Some recommended practices for constructing and using the management-concerns diagram

Some recommended practices for constructing and using the management-concerns diagram:

1. You need to conduct exploratory interviews with a few stakeholders to co-create (possibly to involve some negotiation with them) the management-concerns diagram.

2. The management-concerns diagram is embedded in the problem-situation of the case study, BUT it is not a rich-picture of the problem-situation and the management-concerns items and arrows in the diagram do not represent scientific claims; the items and arrows are only negotiated perceived management concerns that your project intends to respond to with research efforts.

3. Management concerns need to be labelled as MC (management concerns) and UMC (urgent management concerns). They need to be numbered, e.g. Item 1 (MC), Item 2 (UMC), etc.. My provisional view is that UMCs are those that are considered by a manager interviewee to be necessarily and seriously addressed in 1 to 5 months' time.

4. To establish a sufficiently complicated, contextualized and holistic understanding of the management concerns, the management concerns items need to be linked, including some vertical linkages between items (e.g. linkage perceptions) and quantity of items is also a consideration:

Zone 1: 2-3 items (make sure to have items in the external environment (not internal [organizational] environment).

Zone 2: preferably 3 items

Zone 3a: preferably 3 items

Zone 3b: preferably 2 items

{note: it is not easy to construct diagrams in MS word, my recommendation is to use Excel}.

5. You need to briefly mention (i) who have you discussed with and (ii) when was the discussion, for working out your management-concerns diagram in your dissertation report chapter 1.

6. In other to produce a sufficiently complicated management-concerns diagram, you need to do some preliminary literature review so that you are intellectually capable to "brainstorm" with your interviewees to produce a good quality management-concerns diagram to work with.

7. Do not use words such as "to evaluate", "to find out", or "to propose", etc... to express your management-concerns items, as these words are employed to produce the theoretical framework.

8a. Review your management-concerns items to ensure that they are not located incorrectly (e.g. a zone 2 item located in zone 3a).

8b. Try to come up with management-concerns items that are not very similar in nature, e.g. "weak managerial competence" and "weak leadership competence".

9. Formulate your management-concerns items at the coding or category levels preferably (e.g. weak team-management competence, with special regard to Gen Y and Gen Z staff), not at the interview raw data level (e.g. Manager, Mr. Ho, is a horrible boss).

10. Do not write more than 1 sentence to express your management concerns item.

11. Handle your management-concerns diagram with sensitivity; some managers have no problems to discuss with you on management-concerns in dialogue but, feel somewhat uneasy to have the viewpoints clearly stated in a management-concerns diagram.

12. State clearly the organizational unit in focus (or business process/ business function)  in your management-concerns diagram: e.g. The management-concerns diagram of the ABC Business Unit of XYZ Ltd. or the IT Department of XYZ Ltd, or the Procurement function of the HK Subsidiary of XYZ Ltd.).

13. After you insert your management-concerns diagram in your dissertation report, you need to write a few paragraphs to describe your diagram.

Note: also take a look at the related blog note on wordings used.