MANAGING RESEARCH PROJECT AND PRESENTATION

Managing Research Project and Presentation

Managing Research Project and Presentation

Introduction

Since 1979, Life Extenders Scientific Group (“LES Group”) has been working to advance healthcare for people around the world. Building leadership and combining strengths in the areas of pharmaceuticals, nutritional, and diagnostics has enabled LES Group to provide total, integrated solutions across the healthcare spectrum for some of the world's most prevalent medical conditions, including AIDS, cancer and diabetes.

Strategic Objectives

The key strategic objectives of LES Group include the followings.

To double profitability by increasing its sales turnover by 100% over the next three to five years.

To improve market share by 50% in the next three years and 100% in the next five years.

To reduce cost of projects overspend by 90% within three years and 100% within five years.

What Are Maturity Models?

A maturity model is a structured collection of elements that describe characteristics of effective processes. A maturity model provides:

A place to start

The benefit of a community's prior experiences

A common language and a shared vision

A framework for prioritizing actions

A way to define what improvement means for LES Group organisation

Explanation

A maturity model can be used as a benchmark for assessing different organisations for equivalent comparison. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) developed the first Capability Maturity Model (CMM) back in the 1980s. This was a result of research that indicated the quality of software applications were directly related to the quality of the processes used to develop them. CMM® was originally intended as a government tool to evaluate the ability of contractors to deliver a software project. Though it originates from the software development industry it is widely used as a general model of the maturity of processes (e.g. Project and Programme Management). (Lewis R. Ireland 2006, 23-56)

Maturity models have five levels:

Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, heroic) - the starting point for use of a new process.

Repeatable (process discipline) - the process is used repeatedly.

Defined (institutionalised) - the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process.

Managed (quantified) - process management and measurement takes place.

Optimising (process improvement) - deliberate process optimisation/improvement.

Using Maturity Models for Performance Improvement for LES Group

The beauty of maturity models is that they enable organisations to breakdown a broad process improvement goal into manageable tasks. The lower level KPAs need to be in place for the higher level KPAs to be effective. Therefore the lower level KPAs should be addressed first.

In order to identify a prioritised roadmap for process improvement it is important to understand what KPAs LES Group currently do well and what KPAs are causing LES Group performance issues. Maturity modelling applies the concept that there's little point in fixing things that are not broken or that are not causing problems. Additionally, for large organisations it is likely that LES Group have islands of good practice. What is it that department X does differently to department Y or Z? It may be that LES Group have many of the KPAs covered but not universally across the organisation. Adopting good practice from within LES Group own organisation can ...