Browsing by Author "Artto, Karlos, Prof."

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Change in organization - emerging situations, character and praxis
(2010) Keränen, Tapio
Aalto-yliopiston teknillinen korkeakoulu | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
The purpose of this study is to analyze how change is constructed by local actions and interactions of an organization. Drawing on critical realism and assuming organizational change to be a practical and social performance, a mediating entity - organizational character - is postulated to account for relationship between structure, agency, and action. The empirical study addresses local transformation and organizational character through analyzing events that are related to the development of service business in the context of a large energy company. In the empirical study, the organizational character in context consists of prudence, and of the pursuit of technical excellence and operational efficiency. Prudence is an action disposition in context when encountering new situations. The pursuit of technical excellence was a result of the past construction era. The pursuit of operational efficiency is a typical characteristic in an industry context. Three modes of praxis were identified: the habitual mode of praxis consists of fragmentizing and ensuring, and is aimed at operational efficiency for maintaining the organization; the transformative mode is directed toward the future and consists of envisioning the future and searching for new alternatives; and the contingent mode entails judgments to cope with current problems in the present and is characterized by improvisation. The integration of the relationships identified in the empirical study results in a model of local change. The local changes continuously and recursively construct outcomes of praxis that result in new configurations. In emerging and evolving situations new actions become necessary. Human agents engage in creative and transformative actions that are affected by the organizational character. Organizational character, in the context of this study, overshadows creative and transformative capacities of human agents but does not prevent local changes to the context. With regard to the practical outcomes of the study, a suggestion for the management of organizational change is that attention must be paid to internalized action dispositions in which the organization, human agents, and social consciousness about context and action, are intertwined.
Co-selection in R&D project portfolio management : Theory and evidence
(2010) Aaltonen, Pertti
Aalto-yliopiston teknillinen korkeakoulu | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
In the study I analyze the conflicting aspects of project portfolio evolution in a firm. The evolutionary principles of variation, selection and retention are applied to the management of new product development projects. Managers select projects for prioritization. A selection rule is the prioritization rule. In biology, living creatures develop specific features for adaptation as a result of selection rules. However, the selection of specific adaptive features carries along the retention of other, even unforeseen non-adaptive features. Drawing on the evolutionary principles forwarded by Darwin I examine how they manifest in the project portfolio. I define this non-adaptive mechanism as co-selection. By analogy, in portfolio management, if the selection rule for project priority is high revenue and feasibility to global access, other features also survive when the selection rule relating to the prioritization of projects is applied. The evolution of the new product development project portfolio in the case firm displays conflicting trends in the emerging project portfolio over time. Managers pursue prioritization to decrease product development times. But, alas, in the project portfolio the prioritized projects age to a greater degree than non-prioritized projects. Managers prioritize the projects held by the focal business unit more often than those of other business units. However, ultimately the focal business unit has less than a due share of prioritized projects in the portfolio. The results of this study question the applicability of optimizing models in R&D portfolio management in the presence of co-selection. The project portfolio management literature does not provide a mechanism to account for this type of portfolio development. Co-selection provides a mechanism that explains the observed evolution. The study contributes to the conceptualization of the notion of co-selection. The study also provides empirical evidence on co-selection, a non-adaptive evolutionary mechanism to modify R&D project portfolio outcome. The findings give a better understanding of portfolio management of R&D driven new product development projects.
Stakeholder management in international projects
(2010) Aaltonen, Kirsi
Aalto-yliopiston teknillinen korkeakoulu | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Today's international projects are implemented in institutionally demanding environments and executed by coalitions of stakeholders that have differing interests, objectives and socio-cultural backgrounds. Consequently, international projects are subject to the demands and pressures presented by external stakeholders such as community groups, local residents, landowners, environmentalists, regulatory agencies, and local and national governments. Despite the acknowledged importance of stakeholder management, project research still lacks both theoretical knowledge and empirical evidence concerning various project stakeholder related phenomena. The objective of this thesis is to contribute to project research by increasing the understanding of external project stakeholder behavior and a focal project's stakeholder management activities in international projects. The primary theoretical perspective used in this thesis is stakeholder theory, which is applied in the context of project stakeholder research. The thesis comprises of a summary and five publications that are based on five separate case study research settings. Publications I and II adopt the perspective of project stakeholders. Their empirical results are based on an in-depth study of a pulp mill project in Uruguay that faced extreme stakeholder related challenges. The key contribution of publication I is that it identifies and describes empirically eight different influence strategies that external project stakeholders may use to shape their salience. In publication II eight propositions concerning external project stakeholders' potential to take action and influence the project management's decision making during the different phases of the project lifecycle are developed. Publications III, IV and V adopt the perspective of a focal project and examine its activities with respect to external stakeholder influences. The key contribution of publication III is that it identifies and describes different response strategies that a focal project may enact as a response to external stakeholder pressures. By adopting an environmental interpretation perspective, publication IV describes the practices through which project management teams analyze and interpret the project's external stakeholder environment in four international case projects. Publication V adopts a stakeholder network perspective and illustrates how a focal project's local stakeholder relationships are associated with the emergence and management of unexpected events in three international case projects. The findings of this thesis highlight the importance of external stakeholder management in international projects. Through the application of the ideas of stakeholder theory, the results of this thesis provide new theoretical and empirical understanding of how external project stakeholders may influence the project management's decision making during the project lifecycle. The results of this thesis demonstrate how a focal project may analyze its external stakeholder environment and respond to external stakeholder pressures and unexpected events in the context of international projects. Ultimately, the new knowledge of external stakeholders' influence strategies and better understanding of how a focal project can deal with stakeholder influences, supports project managers in the development of effective project stakeholder management approaches.