Academic media video

At last I've been given the link to the video I did about my research. Here it is.

Its subtitle isn't quite correct because:

• First, I’m not a doctor yet, although I will be in a couple of months as I’m through my viva.
• Secondly, the words refer to the OUBSS, not the OUBS – too many esses!

But it's heaps better than my attempts in 2010, and it does allow me to summarise my research. And I'm an extra in a maths video here.

Why is engagement important?

Engagement is important

• to gain commitment
• for influencing
• for bonding
• to lubricate the wheels of IT implementation
• to align individual work with business strategy
• for understanding
• for feedback
• for good communication.
  

and a common cause of government IT failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.

I notice that the government has just had another Parliamentary Select Committee Enquiry on government IT: Good governance and effective IT. A hearing on 8th March is watchable here and the minutes of 15th March are here.

And that is since I handed in my thesis, less than a month ago.

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OGC. 2002. Common Causes of Project Failure. London: Office of Government Commerce. http://www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/cp0015.pdf
Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology. 2003. Government IT Projects - Analysis of the Problem In POST (Ed.). http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/pr200.pdf

Implications for practitioners

Busy day:

1. Computing tutorial given in morning
2. Go to campus to office to collect final print of thesis to read again on Sunday
   
3. Go out to black tie evening event

I get home between items 2 and 3 to have a phone call from a practitioner who's read my thesis, and has feedback for me. Wey hey! Am I pleased.

He tells me that I should use the six components of engagement to develop a checklist for specific actions on each component, so I get a set of ideas and develop practical guidelines in a handbook for practitioners. How cool is that? It sounds like a potential publication because he believes what I've written.

Now I just have to edit my thesis a bit in time for Monday.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this thesis provides useful insight that enhances understanding of engagement.

Final thoughts

I want to write the final section that addresses the closing thoughts of my research. I can't! I'm just waffling, and I'm not allowed to write:

I've done enough. It's good enough. Just give me the doctorate!

Writing has been a struggle for me all the way through this process.

Research aims were achieved in that the researcher has developed and empirically validated a model that shows how participants engage on IT projects. The research aims have been achieved in that this researcher has written a heck of a lot of words.

By presenting empirical research with case studies of five IT projects, this thesis has detailed perceptions of how engaged IT project participants build relationships and get work done. By collecting and analysing my case studies (and thanks ever so much to my participants) I've got this model of engagement. It's quite neat really.

This thesis set out the findings that addressed the research question by developing a framework for engagement. Yes - that's what I meant to say above.

Engagement was seen to involve conditions and behaviours in a self-replicating system. That's the model I mean.

Suggestions have been made in this chapter as to how client management can manage the engagement process with their external consultants. But will practitioners believe me?

The results of this research fill a gap in the literature on understanding engagement. Like who cares anyhow?

By focusing on the process of building relationships rather than the outcomes and products of engagement, it identifies how engaged behaviours can produce value through exchanging and building new intellectual capital. I reckon that bit's new and clever and I'd just like to write it right.

This thesis has shown that the essential behaviours that emerge are sharing, sense making and adapting which interact and self-reinforce. Actually, I'd like to write about it being an autopoietic system, but I don't use that word much so bringing it in now in the last section is a bit of a shock.

and then bla, bla boring bla

This thesis provides useful insight that enhances understanding of engagement. It does.

I want to write this now. I've got other stuff to get on with, like life.

Stuck in cross-case analysis

I've got to rewrite chapters 2 and 6 - well edit them. They are the literature review and the cross-case analysis.

The literature review edit is fairly straight forward and supervisor has helped by reading it thoroughly and giving me over sixty comments in writing. Is that critical or helpful? I think it's helpful supervision because I know the problem and what I have to do to solve it.

The cross-case analysis on the other hand has been difficult for months, and despite listening to my supervisors for an hour and listening again on the recording, I don't know how to tackle it. Until I have the cross-case analysis in my head, I cannot write it down, so in the meantime supervisors can't comment constructively - just say that they don't understand the abstractness of my writing in chapter 6, and beat me up.

