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Topic 1: What is 'people management' and why does it matter?

What is 'people management'?
People management in a climate of change
The importance of people management

The first line states; "People management is about managing people" (and project management is about managing projects, operations management is about managing operations and tautology management is about managing tautologies.) Thanks for that!

People management is a subset of human resource management, which deals with strategic, financial and policy issues, as well as people management.

Unit 402: Contemporary People Management

Prior to 2000, Unit 402 was titled Human Resource Management. As human resource management (HRM) has for many come to mean a defined staff support function and group within an organisation, Contemporary People Management was seen as a more appropriate unit title, reflecting a changed approach to how people are commonly managed in organisations today.

Topic 1: What is 'people management' and why does it matter?
Topic 2: The legal environment for managing people

Parallel NETCDF Installation

Parallel NETCDF is an implementation of the Network Common Data Form which supports parallel I/O. An excellent summary of the advantages are described by Choudhary, Liao, Gao, and Li.

Installation is fairly trivial. Download the tarball from the site, extract, load some modules, configure for the appropriate site, make and make install, and create modules. For example;


wget http://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/parallel-netcdf/parallel-netcdf-1.2.0.tar.bz2

Strategic Perspectives On Technology

Innovation does not necessarily require advanced technology. Innovation can create an advantage by applying an old technology or the same technology as the competition in an innovative manner that adds more customer-perceived value. Systematic innovation is a purposeful and organised search for ways to change aspects of the organisation in order to gain and/or sustain competitive advantage. It requires a systematic analysis of any opportunities that changes might offer for technological, social, organisational or business process improvement.

Managing Strategic Performance

Strategic change is more frequently driven by the need to respond to external factors, rather than to internal issues. Although internally it may appear that strategic change is the consequence of a selected strategy, usually the macro factors that have influenced the selected strategy are not given much consideration when managing the strategic change.

Strategy Implementation

Strategy implementation involves:
* articulating the mission, objectives and intent of the strategy to all staff
* planning, acquiring and allocating organisational resources and managing impact on
* staff and external relationships
* creating the right organisational structure
* establishing appropriate organisational systems
* developing a management style that is supportive of organisational culture and takes a
* proactive approach to cultural change
* considering strategy at three organisational levels—corporate, business and functional.

Strategy Optimisation

The optimisation process should consider the levels at which the strategies are being set. The level of detail and type of optimisation will vary for the three levels of strategy—corporate, business and functional.

Corporate-level strategy will be optimised on the basis of:
* allocating resources to particular parts of the organisation
* changing broad organisational structures
* changing or introducing new aspects to the organisational culture
* developing a code of ethics and values statements
* detailing short-term goals

Strategic directions

Before an organisation can choose a strategy, it will need: a mission statement—to provide a sense of strategic purpose and value strategic objectives—to provide a sense of direction strategic options a process for selecting the best option. A mission statement defines an organisation's purpose and distinguishes it from other organisations. It identifies the reason for the organisation's existence and can focus the organisation on the business it is, or should be, in.

Strategic choice

The primary purpose of a strategy is to provide the organisation with a sustainable position of advantage within a competitive environment. In this topic we will examine the general strategic choices an organisation can make, which is the first stage in defining the strategy it will ultimately follow. We will explore a number of different approaches including: (a) using the organisational purpose, vision and mission to make decisions about strategic choices, (b) focusing directly on achieving a competitive advantage, (c) competing by developing the organisation's core competencies.

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