Professional Documents
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Project Management in High
Project Management in High
1. Title:
Project Management in High-Tech Organizations: A Field Study
1. Investigators (co-investigators)
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin
How, and to what extent, do they share information? What training have they received? How has project management changed in their organization?
Complexities become more difficult to manage, and everyone needs to learn a little about everyone else's work. High-tech organizations, such as software and web services companies, fit this description. Such organizations have faced new challenges in project management. Yet little research on project management has been done in the field of professional writing, particularly for knowledge work organizations such as those described here. In this exploratory qualitative study, I seek insight into how such organizations manage their projects in the course of performing knowledge work. Particularly, I want to know what tools and practices they use, to what extent they use them in the course of collaboration and planning, and to what extent these have changed other aspects of their organizations.
Artifact collection: Researcher will collect artifacts from the designer's workplace that are related to project management, collaboration, information sharing, and training. Artifacts might include copies or photos of project lists, to-do lists, training documentation, generic contracts, screen shots, and email. To ensure privacy of others, participants will redact artifacts before turning the artifacts over to researcher (see Appendix B for redaction protocol).
Researchers will analyze the observational, interview, and artifact data using visual representations (activity system diagrams, genre ecology
models, communicative event models, sociotechnical graphs, operations tables, and contradiction-discoordination-breakdown tables)
F. Confidentiality of the research data. Research data will be kept in a locked cabinet at researcher's office, on an encrypted laptop hard drive, and backed up to a secure server account to which only the researcher has access. For interviews, (a) the interviews will be audiorecorded; (b) the digital files will be coded so that no personally identifying information is visible on them; (c) they will be digitally secured with a password; (d) they will be heard or viewed only for research purposes by researcher; and (e) after they are transcribed or coded, they will be destroyed. G. Research resources, including digital voice recorders and server space, will be provided by the Computer Writing and Research Lab. VII. Potential risks. The research may uncover weaknesses as well as strengths in the participants work. Reports will remind readers that this should happen and that the role of this research is to better understand the organizations' project management as a whole, not to evaluate individual work styles. In addition, the participants identities and organizational affiliations will be kept secret. Participants will be assigned pseudonyms. VIII. Potential benefits. This study will have implications for understanding project management and collaboration in technology studies. In addition, the project should serve as a way for participants to articulate, reflect upon, and justify or improve their project management practices respective to knowledge work. IX. Sites or agencies involved in the research project. Research will be conducted at the workers' workplaces.