Supervisor #2 suggested I was filtering out stuff and to brainstorm, but brainstorming is a group technique, not a really a one-PhD woman job. However he did also suggest I use a technique called EIAG which stands for

• Experience
• Identify
• Analyse
• Generalise

The idea is that I know/see/feel and find the experiences from my research and then identify them. The next two steps seem easy enough but I'm still stuck on the experience bit. For instance, at supervision, I pointed out the cycles and feedbacks on the engagement model that I've developed, but I haven't actually written these loops down anywhere and explained them, because I filter them out and yet they are important - because lose the loops and you lose engagement and also lose the evidence that engagement is continual. It was filtering out this idea from writing yet bringing it up in talking that made my supervisor think of EIAG.

Now what do I do? Stuck again in cross-case analysis

I'll go and edit the literature review.

Systems conference

The UK Systems Society have the annual conference at this time of year, and being interested in systems thinking and its application to business, I took the opportunity to go this year - my funded studentship finishes this month, :( so if I want to do something that costs, this is the last month to claim it. It was worth it because I met and talked with lots of interesting and knowledgeable people about systems, got to know of aspects of systems I'd not heard of before (like Connant-Ashby) and used systems thinking that I'm familiar with.

Systems thinking is a niche with few practitioners, a few small journals with low Research Asssesment ratings and little academic recognition. John Martin from the systems department of the Open University suggested that systems thinking is used in other non-specifically systems and published in other journals, but we don't have the evidence. So systems thinking isn't obvious in the academic literature, but may be applied in practice because we had a number of practitioners at the conference, and a couple of practitioner speakers: John Seddon of Vanguard consulting, and Hoverstadt.

Hoverstadt works in the sort of public sector areas that are relevant to my research, so we had an interesting conversation. His book, The Fractal Organisation, is one that I've been recently reading. He writes clearly, and explains the viable systems model much better than Stafford Beer does. He tutors one of the OU systems courses, and is running a systems workshop on VSM at the OU this month. I'm going to squeeze that in to my last month's funding too.

Friday's findings

Writing up what I should have written before going away to the AOM conference, and struggling to create a coherent paper that:

1. moves my research forward
2. I can send to my supervisors soon

I need to explain how the emerging behaviour arose from the pre-conditions, and how the emerging behaviour created value. And I can't remember what I thought two weeks ago. :(

Squaring the circle

I'm delighted to receive feedback from a research participant to whom I sent a case study write up. She hadn't seen something the way I had and welcomed my feedback, telling me what she could have done, things I hadn't thought through, and thus useful feedback, because I'll incorporate it.

One reason that research participant hadn't seen things that way was because she was the sole primary client, rather than sharing the client role on a project board, so she had no one to bounce ideas off. In another case study, where a contact client saw something one way, and the consultant who was the project manager saw things in a different way, the consultant was able to share his observations with others, and thus bounced ideas off a fellow consultant on the project board. He in turn worked with someone else on the project board to get done what had to be done.

Of course one of the things when you write up a case study is worrying that perhaps you'll show a research participant in a bad light, so I worry in that second case study that perhaps I'm showing the contact client as worrying too much about detail, but then I don't know that perhaps he was right and in fact the people on the project board didn't have enough information to make informed decisions. On the other hand, it is the job of project board members to have the vision, and the contact client's job was to know the detail, so there's no criticism of anyone.

Indeed, what I've got is the variety of perspectives that I set out to get. And the variety shows me that when some participants can't make the connections that afford engagement, engagement via two other connections can square the circle to get the job done.

Engagement - answer to Mollen and Wilson

I try to "pin down the much discussed but elusive concept of engagement" in the context of public sector IT projects, (elusive indeed) whereas Mollen and Wilson attempt this in an online context. Mollen and Wilson analyse engagement's relationship to constructs of telepresence, flow, commitment, but my approach doesn't use these constructs (although commitment seems analogous).

Mollen and Wilson attempt a definition; I don't. I tried - see here. But they attempt a definition of on-line engagement, which is not what I'm looking at. Why do we have to use the same word for something that's not quite the same behaviour!

Mollen and Wilson write "engagement is a volitional commitment by the customer" but that definition applies only to their on-line context and implies a one-way commitment to a brand - there's nothing in there about commitment by the supplier. They write that the customer commitment is "to an active relationship over time" but don't say who the other parties to the relationship are. How can you have relationship with a thing? Aren't relationships between people?

