Project Management and Risk Management in Complex Projects Studies in Organizational Semiotics

Space activities give rise to complex projects calling for contributions from varied communities of knowledge and practical expertise. With their cultures and specialized languages, they define separate information fields that generate problems for communication and collaboration, especially in the early phases of projects – project definition, systems requirements, engineering, design. During these phases technical objects are progressively built up by negotiating the meanings of terminologies, formulas, drawings and other representations intended to satisfy the many agreed requirements, mechanical, electrical, thermal, etc.

Organizational semiotics offers a framework for understanding the processes that this project work entails, in particular the interaction between individuals and groups and between human and technology.

The 8th session of the annual Organizational Semiotics Workshop held in June 2005 in Toulouse – the French capital of aeronautics and space – tested ideas from Organizational Semiotics against two issues from space projects on two illustrative cases provided by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) – the government agency responsible for shaping and implementing France’s space policy in Europe – through its Technical Competency Centre in Management (CCT MAN):

- The management of complex, highly innovative and multidisciplinary projects during their early volatile phases.

- The management of risks faced by such projects that may run far into the future and beyond human intervention.

The twelve chapters of the book are the revised contributions of the workshop on these issues along with general themes of Organizational Semiotics.