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\"Communication is a vital part of project management, and reports are one of the preferred vehicles for transmitting information to an intended internal or external audience. Reports are also part of the system of control and governance on projects, used to bring attention to issues and prompt action to improve project outcomes. There are countless ways of combining project information for consumption by stakeholders. This book discusses the purpose of project reports, and provides examples of the format, content, timing, and audience for various types. Using principles of stakeholders and risk management, it presents a rationale for communication plans, enabling appropriate reporting at the project, program, and portfolio level. The author also: presents tangible experience and suggestions for developing project reports, discusses project reports in context, as applicable to types of stakeholders and the project lifecycle, identifies sources and types of data required for adequate reporting, offers examples of report formats, graphics, and content, and reflects on typical challenges encountered with project reporting. It is essential reading for practitioners and students of project management, cost control and accountancy\"-- Provided by publisher.

Business process management (BPM) aims to optimize business processes to achieve better system performance such as higher profit, quicker response, and better services. BPM systems in Industry 4.0 are required to digitize and automate business process workflows and support the transparent interoperations of service vendors. The critical bottleneck to advance BPM systems is the evaluation, verification, and transformation of trustworthiness and digitized assets. Most of BPM systems rely heavily on domain experts or third parties to deal with trustworthiness. In this paper, an automated BPM solution is investigated to select and compose services in open business environment, Blockchain technology (BCT) is explored and proposed to transfer and verify the trustiness of businesses and partners, and a BPM framework is developed to illustrate how BCT can be integrated to support prompt, reliable, and cost-effective evaluation and transferring of Quality of Services in the workflow composition and management.

\"The all-you-need-to-know primer on continuous improvement--offering best practices presented in a comprehensive, detailed case study illustrating what works and what doesn'tHow to Succeed with Continuous Improvement takes the reader through a real-life case study of one organization's journey towards a world-class continuous improvement process. It provides practical advice on methods, tools, and leadership to help operations professionals set up, execute, and continuously build upon their organization's improvement work.The book offers specific advice and practical application on how to get all employees to give maximum contributions by using their ideas to improve the organization. Each chapter details part of the transformation story and then reflects on and analyzes each concept of continuous improvement illustrated. Joakim Ahlstrom is Head of Consulting for C2, a firm that helps companies establish continuous improvements that provide measurable results. \"-- Provided by publisher.

PurposeThe term knowledge refers to the part of the world investigated by a specific discipline and that includes a specific taxonomy, vocabulary, concepts, theories, research methods and standards of justification. Our approach uses domain knowledge to improve the quality of business process models (BPMs) by exploiting the domain knowledge provided by large language models (LLMs). Among these models, ChatGPT stands out as a notable example of an LLM capable of providing in-depth domain knowledge. The lack of coverage presents a limitation in each approach, as it hinders the ability to fully capture and represent the domain’s knowledge. To solve such limitations, we aim to exploit GPT-3.5 knowledge. Our approach does not ask GPT-3.5 to create a visual representation; instead, it needs to suggest missing concepts, thus helping the modeler improve his/her model. The GPT-3.5 may need to refine its suggestions based on feedback from the modeler.Design/methodology/approachWe initiate our semantic quality enhancement process of a BPM by first extracting crucial elements including pools, lanes, activities and artifacts, along with their corresponding relationships such as lanes being associated with pools, activities belonging to each lane and artifacts associated with each activity. These data are systematically gathered and structured into ArrayLists, a form of organized collection that allows for efficient data manipulation and retrieval. Once we have this structured data, our methodology involves creating a series of prompts based on each data element. We adopt three approaches to prompting: zero-shot, few-shot and chain of thoughts (CoT) prompts. Each type of prompting is specifically designed to interact with the OpenAI language model in a unique way, aiming to elicit a diverse array of suggestions. As we apply these prompting techniques, the OpenAI model processes each prompt and returns a list of suggestions tailored to that specific element of the BPM. Our approach operates independently of any specific notation and offers semi-automation, allowing modelers to select from a range of suggested options.FindingsThis study demonstrates the significant potential of prompt engineering techniques in enhancing the semantic quality of BPMs when integrated with LLMs like ChatGPT. Our analysis of model activity richness and model artifact richness across different prompt techniques and input configurations reveals that carefully tailored prompts can lead to more complete BPMs. This research is a step forward for further exploration into the optimization of LLMs in BPM development.Research limitations/implicationsThe limitation is the domain ontology that we are relying on to evaluate the semantic completeness of the new BPM. In our future work, the modeler will have the option to ask for synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms or keywords. This feature will facilitate the replacement of existing concepts to improve not only the completeness of the BPM but also the clarity and specificity of concepts in BPMs.Practical implicationsTo demonstrate our methodology, we take the “Hospitalization” process as an illustrative example. In the scope of our research, we have presented a select set of instructions pertinent to the “chain of thought” and “few-shot prompting.” Due to constraints in presentation and the extensive nature of the instructions, we have not included every detail within the body of this paper. However, they can be found in the previous GitHub link. Two appendices are given at the end. Appendix 1 describes the different prompt instructions. Appendix 2 presents the application of the instructions in our example.Originality/valueIn our research, we rely on the domain application knowledge provided by ChatGPT-3 to enhance the semantic quality of BPMs. Typically, the semantic quality of BPMs may suffer due to the modeler's lack of domain knowledge. To address this issue, our approach employs three prompt engineering methods designed to extract accurate domain knowledge. By utilizing these methods, we can identify and propose missing concepts, such as activities and artifacts. This not only ensures a more comprehensive representation of the business process but also contributes to the overall improvement of the model's semantic quality, leading to more effective and accurate business process management.