I checked the references section, and although I recognise some references, such as the 2006 paper by Petre, Minocha & Roberts, none of the other references match what I'm using, because she is looking at marketing, advertising and on-line engagement whereas I am looking at engagement in the public sector, on IT projects where there's IT development and interactional behaviour.

With this sketch I think I can see some similarities. They are:

1. the web site context, ie telepresence is the materiality and the website provides the context in which to work and interact
2. consumer experience is the knowledge available. consumers, like participants in an IT project some with knowledge and experience to contribute to the interaction.

But it's one sided, and if my research were of how clients got consultants to engage on a project, then it would be equally one sided because there'd be no mention of how clients engaged with people, clients with clients, clients with consultants.

I've looked at concepts analogous to engagement as participation, motivation, commitment, involvement, collaboration, using engagement literature that includes Huxham, Schaffer, , Saks, Marcum, Schaufeli, Axelrod, Barki, Huxham, Hartwick. And this literature does not coincide with Mollen's work at all.

Mollen is now developing an engagement scale, (Schaufeli has developed a questionnaire to measure work engagement (blogged here), but Mollen doesn't mention Schaufeli's work), which suggests that she's looking for a way to measure customer engagement. I am looking for

1. how people engage
2. the value that rises from engagement, - so a way to measure that value would be persuasive in influencing public sector clients who do not see the worth of investing time and effort to engage with suppliers. For the public sector IT context a metric for engaged behaviour is of less use than a metric for the value arising from engagement.

The literature that Mollen uses from the e-learning fields is more interest to me than that from the advertising field because in an IT development, there is learning, so the e-learning literature on engagement might have something transferable. The suppliers and the consultants learn how the business works, and the business clients learn from the suppliers' behaviours and material outcomes (e.g. reports, or new software). However, Mollen is using the electronic learning literature rather the learning literature per se.

Anne Mollen's preconditions are similar:

• participants (customers but not suppliers)
• knowledge (experience)
• environment (web, on-line)

but the emerging behaviour is different. I find

• sharing - not possible if participants are single individuals, and if the supplier is not involved as well
• sense-making - maybe
• adapting - customer behaviour

I conclude that Mollen's theory of engagement is insufficient to help understand how clients and consultants/suppliers engage on IT projects, and secondly, her work doesn't indicate what value arises to whom in a way that I can transfer to the IT project context. (She refers to "optimal consumer attitudes and behaviours").

However, what I'm working on is broader and may be helpful to on-line advertisers who are happy to take a more holistic view of engagement.

The interesting concept that both our approaches must share is volition.

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Mollen, A. 2010. Engagement, Telepresence and Interactivity in Online Consumer Experience: Reconciling Scholastic and Managerial Perspectives. Journal of business research, 63(9-10): 919-925.
Saks, A. M. (2006) 'Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement', Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21 (7), pp. 600-619. 938
Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B. and Salanova, M. (2006) 'The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study', Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66 (4), pp. 701-716. 835
MARCUM, J. W. (1999) Out With Motivation, in With Engagement. National Productivity Review (Wiley), 18, 43-46.
HUXHAM, C. (1993) Pursuing Collaborative Advantage. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44, 599-611.
NAO (2006) Good governance: Measuring Success Through Collaborative Working Relationships. National Audit Office.
SCHAFFER, R. H. (2002) High Impact Consulting, Jossey-Bass.
AXELROD, R. H., AXELROD, E., BEEDON, J. & JACOBS, C. D. (2004) You don't have to do it alone: how to involve others to get things done, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use. Management Science, 40, 440-465.

Engaging dancing

The Axelrods' talk was the more important session for me here, and has been enlightening on how engagement allows sense making. As an added bonus, I met other phd students researching engagement. I hope to keep in touch with them and continue to compare notes.

There is so much going on it is easy to miss something good (like the session on materiality) or end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Today I was going to a session on visualisation, but it was full to overflowing. I heard someone say something about an alternative room and followed them to find ourselves in a huge ball room, where I discovered I'd joined another session, one on dancing the tango. The tango is a metaphor for leadership because it requires subtle understanding of the changes of moves, and quick reactions and Montreal is the northern hemisphere's centre for tango. If you live in Montreal, then go here.

