Background:~ WRM-Media Ltd provide 3rd party advertisers the opportunity to send email and postal marketing to the 30m strong global membership of Who-Remembers-Me.com, wrm-dating.com and wrm-surveys.com. With offices in Wakefield, London and now Sydney Australia, the company has experienced enormous growth in the last 24 months, doubling the number of staff and turnover. Matt Bennathan joined the business in October 2010 and is responsible for setting up and running WRM’s APAC operation in Sydney. Matt brings with him fourteen years’ experience in data marketing services.
Challenges:~ WRM-Media recently expanded into Australia. During the planning, analysis and market research stages of the Australian expansion, it was identified that WRM-Media needed a geodemographic product to add depth, analytic capabilities and improve targeting in Australia. Keep reading…
Introduction: Siemens was established in the United Kingdom 167 years ago by William Siemens, a leading Victorian industrialist who turned his concepts and inventions into practical solutions – many of which were world firsts.
Today, it is one of the largest global electronics groups and is still providing innovative solutions to help tackle the world’s major challenges across the key sectors of energy, industry and healthcare.Siemens designs and manufactures products and systems ranging from traffic lights, gas turbines and turbine spares to the superconducting magnets used in medical scanners and the drives that are behind many of the UK’s manufacturing plants.The company employs 15,612 people in the UK of which 332 are in project management roles. Globally there are over 405,000 employees of which around 17,000 are project managers with around 45,000 in project related roles. Click here to read more…
A global manufacturing company was experiencing inefficiencies in in its inventory management processes. With suppliers across the world delivering parts for the company’s products, multiple buyers within the company are responsible for tracking the parts required for each product from the manufacturing phase through delivery. The company needed a way to keep a master list of all inventory with easy access to parts’ delivery statuses and other pertinent information relevant to the company. The firm engaged Aciron to develop a custom inventory management system focused on enhancing inventory management through powerful parts tracking, management, and reporting features.
Approach
Aciron initiated the project by holding extensive interviews with client personnel to understand the company’s needs and challenges. Aciron followed an agile, iterative, approach to application development, allowing the client to regularly review and make adjustments to the application, and to easily incorporate the clients’ evolving requirements. Throughout the project, Aciron focused on open communication, with regular status reports and meetings, consistently engaging key client personnel and ensuring project milestones were met on time and within budget. Click here to read Solution…
A Study about Scaling Up Corporate Social Investments in Education
Scaling up good corporate social investment practices in developing countries is crucial to realizing the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals. Yet very few corporate social investments have the right mix of vision, financing, cross-sector engagement and leadership to come to scale. Globally, 67 million children are not enrolled in primary school, over 200 million are in school but not mastering basic skills such as reading, and many millions more complete post-primary education without the skills needed to participate in society or the local economy.
Overcoming these challenges will require swift and bold action by many actors, including governments, multilateral organizations, donors and civil society. Corporations can use their core assets to generate shared value for business and society by helping get children into school, setting a strong learning agenda and scaling up what works in education. This policy paper looks at what works and what is not working in corporate efforts to further education in developing countries. Keep reading…
A Case Study about Leading Effectively in Humanitarian Operations
Executive Summary: Leadership has long been an important topic in the commercial, political and military arenas. However, despite the challenges inherent in leading humanitarian operations, leadership has, until recently, received limited attention in the humanitarian sector. The last decade has seen a marked increase in the time and resources devoted to identifying and developing humanitarian leaders; however, evidence from ALNAP’s State of the Humanitarian System report (Harvey et al. 2009), and from elsewhere, suggests that ineffective leadership is still a major constraint to effective humanitarian action.This study seeks to contribute to improved humanitarian leadership by considering the factors that make humanitarian leadership successful, and identifying actions that actors within the humanitarian system can take to improve the quality of leadership in humanitarian responses. It focuses specifically on the operational level of leadership.