\"In Captured, U.S. Senator and former federal prosecutor Sheldon Whitehouse offers an eye-opening take on what corporate influence looks like today from the Senate Floor, adding a first-hand perspective to Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Americans know something is wrong in their government. Senator Whitehouse combines history, legal scholarship, and personal experiences to provide the first hands-on, comprehensive explanation of what's gone wrong, exposing multiple avenues through which our government has been infiltrated and disabled by corporate powers. Captured reveals an original oversight by the Founders, and shows how and why corporate power has exploited that vulnerability: to strike fear in elected representatives who don't \"get right\" by threatening million-dollar \"dark money\" election attacks (a threat more effective and less expensive than the actual attack); to stack the judiciary--even the Supreme Court--in \"business-friendly\" ways; to \"capture\" the administrative agencies meant to regulate corporate behavior; to undermine the civil jury, the Constitution's last bastion for ordinary citizens; and to create a corporate \"alternate reality\" on public health and safety issues like climate change. Captured shows that in this centuries-long struggle between corporate power and individual liberty, we can and must take our American government back into our own hands\"-- Provided by publisher.

PurposeAlthough businesses continue to take up artificial intelligence (AI), concerns remain that companies are not realising the full value of their investments. The study aims to provide insights into how AI creates business value by investigating the mediating role of Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities.Design/methodology/approachThe integrative model of IT Business Value was contextualised, and structural equation modelling was applied to validate the proposed serial multiple mediation model using a sample of 448 organisations based in the EU.FindingsThe results validate the proposed serial multiple mediation model according to which AI adoption increases organisational performance through decision-making and business process performance. Process automation, organisational learning and process innovation are significant complementary partial mediators, thereby shedding light on how AI creates business value.Research limitations/implicationsIn pursuing a complex nomological framework, multiple perspectives on realising business value from AI investments were incorporated. Several moderators presenting complementary organisational resources (e.g. culture, digital maturity, BPM maturity) could be included to identify behaviour in more complex relationships. The ethical and moral issues surrounding AI and its use could also be examined.Practical implicationsThe provided insights can help guide organisations towards the most promising AI activities of process automation with AI-enabled decision-making, organisational learning and process innovation to yield business value.Originality/valueWhile previous research assumed a moderated relationship, this study extends the growing literature on AI business value by empirically investigating a comprehensive nomological network that links AI adoption to organisational performance in a BPM setting.

