Joao P C Fernandes Thomaz

In order to perform their activities, the project managers are often faced with conflicting situations, which involve issues of medium and high risk, whose decisions, if not properly taken, they may delay the schedule of the project, leading it often to fail. As it has been a routine, it is assumed that the decision making is something totally understood and

Este estudo procura pesquisar possíveis associações entre as experiências de flow e os fenômenos de mentoria e liderança. Procura-se identificar as características e benefícios de experiências de flow e de relações de mentoria e liderança, percebidos pelos colaboradores de quatro empresas de Injeção de Plásticos da Marinha Grande. Identificam-se as funções de mentoria, os estilos de liderança transacional, transformacional e servidora e os componentes de flow entre estes colaboradores. Para a medição dos estilos de liderança foram utilizados os instrumentos desenvolvidos por Avolio e Bass (2004) e Dennis (2004). Para as funções das relações de mentoria, definidas por Ragins e Kram (2007), o instrumento desenvolvido por Noe (1988). Para os componentes observados em experiências de flow, o instrumento desenvolvido por Jackson e Ecklund (2002). Apoiado nos instrumentos referidos foi aplicado um questionário na recolha dos dados para este estudo. Foram encontradas influências moderadas e fortes entre os estilos de liderança, as funções de mentoria e os componentes de uma experiência de flow.

O comprometimento organizacional (CO) tem originado um conjunto de estudos teóricos e empíricos que procuram verificar os seus efeitos, individuais e organizacionais, assim como os fatores que podem contribuir para o aumento da ligação dos colaboradores às organizações. Espera-se proporcionar um contributo na adoção de práticas que aumentem a ligação e o CO dos colaboradores, aumentando a sua satisfação e produtividade. É feita uma revisão bibliográfica relativa ao CO e às práticas de recursos humanos e a sua aplicação na REFER. Os participantes do estudo foram selecionados a partir de uma metodologia de amostragem não probabilística e de conveniência. Foi elaborado um questionário de acordo com as temáticas, sendo o tratamento estatístico efetuado com o software IBM SPSS v. 21.0. Os resultados sugerem que o comprometimento organizacional tem um impacto significativo nas Práticas da Gestão de Recursos Humanos, nomeadamente na formação ou instrução e no recrutamento e seleção e evidenciam que a maior parte dos colaboradores se encontra empenhado de forma afetiva, concluindo-se que os indivíduos têm uma menor tendência de turnover e absenteísmo e apresentam um elevado desempenho e superiores comportamentos de cidadania organizacional.

De modo a desempenhar suas atividades, os gerentes de projeto de software se veem muitas vezes diante de situações conflitantes envolvendo questões de médio e grande risco, cujas decisões, caso mal tomadas, podem atrasar o cronograma do projeto, levando-o muitas vezes ao fracasso. Por ser algo tão cotidiano, supõe-se que a tomada de uma decisão seja algo totalmente compreendido e conhecido. No entanto, o que se observa é uma ausência, na prática, de metodologia para orientar o processo de decisão em projetos de software. Nesse sentido, o objetivo deste artigo é propor, em uma perspectiva sociotécnica, a utilização da Metodologia de Conferências de Decisão para complementar os processos técnicos definidos no Guia PMBOK® com ênfase em processos de facilitação de grupo e técnicas de tomada de decisão.

Enterprises have acquired Business Intelligence (BI) systems to improve business decisions and support the implementation of their strategies.
Quantitative assessments show that many Business Intelligence projects fail at an alarming rate. Extrapolated costs and delivery delays are attributed in large part to requirement problems, such as the difficulty of the customer to know what he/she wants, failures of communication between the development team and the customer, the development team’s lack of knowledge of the customer's business, different vocabularies between the customer and the technical team, the development team’s lack of the necessary social skills to extract and understand the strategy and customer needs, among others.
Given this reality, it is observed that the knowledge gained from the customer is critical for success in Business Intelligence projects. The customer knowledge is considered by the intellectual capital theory as an intangible asset, because it results from interactions. Furthermore, enterprises are increasingly worried about the satisfaction of their customers and looking for ways to guarantee their loyalty.
One of the objectives of this paper is to present a literature review about requirements management practices in existing business intelligence methodologies and about the main theory in intellectual capital, especially in customer capital dimension. Moreover, we believe that this review may help to understand the possible influence of the customer capital management to make explicit the customers' knowledge in Business Intelligence projects. As a result of the ongoing research we intend to examine the intangible assets of an information system development initiative and mechanisms proposed by the customer capital to evolve the interactions of an enterprise with the customer and improve the requirements definition of a Business Intelligence project. This paper also presents a study model that resumes the proposal of this ongoing research.

