Interactive management in identifying modification project delay factors

Interactive management (hereinafter referred as IM) is the research methodology adopted by the researcher, and which will be used for the study of identifying factors causing delays of plant modification projects at Koeberg Power Station. The development of IM is based on the recognition that for coping with complex situations there is a need for a group of people, knowledgeable of the situation, to tackle together the main aspects of concern, to develop a thorough understanding of the situation under analysis and to elaborate on the basis for effective action; all these are founded in a spirit of collaboration, commitment, and within the framework of a serious and organized effort (Warfield and Cardenas, 2002: 1). Tuan (2003: 68) posited that varieties amongst a group of people are greater than that of an individual because generally, each person captures only a portion of a problematical situation. However, through group collaboration, conjoining various angles to promote versatile solutions can generate larger varieties and that can expand the breadth and depth of our horizon spectrum. In some way, they increase the variety in a designing system, which is vital to unravel a “messy situation”.

Warfield and Cardenas (2002: 1) further define IM “as a system of management invented explicitly to be applied intermittently in organizations to enable those organizations to cope with issues or situations whose scope is beyond that of the normal type of problem that organizations can readily solve”. IM is one of system thinking approaches. Systems thinking eschews simple solutions to complex problems and embraces holism and creativity to handle complexity, change and diversity (Jackson, 2003: xx). Jackson (2003: xx) suggested that the notions of holism and creativity are initially a little more difficult to grasp than the fads and panaceas prepared in easily digestible form for managers to consume. Furthermore, Warfield (1999: 5) suggested that today, it appears that there is only one sound alternative in managing complexity, and that is interactive management, whose advocates claim that it satisfies all the following defining requirements for complexity resolving systems:

• Full disclosure: Its explanation is widely available in the literature.

• Replicability of activity: The explanation is in significant depth, so that replication

is possible.

• Specializing in resolving complexity: It is intended only for resolving complexity in

• Sizeable record of value-adding application: It has been applied in many

organizations and has added significant value. • Founded in science: It is founded in science.

Initiation, development, and execution of modification projects in a nuclear power plant are subjected to various processes and requirements before they can be confirmed successfully completed. These requirements and processes could influence one or more of the project success factors. Timely delivery of projects is one of the project success factors, and as such the identification of factors causing project delays is viewed, in the context of this research, as a complex issue or situation.

Beer (1979), cited by Tuan (2003: 64), postulates that complexity can be denoted by variety, which is defined as the number of possible states of anything of which one needs to measure the complexity. During interpretive structural modelling technique, which is part of interactive management process, the participants will be asked to answer the questions presented by the computer, and the final answers to those questions are based on a democratic rule where the majority leads. It is also during this process where participants will be asked to give rationales for their individual decisions in order for the others to be exposed to different points of view and information, and then to have a better basis for a final decision regarding the questions under consideration. It is in this “exchange” of points of view where most of the learning during the IM activity takes place among the participants (Warfield and Cardenas, 2002: 92).

Although Baloyi and Bekker (2011: 59) suggested that the research method of extending questionnaires or interviews has been a proven application of identifying project delays, the further step in the context of modification projects in a nuclear power plant will be considered. This step involves establishing the interrelationships or links among the identified delay factors using the interactive management methodology and this approach, as described in the above paragraph, is part of holism. Holism considers systems to be more than the sum of their parts, and of course interested in the parts and particularly the networks of relationships between the parts, but primarily in terms of how they give rise to and be sustained in existence (Jackson, 2003: 4). In the research study for “identifying factors causing modification project delays”, the combination of modification projects and project related processes in a nuclear power plant which have influence in modification projects, will be considered as a system. A system is a complex whole, the functioning of which depends on its parts and the interactions between those parts (Jackson, 2003: 3). Jackson (2003: vii) further posited that complexity stems from the nature of problems that rarely present themselves individually, but come related to other problems in a richly interconnected

problem situation that are appropriately described as “messes”. As a result, once examined, problems seem to get bigger and to involve more issues and stakeholders. IM is a system thinking approach which will be used to examine the complexity of modification project delay factors. The intent is to advance the identification of project delay factors and investigate how these factors influence each other through the assessment of their interrelationships.

Previous studies on the subject of identifying factors causing project delays have focused on reducing the subject to just the trimming of a large number factors to a manageable number deemed significant to cause project delays. This approach is similar to an approach of individually optimising specific elements of the system or organization, referred by Jackson (2003: xiv) as sub-optimization. Jackson (2003: xiv) suggested that these simple solutions to problems fail simply because they concentrate on parts of the organization rather than the whole. In doing so, they miss the crucial interactions between the parts and they fail to recognize that optimizing the performance of one part may have consequences elsewhere that are damaging for the whole (Jackson, 2003: xiv).