—its objectives, its structure, and its achievements 20 years after its creation in the 1960s. Long-range strategic planning for local government is an important tool in a volatile economic and social climate, and its history in Placentia will assist public officials of local communities.     

How planning and capital budgeting improve SME performance

This paper focuses on the use of strategic planning among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK manufacturing sector. It analyses the relationship between the intensity of strategic planning, business objectives, perceived performance, changes in the business environment and the use of capital budgeting techniques. Capital budgeting is of particular interest as an area of investigation, and is one which has seldom featured in previous studies of strategic planning behaviour. These issues were investigated via a survey of UK manufacturing SMEs carried out in the winter of 1996/97.

The key results suggest that SMEs incorporate a range of objectives into their strategic planning process, with profit improvement perceived to be the most important objective, followed by sales growth. SMEs engaged in detailed strategic planning are more likely to use formal capital budgeting techniques, including the net present value method, which is consistent with maximising the companys' value. Perceived profitability and success in achieving organisational objectives were positively associated with planning detail, suggesting that strategic planning is a key component improving performance. Planning detail was also associated with a significantly higher level of perceived change in the business environment.     

Strategic planning for multinationals—The views of governments and scientists

The purpose of the project described in this paper was to study the environmental changes that influence the strategic planning of multinational firms. The environment of any business or government consists of all things external to an organization which influence it, such as political climate, social situation, international economics, etc. The changes in the strategic planning procedures of firms have been reported elsewhere. This article concentrates on the role that three governments in north-western Europe play in multinational business planning and the views of a number of scientists concerning the interaction of environmental conditions and the strategic planning of multinational firms.     

Effect of economic planning on business decisions

The fact that the United States has not faced an economic perplexity of current dimensions since the depression days hardly needs any emphasis. The current economic slowdown is significant because no recovery measures which may be applied to cure the economy are in sight. Since the Great Depression, especially after World War II, Keynes' economic theories have successfully been applied in the U.S., as also in other countries of the Free World, to put the economy back on path to recovery. Unfortunately, Keynesian measures do not seem to cope with the current economic woes. Apparently, new ways need to be sought and employed to get the economy back on track. Among many new ideas that have been advanced to restore economic growth, one is national economic planning by which the Government would play an active role in setting goals for the economy and devising means to reach them.The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study that the author undertook to probe the opinions of chief executive officers of the largest U.S. corporations on the whole idea of national economic planning in the United States. This study is based on interviews with 23 chief executives officers (CEOs) in different industries. Table 1 shows the background of these CEOs. Specifically, the author refers to such questions as: What positive and negative attitudes do the chief executive officers maintain toward national economic planning; what difficulties do they think will have to be surmounted to accomplish national economic planning in the U.S.; what influence may national economic planning have on various business decisions; and how may national economic planning affect corporate strategy?     

Strategic planning for research and development

This paper examines the need for and the difficulties in implementing strategies for planning the research and development activities of a company. The author does not accept that research planning reduces creativity, though he is of the view that planning's exclusive concentration on economic aspects of a company's activities, such as turnover or profit, can lead to erroneous decisions in the research and development field. This paper outlines a number of specific and explicit research strategies which can be followed, and relates them to the company's strategic objectives. Furthermore, the author explicitly categorizes different types of research and comments upon the relevance of strategic planning to each.