CAMES: An Approach to Project Management Based on Action Research and the Ideal Speech Situation

Background

This chapter presents an alternative approach to project management, named CAMES (Corporate Action Methodology for Enterprise Systems). CAMES offers project managers an alternative approach to managing complex projects and decision making. It starts from the premise that the really important issues of project management lie within the human factors domain; that projects fail because of issues of communication, politics and emotion.

Projects run into problems because of how people act, how they feel about the project and the way it is progressing; and because of what they say (or don’t say) to other team members. How often have we seen emotion enter the arena of project implementation, with team members debating and arguing issues which on reflection, in the cooler light of day, seem trivial? Yet how often have we seen such emotionally charged conversations take the project to a place of no return, to the edge of chaos, and to a point where the project partners can no longer work together? The CAMES approach sets out to recognise and flag up the early signs of such emotionally charged communication, using simple conversational analysis to recognise when danger approaches. It will then highlight these issues to the project manager, at an early stage while there is still time to intervene, change direction and “save” the project. The proposed system will offer the project team an online environment which supports all project communication, monitors that communication and, in simple terms, “measures” the “heat” in project communications.