The world is experiencing a knowledge-based economy with a revolution in information technology, innovation, and telecommunications. The rise of the "new economy", driven by information and knowledge, has led to an increased
interest in intellectual capital theory, which aims to manage intangible assets of organizations. Firms belonging to technology and knowledge-based industries recognize intellectual capital as the key knowledge base that contributes to the creation of a competitive advantage for the firm. This paper aims to answer the question "How are Intellectual Capital (IC) and Information Technology (IT) related?" through a systematic review based on four steps: 1) search conduction; 2) selection of papers based on their titles and abstracts; 3) content analysis of selected papers; 4) evidence mapping and discussions. The analyzed papers were categorized into five themes: "Statistical analysis or case study in IT companies from the Intellectual Capital perspective"; "IT as a tool for Intellectual Capital Management"; "Intellectual Capital or technology knowledge assets influencing innovation and development", "Intellectual Capital assets to evaluate a technology" and "Intellectual Capital theory as a way to understand and share knowledge in IT projects". Our findings evidenced that the Human Capital was the main dimension studied by the authors, followed by Structural Capital and Relational Capital. We believe that this work may help to clarify on Intellectual Capital Management procedures into Information Technology projects, thus opening new topics for future research.

No âmbito da Engenharia de Software, a produtividade é determinada pela interação de muitos fatores, de modo que nenhum fator em especial é capaz de garantir o alto desempenho em um projeto de software. Apesar disso, ela é medida de forma única, através da divisão entre a quantidade produzida pelo esforço necessário. Portanto, torna-se necessária uma forma de medição da real produtividade de um projeto de software que reflita as circunstâncias nas quais o software foi desenvolvido. Dessa forma, este artigo propõe um modelo de avaliação da produtividade de projetos de software através de uma abordagem multicritério.

When making judgments, people rely on heuristics, or general rules of thumb. In other words, they use mental "shortcuts", which may lead to rational solutions and good estimates. In certain situations, however, these simplification techniques can cause inconsistencies and promote cognitive biases. One root cause of almost all project failures is human error or misjudgment. Although the ability to make right decisions is considered a main indicator of project management professionalism, many project managers are unwilling to try to improve the quality of their decisions. Because project managers rarely have enough time and resources to perform a proper analysis, and a decision analysis expert is not always available, there is always the temptation to make intuitive decisions. Even having enough knowledge of a particular area, some natural limitations to thinking mechanisms can lead to potentially harmful choices. Since people tend to rate themselves as above average when asked to characterize their abilities, they tend not to see their own biases. This paper proposes to shed light on the susceptibility of project managers to cognitive biases and how they deal with them, including techniques and tools they use to minimize their negative effects. This study evaluates ten cognitive biases: anchoring bias, exposure effect, pseudocertainty effect, certainty effect, hindsight bias, halo effect, planning fallacy, sunk-cost fallacy, availability-related bias, and Parkinson´s law effect. The qualitative approach was based on semi-structured interviews with seven experienced project managers in a Brazilian large public sector IT organization. Other three project managers participated in the triangulation process in order to validate the concepts map resulted from this process. All project managers recognized susceptibility in eight of ten cognitive biases. Some agile practices such as use of burndown chart for daily monitoring of planned versus accomplished activities and bottom-up planning from short activities were suggested as alternatives to minimize planning fallacy. The last technique was also indicated to minimize Parkinson´s law effects along with daily team meetings. Opinion of others, including experts, was the most mentioned alternative method by project managers, aiming to reduce the negative impact of seven biases. Although its limitations, we believe that this work may help to improve project managers' awareness of cognitive biases and also their susceptibility to these systematic errors, eliciting common tools and techniques used to minimize their negative effects, which can lead to better decisions, and thus, to better project´s outcomes.

