Organizational Dynamics of the Rise of Telework as an Adaptive Response to a Global Pandemic

The use of remote working options has saved jobs and reduced health risks inherent to the rise of COVID-19. The opportunity to use telework has allowed organizations to engage in operational activities by leveraging virtual teams’ potential. Organizations offering workers to work remotely have become financial salvation for many workers during the pandemic, significantly since the pandemic impacted the U.S. economy so severely that more than since more than 57 million American workers have filed for unemployment government benefits in just 2020. While having a telework option is an assurance of organizational sustainability or continual employment, it represents a unique opportunity for exploration for employees, supervisors, and organizations attempting to adapt to this evolving level of complex change. This paper uses applied qualitative focus group research from a process consulting to explore the values and barriers that telework for a real estate title organization called XRO.

Unlocking Creativity: 6-Part Story Method as an Imaginative Pedagogical Tool

This article emerges from an approach to transformative learning where students are challenged to explore taken-for-granted assumptions about their experiences in the world. We outline the 6-Part Story Method (6PSM), which uses abstract images to provide a structured storytelling process that enables reflexive learning. This is documented through conversations between a university teacher and three Masters students about the method used in their course on practical ethics in process consulting. Using individual stories that emerged from a common set of cards, we illustrate how the method enabled us to critically explore our practices as teacher and student consultants.

Exploration of the Development Direction of China Power Design Institute

With the high-quality development of the global economy, China’s power industry is accelerating its upgrading and transformation in accordance with the requirements of building a clean, low-carbon, safe and efficient manner. As the front-end industry of the power industry, related Power Design Institutes are also facing the challenge of transformation pressure. This study believes that the Power Design Institute should be market-oriented to change its concept, mainly from three aspects: transform from traditional coal-fired power generation business to new energy power generation business, and develop photovoltaic, wind power, biomass power generation and other new energy power generation businesses; The traditional design method is transformed into a digital and intelligent design method, and advanced technologies such as BIM and blockchain are fully utilized in the design process; from a simple design business to a whole-process consulting business, Transition from a simple design business to a whole-process consulting business, horizontally expand the design business to the entire process from pre-planning to post-project evaluation, and initially expand the business types to include project management, investment consulting, bidding consulting, and general contracting services, supervision business, procurement consulting, etc.

Ready for the unexpected: theoretical framework and empirical findings on communication consulting

PurposeAlthough the market for communication consultancies has been booming worldwide for many years now, there are still only a handful of theoretical concepts and empirical findings pertaining to communication consulting. This is the fundamental starting point for this paper, which sets out to answer the following research questions: What is the function of communication consulting? What are the differences between consultants' expectations of consulting and those of clients? How do consultants and clients deal with the contradiction between proximity and distance? What are the potential threats to the autonomy of consulting?Design/methodology/approachThe paper combines a theoretical framework of communication consulting with a survey of German communication consultants and clients.FindingsFirst, a theoretical framework is developed in which communication consulting is defined as follows: First, it opens up decision-related contingency and thus produces additional options for managing communicative relationships with internal and external target groups, before helping to close decision-related contingency. The results of the survey show that the expectations of clients and consultants for communication consulting are largely similar. In the closing dimension especially, most clients share the active role of self-conception of most consultants. On the other hand, in some opening activities, clients wish for more critical, independent and courageous consulting.Research limitations/implicationsThe scope of the empirical material is limited to communication consultants and clients in Germany and may therefore not be valid in other cultural contexts.Originality/valueThe paper closes a gap in both theory building and empirical research in communication consulting. The theory presented conceives of communication consulting as a hybrid of management consulting and process consulting and, in addition to the opening dimension, also takes the closing dimension of consulting into consideration for the first time. The study reveals a certain schizophrenia in clients: on the one hand, clients demand more critical consultants and thus call for more distance; on the other hand, clients prefer to be close to their consultants, particularly if they wish to work with them for the long-term.

Time to dismiss the idea of a structural fix within government? An analysis of intersectoral action for health in Danish municipalities

Aims: This paper examines the role of organizational structure within government(s) in attempts to implement intersectoral action for health in Danish municipalities. We discuss the implications of structural reorganization and the governance structures that are established in order to ensure coordination and integration between policy sectors. Methods: The paper is based on 49 interviews with civil servants from health and non-health sectors of 10 municipalities. Based on participants’ experiences, cases have been described and analyzed in an iterative process consulting the literature on Health in All Policies and joined-up government. Results: Continuous and frequent processes of reorganizing were widespread in the municipalities. However, they appeared to have little effect on policy change. The two most common governance structures established to transcend organizational boundaries were the central unit and the intersectoral committee. According to the experiences of participants, paradoxically both of these organizational solutions tend to reproduce the organizational problems they are intended to overcome. Even if structural reorganization may succeed in dissolving some sector boundaries, it will inevitably create new ones. Conclusions: It is time to dismiss the idea that intersectoral action for health can be achieved by means of a structural fix. Rather than rearranging organizational boundaries it may be more useful to seek to manage the silos which exist in any organization, e.g. by promoting awareness of their implications for public health action and by enhancing the boundary spanning skills of public health officers.

Configuring the project management office: case of an innovation industrial company

Project management development in various industries and spheres of activity has caused a variety of forms and functions of project management offices. This has caused the need to develop an approach to the configuration of the office of a company. The research object – an innovative industrial company – predetermined the need to form a project management office as a center of management consulting. The study was carried out on the basis of the case-study methodology, which combined the documents analysis, assessment of the project management maturity and survey methods.It proposes and approves the approach to designing the project office configuration based on the assessment of the level of organizational and technological project management maturity. The in-depth study of the industrial innovation company made it possible to disclose the main components and connections in the system «innovation – project management (project office) – consulting». As a result, the set of functions of the project management office is determined, and in particular, the content of the consultancy function in the process of the current activity within the innovative industrial company (process consulting).

On addressing privacy in disseminating judicial data: towards a methodology

Purpose Information dissemination has become a means of transparency for governments to enable the visions of e-government and smart government, and eventually gain, among others, the trust of various stakeholders such as citizens and enterprises. Information dissemination, on the other hand, may increase the chance of privacy breaches, which can undermine those stakeholders’ trust and thus the objectives of transparency. Moreover, fear of potential privacy breaches compels information disseminators to share minimum or no information. The purpose of this study is to address these contending issues of information disseminations, i.e. privacy versus transparency, when disseminating judicial information to gain (public) trust. Specifically, the main research questions are: What is the nature of the aforementioned “privacy–transparency” problem and how can we approach and address this class of problems? Design/methodology/approach To address these questions, the authors have carried out an explorative case study by reconsidering and analyzing a number of information dissemination cases within their research center for the past 10 years, reflecting upon the whole design research process, consulting peers through publishing a preliminary version of this contribution and embedding the work in an in-depth literature study on research methodologies, wicked problems and e-government topics. Findings The authors show that preserving privacy while disseminating information for transparency purposes is a typical wicked problem, propose an innovative designerly model called transitional action design research (TADR) to address the class of such wicked problems and describe three artifacts which are designed, intervened and evaluated according to the TADR model in a judicial research organization. Originality/value Classifying the privacy transparency problem in the judicial settings as wicked is new, the proposed designerly model is innovative and the realized artifacts are deployed and still operational in a real setting.