CISCO Case Study Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

CISCO Case Study - Research Paper Example 2). This means that dynamism has been the strategic approach of the company and in doing this, it has made the entire globe its platform for operation. Hitherto, Cisco began a right company to include in the Partnership for Lebanon (PFL) when it became necessary to put together five companies to send relief to the country in various ways. If for nothing at all, functions of corporate social responsibility are part of a globalised dynamic strategy and so meet the vision and culture of Cisco squarely. CSR Lessons Reading through the case, there are several key strategic lessons that any senior manager of projects within a company could adapt. The first of this has to do with the use of integration in both the approach and stakeholder base. That is, the Partnership for Lebanon, as the name implies, was undertaken in an integrated or partnership manner. Integration has been found to hold the key to the many failures recorded in project management in terms of effectiveness and efficiency (Nonis & Swift, 2001). This is so because most project managers tend to take up all the task of project implementation and execution or at best include only a few stakeholders. Once this happens, there tend to be inefficiency and ineffectiveness because very little is achieved within a longer time frame and what is achieved is hardly guaranteed of quality. From the manner in which the Partnership for Lebanon was implemented using as many stakeholders and agents as possible, it is important that senior managers always adapt an employee involvement approach when carrying out major projects. In terms of approaches too, it could be seen that as many as five criteria were set for the implementation and running of the development program. In light of this, senior managers are admonished to always have a backup strategy that they can fall on in case substantive strategies fail. Alternatively, they may choose to use many strategies at a go so the weaknesses of some of the strategies will be overshadowed by the strengths of others. The second lesson that can be learned in terms of implementation and running of development programs has to do with the implementation approach adapted by the stakeholders. Indeed, not only did the stakeholders have a differentiating approach that was made up of several different strategies. What is more, the approach that was adapted when implementing the strategies gives a strong signal to senior managers. The implementation approach is what could be referred to as the spiral implementation approach. In such spiral implementation approach, the strategies or tasks in implementation are prioritized. The prioritization is made to move from the less complex to the most complex. Complexity could be defined in terms of cost, urgency, relevance and resource demand. In whatever the case, the ones that demand less are first implemented before jumping on to the ones that demand more (Norberg, 2000). In the present case, we read about stakeholders of the project at the April 2007 conference in Paris, deciding on the immediate priorities to