Managing Complex Projects and Systems
From Information Systems at Pitt Business
As organizations expand their operations to support global operations they are increasingly faced with overwhelming complexity. Project can involve hundreds of stakeholders working in distributed environments around shifting goals. Infrastructure now consist of thousands of components from hundreds of vendors deployed worldwide to support not only internal users but also customers, suppliers, and other partners.
In this world you cannot hope to knowing everyhing or anticipate all possibilities. Instead you and your organization must develop the capability to manage, adapt, and grow dynamically in response to the unexpected.
Within the Pitt Business IS community there are a variety of efforts and activities that are focused on better understanding how you can effectively manage complex projects and deploy and maintain complex information system to achieve important individual, group, and organizational level goals.
[edit] Reliability, Mindfulness, and Information Systems
Software crashes. Hardware breaks. Networks become congested. Viruses and worms bring down systems. Data gets corrupted. Users, for better or worse, use information technologies in ways designers never imagined. Yet, the paradox of relying on complex systems composed of unreliable components for reliable outcomes is rarely acknowledged in discussions of IS operations, design, and management.
How do individuals and organizations acheive reliable performance in spite of the fact that the systems that depend on are fragile and complex? While engineering practice would suggest that reliabily can acheived best through redundancy and standardization, studies of high-reliability organizations provide insight into the crucial role that adaptability, flexibility, and attentiveness play in acheiving consistent performance in the face of complex, uncertain systems.
To read more check out the paper on Reliability, Mindfulness, and Information Systems by Brian Butler and Peter Gray.