\"After the ousting of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, there was much debate about the reasons for the former regime's longevity and its collapse. Here, Safinaz El Tarouty provides an original contribution to the study of authoritarianism in Egypt by focusing on the role of businessmen in authoritarian survival. As the regime intensified neo-liberal economic reforms that led to social deprivation and frustration amongst increasing numbers of Egyptian citizens, they co-opted businessmen in order to defuse challenges and buttress the regime, constructing a new political economy of authoritarianism. Extending the existing literature on clientelism, El Tarouty creates a typology of regime-businessmen relations to describe the multiple mechanisms of co-option in the context of economic liberalization. Ultimately, though, these businessmen proved too narrow a constituency to provide legitimacy to the regime and in fact formed one of the reasons for its collapse\"-- Provided by publisher.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus on the implementation of an ambidexterity strategy in a large Italian Company that works in the energy field. The aim of the study is to understand how contextual ambidexterity has been achieved during a business process management (BPM) approach by describing the main variables that interacted during the project implementation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors based their study both on primary (direct observation and interviews) and secondary (company manuals, books and procedures) qualitative investigations of BPM approach based on three business process re-engineering (BPR) projects and nine total quality management (TQM) projects, focused on change team behaviors, dynamics and dialogues.FindingsThe authors observed that the implementation of simultaneously radical and incremental change projects has been influenced by the exploration and exploitation activities related to every single TQM and BPR project considered. The findings suggest that the overall project has been influenced by four main underlying variables, which are task specialization and systems interoperability (knowledge transfer), identity and leadership (knowledge conversion) and two output variables (ambiguity and feedback to change), that, by interacting, enable ambidexterity.Research limitations/implicationsBPM is an important option to consider within the ambidexterity theory, being conceptually conceived as an approach in which TQM and BPR actually complement each other. Moreover, the results contextualize the importance of the change management team (CMT) to manage the connections between knowledge creation and refinement, and vice versa, depending particularly on the knowledge conversion process enabled by a flexible team culture. The focus of the study is mainly at the BPR and TQM project level. The authors consider structural ambidexterity and its enabling mechanisms as the framework in which BPM is implemented. Moreover, research limitations are related both to the specificity of the context, a large, highly specialized and mechanistic company and to the qualitative approach that may reduce the generalization of the empirical results.Practical implicationsManagers need to be cognizant and aware both of the BPM techniques, in order to sustain ambidexterity, and of ambiguity and change feedback as variables that enable the effective connection of the different steps of innovation or refinement strategy and, therefore, of ambidexterity. Moreover, the contextual factors such as leadership and people identity should be considered and managed as important variables related to change.Originality/valueThe originality of this paper is related to improving the understanding of how to implement the theoretical concept of ambidexterity in a real world organization, by providing new evidence that highlights the importance of contextual ambidexterity within a structural ambidexterity strategy during a BPM project.

When a new technology makes people ill, how high does the body count have to be before protective steps are taken? This disturbing book tells a dark story of hazardous manufacturing, poisonous materials, environmental abuses, political machinations, and economics trumping safety concerns. It explores the century-long history of ?fake silk,? or cellulose viscose, used to produce such products as rayon textiles and tires, cellophane, and everyday kitchen sponges. Paul Blanc uncovers the grim history of a product that crippled and even served a death sentence to many industry workers while also releasing toxic carbon disulfide into the environment. Viscose, an innovative and lucrative product first introduced in the early twentieth century, quickly became a multinational corporate enterprise. Blanc investigates industry practices from the beginning through two highly profitable world wars, the midcentury export of hazardous manufacturing to developing countries, and the current ?greenwashing? of viscose as an eco-friendly product. Deeply researched and boldly presented, this book brings to light an industrial hazard whose egregious history ranks with those of asbestos, lead, and mercury.

We have presented a review of the challenges facing business PM. These challenges are categorized into three challenges: (1) between business and IT, difficulty of deriving IT goals from business goals challenges; (2) security issues on business PM challenges; and (3) managing customer power, the rapidly changing business environment and business process (BP) challenges. Also, it presents the limitations of existing business PM frameworks. For example, in the first challenge, the existing literature is limited because they fail to capture the real business environment. Also, it is hard for IT analysts to understand BPs. In the second challenges, the existing methods of IS development fail to successfully integrate security during all development process stages and only deal with specific security requirements, goals and constraints. In the third challenges, no research has been conducted in the area of separating customers into different priority groups to provide services according to their required delivery time, payment history and feedback. Finally, we outline possible further research directions in the business PM domain. A systematic literature review method was used. Our review reports on academic publications on business PM challenges over the 13 years from 2000 to 2012. There are 31 journals as well as the IEEE and ACM databases being searched to identify relevant papers. Our systematic literature review results in that there are 53 journal papers as being the most relevant to our topic. In conclusion, it is not easy to create a good business PM. However, the research have to pay much attention on the area of creating successful business PM by creating secure business PM, manage customer power and create business PM where IT goals can be easily derived from business goals.