The organisers aimed to demonstrate that social dance can be used to develop organizational leadership skills. It does “take two to tango”: a leader and a follower.

"The dance is a metaphor for work performance and a “successful” dance or partnering is like the achievement of organizational objectives by a manager with an engaged workforce. Social dance provides a powerful and “sticky” medium to bring these principles to life."

The organisers wrote that the Argentine Tango "embodies skills necessary to lead organizations. Above all, it requires the ability to dynamically adapt to rapidly changing environments. Both today’s business leaders and tangueros (tango dancers) must be able to “think on their feet” and respond effectively to the unexpected actions of others, including those with whom they interact most closely. Skilled organizational leaders, like dancers, more easily navigate the complexities of their business environment by establishing deep and fluid communication with their followers."

I began to feel as I moved with my partner that I understood what they meant - if I lived in Montreal I might join a tango class.

El tango no está en los pies. Está en el corazón. [Tango is not in the feet. It is in the heart.] Larry Caroll, Tango Corazon

It's a daring approach.

Engagement - an intermediate variable

Supervisor sent me a paper about engagement in a different context, where engagement is seen as an intermediate variable for on-line web advertising. Wilson notes that

"engagement is a volitional commitment by the customer to an active relationship over time"

and supervisor now realises we need to discuss volition.

Anne Mollen wrote her Cranfield MRes on engagement as an intermediate variable for on-line marketing. I read it some years ago, and discarded the ideas then after a short discussion with the then supervisor #1, because her systematic review showed that she was situating her research in e-learning and advertising literature, rather than in organisational development and change. I recommend reading the paper because she writes well, and because her Master of Research dissertation is an exemplar of a systematic review. Find it here at Cranfield research theses.

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Mollen, A. 2010. Engagement, Telepresence and Interactivity in Online Consumer Experience: Reconciling Scholastic and Managerial Perspectives. Journal of business research, 63(9-10): 919-925.

Rewriting

After supervision, I seem to have found a new ball to roll. By the end of last week, I was getting stuck, apart from a short moment when I realised that my theoretical framework could act as a paradigm for good practice and if components or connection on it are missing, then I have a tool to analyse how to improve engagement.

I wrote that idea up in a hurry, illustrating it with some of my case studies and gave my supervisors 24 hours to read it before our meeting. I'd already given them two other papers and then rolled to a stop.

Supervisors' response is positive because it may be a way to compare across cases instead of using tables, (which I'd tried and weren't working).

Future weeks' work then will be to rewrite all five cases studies:

• do they show mutuality of engagement of interactive problem solving?
• do they show a meta-capability to produce engagement?
• what was complex about each project?
• identify the value that grew from solving complexity and knotty problems
• write about the value for each case
• identify what the key issues were that needed to be resolved, if they were resolved and how engagement helped the extent to which they were resolved.

I feel like my supervisors have given me a kick, and like a ball I'm slowly rolling again. May be this mess of thoughts will gain speed.

Organisational memories

Procurement can start good relationships but engagement needs to be continually worked at. In one of my case studies, the initial procurement was set up years earlier, but by 2007 people were not working together. The replacement senior management had to overcome adversarial tensions in order to create new relationships. Those tensions had been so strong that participants still remembered them over a year later. Bad memories take time to overcome {*}, and engagement takes time and has to be worked at continually.

*Citing whom? Do organisations have memories and do they matter? In central government, civil service senior managers move frequently so don't they lose organisational memory? Probably. Few remember the IT debacles of the 1980s, like Camelot. See Tony Collin's Computer Weekly Blog.

Unit of analysis

The unit of analysis is the project or programme. It's tempting to see the organisation as the unit of analysis but projects vary within organisations though using different technology, suppliers and consultants, and an organisation may have some successful projects and some not. The unit is unlikely to be the team because some teams deal with several different projects, and also some participants who are managers and senior managers see themselves as managers rather than team members - so how would I define a team. Engagement may differ between participants on different projects or programmes in the same organisation, so the project or programme must be the unit of analysis.

I've deliberately chosen (nah! it was pot luck what access I got) a number of cases as instrumental case studies (Stake, 2005), see my blog here, to provide insight to engagement, so the focus is not on the IT product but on the issue of engagement in IT projects and programmes.