Much of the work developed in organizations occurs as projects and this tendency is crescent. The Project Management Office (PMO) is an organizational entity with responsibilities related to the centralization and coordination of projects under its domain. In fact, PMOs can fill many different roles or functions in different organizations. In this way, it is not possible to state that PMOs filling specific functions are better than others, more general and preemptive. The decision about which functions a PMO might fill in a specific context will most likely be influenced by this context. However, since too many organizations tend to repeat the same mistakes too often and also reinvent the wheel, knowledge management seems to be an important integrative function with impacts on organizational learning and consequentially on project performance. As project managers tend to give lower priority to everything that does not directly contribute to their project, if this knowledge management is not well done and adopted, it will simply be ignored. In this way, this conceptual paper aims to answer how PMOs manage project’s knowledge. Through a systematic review-based approach in three search engines: ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Wiley, we obtained a classification divided into four themes: communities of practice, knowledge brokering, lessons learned and project performance, which were then synthesized. The cyclic work composed by the first three themes tends to increase project performance and thus strengthening and legitimizing the PMO presence in an organization. Lessons learned refinement and storage in an accessible and readable way seem to be the strong one to be emphasized by PMOs. As the majority of studies were based on qualitative investigations sustained by interviews, observations and focus groups, it is necessary a major number of empirical studies about how PMOs can better facilitate the groups and how tacit knowledge can be better codified to be used in future cases.

Enterprises have acquired Business Intelligence (BI) systems to improve business decisions and support the implementation of their strategies.
However, quantitative assessments show that many Business Intelligence projects fail at an alarming rate. Extrapolated costs and delivery delays are attributed in large part to requirement problems, such as the difficulty of the customer to know what he wants, failures of communication between the development team and the customer, the development team’s lack of knowledge of the customer's business, different vocabularies between the customer and the technical team, the development team’s lack of the necessary social skills to extract and understand the strategy and customer needs, among others.
Given this reality, it is observed that the knowledge gained from the customer is critical for success in Business Intelligence projects. The customer knowledge is considered by the intellectual capital theory as an intangible asset, because it results from interactions. Furthermore, enterprises are increasingly worried about the satisfaction of their customers and looking for ways to guarantee their loyalty.
One of the objectives of this paper is to present a literature review about requirements management practices in existing business intelligence methodologies and about the main theory in intellectual capital, especially in customer capital dimension. Moreover, we believe that this review may help to understand the possible influence of the customer capital management to make explicit the customers' knowledge in Business Intelligence projects. As a result of the ongoing research we intend to examine the intangible assets of an information system development initiative and mechanisms proposed by the customer capital to evolve the interactions of an enterprise with the customer and improve the requirements definition of a Business Intelligence project. This paper also presents a study model that resumes the proposal of this ongoing research.

This study aims to determine which dimensions of organizational justice concerning the pay systems that influence job satisfaction. It was performed a literature review of the concepts involved and the measuring instruments of different dimensions of organizational justice and job satisfaction. It was made an application that focused on one hundred thirty-nine employees of the INATEL Foundation. The methodology used, quantitative descriptive, was applied through a questionnaire that integrates the three dimensions of organizational justice (distributive, procedural and interactional) and job satisfaction measured by Job Satisfaction Survey (JSS) (Spector, 1985). Analysis of multiple regression coefficients obtained for the three dimensions of organizational justice finds that distributive justice proved to be the significant predictor of job satisfaction. In what refers to the dimensions of procedural justice and interactional justice the results indicate that they have no influence on job satisfaction.

The competitiveness of organizations depends, among other things, of their performance levels. For such, it is vitally important that they have a measurement and evaluation system that, from a set of indicators, provides them reliable information to reflect their goals and evaluate their performances. The aims of this study are: (i) to identify the most discussed approaches in the literature to evaluate the organizational performance, and (ii) to carry out a diagnosis of how small and medium enterprises with economic activity in Portugal measure and operationalize the evaluation of their performance. To meet the objectives of the study, we proceeded to the analysis of published studies in scientific journals and conducted twelve interviews in SMEs. The results indicate that, in addition to the majority of the studied organizations not having a formal process of their strategy, they also do not measure their results in an integrated system that would allow them to make an evaluation according to their strategic goals.