Noelle Barry - the reflective essay for lecturer PDF

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Noelle Barry’s Presentation: Word Count: 598 Noelle mainly talked about the importance of structure and culture in organisations. She took three example as distinct structure and culture in organisations by her own 19 years work experiences in management. She critically classified the three organisations in terms of the structure and culture. Oracle is a large global multinational company based in U.S. and Abtran is a large family business with 2000+ employees while UCC is a public sector entity have massive students, staff and contractors. From Noelle’s perspectives, there’s no perfect structure of the organisations, it depends on the size and scale of the project. She took examples for three types of structures: functional, matrix and dedicated team. There may have mixture of different types of structures within one organisation. She raised a question with “Is culture a factor in project management?” She answered this question with Peter Drucker’s words: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It is means that people can’t go against with the organisational culture and culture management is the highest level of enterprise administration. It reminds me of Wells Fargo’s fake account dilemma. Since the senior managers turned blind eyes to the unethical behaviours of their staffs, they were exposed created more than 2 million accounts without their customers’ consent (Bloomberg, 2016). The main reason of this scandal is the culture within this organisation is competitive and performance-driven. The managers downplayed the problems and attribute them to personal behaviour. However, it is the culture’s affect the individuals’ behaviours. Take the example I found when I came to Ireland from China. The pedestrians run through the red light at will and ignore the signal (News.ifeng.com, 2012). It became a phenomenon in China called the way Chinese crossing the road. It is unsafe and against the rules, even the government thinks it’s tough to solve the problem. When I came to Ireland, I think the people here are very obedient to the traffic lights, and they stop or move on strictly according to the instructions of the signals. However, once I saw a man looks very busy and walked through the red light in a fast pace.

The people waiting next to him saw the man cross the road and start to move as well, regardless of whether the signal was still red. That time I recognized the importance of the culture of our environment. The culture could make you overlook the policies and strategies. Additionally, Noelle talked different factors affect the organisational cultures, such as sponsors, politics, goals & results and people. She mentioned the management sector in UCC is very soft and slow changing, it is kind of shadow side culture. She introduced the managers should work with the culture instead of against it. The problems may be hidden if they use the blame cultures. Wells Fargo’s Fake Account Scandal could explain this as well. The employees won’t get bonus or potential fired if they couldn’t meet the target while the target is unattainable by regular and legal means. Then Noelle talked about her experience to explain the goal and result setting systems is important to the managers to move individual’s forward. Lastly she quoted Robert Kennedy’s words when she introduced the people’s impact on culture: “Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.” My understanding is people is the soul of the organisation while the culture is the DNA of it. A good leader could manage the culture and benefit from it. More importantly, I learned from Noelle is, don’t afraid of failure, failure is a good lesson for your project and your life.

References: Bloomberg.com. (2016). Wells Fargo Opened a Couple Million Fake Accounts. [online] Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-09-09/wells-fargo-opened-acouple-million-fake-accounts [Accessed 11 Dec. 2018]. News.ifeng.com. (2012). “ 中国式过马路 ” 走红网络：不看红绿灯 凑一撮人就走 _ 资讯频道_

凤凰网. [online] Available at: http://news.ifeng.com/mainland/detail_2012_10/14/18243206_1.shtml [Accessed 11 Dec. 2018]....