This ability to judge when particular skills and approaches are relevant and desirable in a given context emerged as an important theme in the study, and serves as a warning against reducing leadership to any single list of competencies. Leadership happens when individuals engage completely with a situation. The ‘magic’ that can transform a list of skills from ‘competence’ to ‘excellence’ is often to do with the essence of the individual and how that person engages with the context in which they find themselves, the people with whom they are working, and with themselves. In fact, the study found that when a particular leadership strength is overplayed it can become a weakness: a leader’s tenacity and energy can, for example, result in pushing colleagues too hard, with negative effects for the team and the programme. This can lead to burn-out. Leaders and organisations should be aware of this ‘shadow side’ of leadership, and take measures to address it. Keep reading…
Summary: Stakeholders are the people who matter to a system. Stakeholder power analysis is a tool which helps understanding of how people affect policies and institutions, and how policies and institutions affect people. It is particularly useful in identifying the winners and losers and in highlighting the challenges that need to be faced to change behaviour, develop capabilities and tackle inequalities.
Like other tools, the usefulness and strength of stakeholder power analysis depends on the way it is used. It can be carried out by individual analysts, multi-stakeholder processes, or some intermediate between these two ends of the spectrum. Stakeholder power analysis can be used progressively to empower important but marginalised groups, and to improve policies and institutions. Keep reading
Case Study about Leadership Development in Undergraduate Public Relations Students
This qualitative case study considered the relationship between a Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA) chapter at a public state university in Northern California and its local Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) affiliate chapter. Its purpose was to explore student perceptions of the contributions of this relationship to what they learned about leadership while serving as club officers. Research was conducted during the fall semester 2010.
The study explored efforts designed to help PRSSA chapter officers fulfill individual responsibilities. Local and national PRSA representatives provided advice and counsel through diverse channels, the intent of which was to help PRSSA chapter officers meet the challenges of their respective roles. These industry professionals in turn observed leadership development in the students included in this study. Keep reading…
The academic research analysed in this paper tends to involve the comparison of data on activities and performance across a number of companies, with little consideration of the role of internal processes and policies. This kind of evidence cannot explain how business benefits were realised, which would be of more use to businesses facing specific challenges. Evidence on what has actually worked and why would require detailed company case studies.
There are already quite a few case studies of the business benefits from equality & diversity, but they tend not to focus on business performance impacts, or to look at firms’ context and strategic response, what worked and why. The insight from this report suggests that the business case for equality & diversity might have more resonance with businesses if there was credible evidence of this more practical kind. Keep reading…
A Case Study about Dialectical Inquiry: A Structured Qualitative Research Method
This paper presents Dialectical Inquiry (DI) as a structured qualitative research method for studying participant models of organizational processes. The method is applied to rich secondary anecdotal data on technology transfer, gathered by subject-matter experts in a large firm. DI assumes that the imposition of a dialectical structure will produce emergent theories in tacit use by organizational actors. As such, it serves as a meta-structure for grounded research. Three competing models were discovered in the data. Each model was analyzed in the context of other models to reveal governing assumptions and counter assumptions.
Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to present and exemplify Dialectical Inquiry (DI) as a useful structured qualitative research method for studying organizational sense making processes as they are understood by participants. The paper will develop DI as a research method and link it to other qualitative methodologies. The particular research setting and challenges will be described. In this particular case, the challenge was to understand internal processes of technology transfer. Subject matter experts in the organization conducted interviews and experienced great difficulty interpreting their data. The research challenge was to “make sense” of this secondary data. Keep reading…
A Case Study about Dialogue on Intersectoral Action
In the last decade, social and health inequalities have moved to the centre of the policy environment in New Zealand. From an absence of general discussion about disparities between groups, awareness has increased to the extent that inequalities are now a significant part of the political debate for the major political parties and central to the policy development and monitoring frameworks, particularly in the health sector.
This paper considers how this development has occurred with regard to health and presents initial indicators of the progress made, exploring why New Zealand chose to act on health inequalities and how this has been implemented. The paper provides a brief overview of health inequalities in New Zealand followed by a discussion of relevant local literature and tools to address these inequalities. Intersectoral action as part of a ‘whole of government’ approach to inequalities has been a key element of implementation efforts, and an intersectoral housing project to improve health is described to illustrate this. The paper concludes with a consideration of the impact of the policy attention to inequalities and further challenges for New Zealand to continue progress in this area. Keep reading…