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STAKE, R. E. (2005) Qualitative case studies. IN DENZIN, N. K. & LINCOLN, Y. S. (Eds.) The Sage handbook of qualitative research. London, Sage Publications.

Transaction costs

A friendly economist often stops by my desk to chat. He would tackle my research from a different perspective, of course, so he asks me about the transaction costs of employing consultants, which I have thought about - like here.

In the public sector, the make or buy decision matters to saving costs. Some years ago, the Inland Revenue outsourced its software development to EDS (now HP), and its employee civil servants all transferred. Presumably the reason for the change was because its core business is tax, not software development. I'd have to find the old newspapers to find out. Yet now, the UKBA is employing more software developers are the grounds that:

1. they're needed now
2. there'll always be more work for them (probably true)

Different public sector organisations at different times make different decisions. So what? And it's nothing to do with my question about engagement.

Contribution to practice

What contribution to practice does my research make?

This research identifies factors that enable or hinder engagement, like environment, participation and knowledge, which are factors that people already know, but in addition my research reveals how these factors together allow mutual sharing and sense making. Mutuality and negotiating that sense is what creates engagement, and that answers my how question, how do people engage? They share in order to make sense of what each other has.

Three factors enable:

• environment
• participation
• knowledge

By enabling interaction, those factors allow:

• mutuality
• negotiation of meaning

Collaboration

The collaborative model focuses on cooperative relationships with complementary goals. My research is about projects that require collaborative relationships with shared goals. So there's some overlap, but the kind of goal is different.

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LACITY, M. & WILLCOCKS, L. P. (2000) Relationships in IT outsourcing: a stakeholder perspective. IN ZMUD, R. (Ed.) Framing the domains of it management : Protecting the future ... ... Through the past. Cincinnati, Ohio, Pinnaflex Educational Resources.

Crossing boundaries stories

The stories that people tell me demonstrate engagement across boundaries: preparing, using the environment, sharing, learning, and hindrances.

Preparing

• Knowing where the political undercurrents are to avoid,
  
• Getting introduced to people so they're ready for you,
  
• Assessing people
  
• Listening to people

Environment

• Finding advantages in what is in the environment, and sometimes the problems

Sharing crossing and across the boundaries

• Sharing knowledge and time, sharing abilities and skills - may involve for example piggybacking on others interviews to save an interviewee time
  
• Aligning plans is other sharing - let's use the same map as we cross - it's no good one party aiming for downstream whilst the other is aiming upstream
  
• Adapting to each other's approaches

Learning

• Gaining new understanding of each others world.
• Recognising missed opportunities.
  

Hindrances

• Lack of expertise
• Challenges
• Time wasting
• Disputed ownership

Engagement works out

Although so many public sector IT projects notoriously fail, costing the tax payer millions and billions, some quietly succeed. Reasons for success may be the opposite of failures, as listed by the National Audit Office {NAO, 2006 }:

• good project management
• aligning IT with business objectives
• having senior management commitment

How do you get that commitment? and how do you know when you've got it? What is commitment? The terms 'commitment' and 'engagement' are often used together, but engagement is woolly - what is it? and how do people do engagement on successful projects?

I think that engagement is open and honest communication, where people contribute their knowledge, expertise, skills, and key parties participate. Such participation requires shared aims, time, place and documents. People need to be clear about aims, but also need to discuss repeatedly in order to understand each others aims.

Small teams help, but that is not always feasible. Making it easy to communicate helps more and ways to ease communication require space to talk formally, informally face-to-face and electronically {Arino, 2001 #1464}. Sharepoint is one way, but relaxed face-to-face is avowed the best way of getting to know each other and to build up trust before getting into formal and perhaps difficult conversations.

For instance, before an IT supplier went in to see a client about task b, another client warned him: "he's not too happy about his [task a]". That water-cooler moment allowed a problem to be nipped in the bud. Talk. Keep talking. Talk whenever and wherever you can.

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NAO (2006) Delivering successful it-enabled business change. IN NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (Ed.). HMSO.
ARINO, A., DE LA TORRE, J. & RING, P. S. (2001) Relational quality: Managing trust in corporate alliances. California Management Review, 44, 109-131.