Management and Accountability

Management and accountability has always been a necessity throughout history.  There has always been a basic need to evaluate, design, develop and analyze the environment around us. Such needs led to the development of project management. This discipline is carefully used to project, plan and organize resources to achieve goals and meet criteria put in place.  In order for a project to go from a simple idea to a completed project, many steps need to be taken in order to achieve a smooth and efficient process. This is all covered under the guidance of project managers. According to the book Why projects fail by Uladzislau Shauchenka (2013) “Many projects fail, in fact, statistics show that projects fail more often than they succeed” therefore there are many systems set in place in order to successfully complete a project. A system is an entity composed of individual components which have an exchange of information, energy, or matter in order to produce a result.  There are three major systems that all projects fall into. They are open, closed and extended systems.

A closed system is designed to have no interaction with its external environment. According to J.Alex Sherrer in the website projectsmart.co.uk “Closed systems can't interact with their external environments, so they receive no information, matter, or energy from the outside world”. What this entails is that a closed loop system cannot adapt to change and it’s not susceptible to any environmental influences. The simplest way to visualize a closed system is to envision something that is artificially created, like a quality control testing environment where the processes must be closely regulated. The closed system approach encompasses the management of technology, personnel equipment and materials. However it is specifically designed to exclude competitors, suppliers, distributors and governmental regulations. The biggest problem with a closed system is that in today’s society, interconnectivity has become more popular as technological advances rapidly change the industry. Reversely the ability to not be influenced or impacted by the outside world is an advantage of closed systems. Some examples of closed systems are a high technology projects and an R&D project. Both projects will most likely be highly confidential and on a need to know basis. The possibility of competitive companies knowing what is being develop is a big threat and might mean an economic catastrophe, therefore no information regarding the projects or the environment is exchanged.

An open system’s origin can be traced in the natural science fields. However, it became popular and rapidly spread across many disciplines such as but not limited to computer science, ecology, engineering, management and psychotherapy. The most important concept of an open system is that an organization takes inputs from the environment; it transforms these inputs and releases them as outputs in parallel to the environment. An open system receives and exchanges varying levels of information, matter, or energy with their environment. This means that an open system is most adaptable to change. However, this means that open systems is more complex to understand. One of the important concepts of open systems is that there is feedback with many other systems. Such feedback allows for a more communicative and better adapting system. It takes a great amount of thought, research, and investigation to fully understand the inner workings of an open system. An example of an open system is an on-line computer system which directly connects the consumers to the bank. In this type of model, communication with the user is very important. The needs of the user or the environment directly affects the product which in this case is the online computer system. Another example is a construction of a chemical plant. Both the consumer and the company in charge need to be in direct communication, the needs of the consumer or client directly affect the final outcome or the product which in this case is the construction of the chemical plant.