refernces should provide 2015 to 2020 in harvard style.with 1 page summary
Page 1 of 9 Assessment details for ALL students Assessment item 2—Part B: Case Study—Term 1 2020 Due date: Electronic submission via Moodle by 11:45 pm AEST, Thursday, Week 10, 21 May 2020 ASSESSMENT Weighting: 20% of total unit assessment 2B Length: 2000 words, +/- 10% Write a report answering the questions at the end of the following case study. Dream Design: KM in a Scottish Architectural Practice Dream Design is Scotland’s leading independent architectural practice. The company enjoys an international reputation in health-care design and education. The directors are proud of the company’s 150-year history, including the partnership with the internationally valued John Arthur Mackintosh. During that history the business has secured a reputation for quality buildings that work well at a technical level as well as aesthetically. For example, some of Glasgow’s 19th-century hospitals pioneered the practice of air conditioning far in advance of their time. More recently, Dream Design architects lead in setting the standards for low-carbon office design. The company invested in knowledge management to support the professional development of staff, particularly young trainees, and to improve internal communication of project knowledge. The initiative resulted in enhanced social and professional cohesion among staff at all levels of the organisation, allowing greater project collaboration among offices. It also allowed the directors to identify those areas of the corporate knowledge base which they most wanted to develop, such as sustainable building technology and design. Dream Design experienced a period of rapid expansion in recent years, due to large-scale public investment in health-care and education facilities, based on public-private funding partnerships. From its headquarters in Glasgow, it opened offices in four other Scottish cities and moved into Northern Ireland and the north of England. Staff numbers doubled over a period of two years. Certain features of the staffing profile highlighted the importance of effective knowledge management. The training of architects in the UK is based on alternating periods of university education and working experience in architectural practice. After four years of university study, trainee architects spend one year in practice before returning to study for a further year at university. This is followed by a second period of practice as a trainee before taking a final examination to become a qualified architect. The profession relies on a steady supply of trainees each year and expects to invest in training and practical mentoring. Architectural education in the UK has been marked by a shift away from the technical aspects of building construction towards a strongly aesthetic or design focus. While this has advantages in terms of the quality of the public realm, it does create gaps in the knowledge base of young architects. Dream Design directors were concerned by the lack of technical competence of architectural trainees entering the practice from university. Page 2 of 9 These factors combined to highlight the importance of knowledge management for the company. The rapid expansion placed impossible stresses on the traditional forms of knowledge sharing and training. The company growth relied on increasing numbers of trainees who lacked the technical understanding that was a cornerstone of the company’s reputation. This growth in the business also put new pressures on business development processes. The company produced some generic promotional material in-house and made significant investment in high-quality bid documents for each specific project. These documents were produced by a two-woman team who pooled information from across the company and generated quality branded bidding information. As the market base expanded, there was a clear need for a dispersal of these processes to local offices. The challenge was to maintain the quality of the documents with devolved responsibility. A Knowledge Manager was appointed with a broad remit to improve the training and professional development within the company and to capture the expertise developed in project working. She reported directly to the managing director, quickly establishing a steering group of representatives from all management levels to select priority actions and gain broad-spectrum support for the program. Although some of the Dream Design directors had heard about knowledge management and were in sympathy with the ideas behind it, they did not have a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve by it. They were aware of a need for greater coordination of training, and for better learning from project experience, but had no clear plan for how that should happen. When the Knowledge Manager was first appointed in 2006, she conducted a widespread consultation among all staff to identify the key areas of concern for the workforce. Informal conversations, discussion groups, and searches of information systems quickly revealed two key areas of concern. First, the company’s IT systems had developed to serve the needs of local offices in their project work, but they could not provide a standard portal for sharing information across the business. Staff wanted a simple means of communicating throughout the company. A number of other objectives followed on from that, including the establishment of a directory of skills and experience, a database of standard drawing details, a library of technical and design information, and a repository of standard company information for inclusion in bid documents. The second concern was to improve personal communication among staff, particularly in terms of sharing experience. It was clear that the architects and technicians wanted to be able to talk to each other about specific recurring issues. The Knowledge Manager worked with the top designers in the company to develop processes of design management and reflective practice. Teams were set up to develop methods of post-project review, following the completion of a building, and post- occupancy evaluation, after one to two years of building occupation. Training had been identified as a key objective of the KM program, and a program of training seminars was set up within the first months. For half of the year, seminars were given to all staff on a range of topics including study tours, post-project reviews, and conferences. For the other six months, training focussed on the needs of architectural trainees preparing for their final examination. Specialists in a range of business functions gave talks to the trainees on a fortnightly basis, making notes available via the intranet for e-learning. By 2008 video-conference facilities allowed trainees in all offices to participate in the seminar program, building a community of learners. Page 3 of 9 The KM program would demand active engagement from members of staff at all levels of the organisation, so it was critical to establish commitment from the outset. Although the Knowledge Manager had been appointed by the Managing Director, it was clear that many junior managers had to be engaged in the process. A steering group was set up to guide the priorities for the program and ensure personal communication across all management groups. As each of the objectives would demand a different skill set, technical working groups were set up, coordinated by the Knowledge Manager. For example, a team of IT enthusiasts and professionals met to outline the technical brief for a demonstration intranet. The Technical Managers, including both architects and experienced architectural technologists, were a strong internal team with responsibility for the development of technical capability of the staff. They worked with the Knowledge Manager on the development of a database of standard drawing details. During the first nine months of the program, a very basic intranet was set up, based on Word, to demonstrate to the company what might be possible with a fully web-based system of internal communication. It was delivered as a demonstration project, with the explicit objective of identifying what would be required of a full system. Nevertheless, it included a significant amount of usable data to show what was possible. This demonstration was shared across all offices in August 2007 and immediately followed up with a series of focus groups to gain an understanding of how people might use the system. This identified a number of priorities for the full system, then under development. The IT team were already working on identifying a suitable web-based system to develop a “real” intranet. DNN, an open-source base, was selected, based on its capacity for simple devolved editing and the flexibility for expansion to a very large support community. This system was delivered, populated, and fully accessible in April 2008, based on the content of the original prototype and the feedback generated by the focus