Definitions of Maturity Stages and Dimension Variables

Definitions of Maturity Stages and Dimension Variables in the Middle Manager Best Practices Arc
Maturity Stages

1. Technology implementation competence and recognition: This first stage represents the middle manager’s capacity to learn, conceptualize, and articulate key issues relating to cogni- tive business technological skills, organizational interactions, management value systems, project management ethics, and management presence.
2. Multiplicity of business implementation of technology: Indicates the middle manager’s ability to integrate multiple points of view during technical project implementations. Using these new perspectives, the middle manager augments his or her skills with business implementation with technology career advancement, expands his or her management value system, is increasingly motivated to act ethically during projects, and enhances his or her management presence.
3. Integration of business implementation of technology: Maturing middle managers accumulate increased understand- ing of how business and technology operate together and affect one another. They gain new cognitive skills about technology and a facility with how the organization needs to interact, expand their management value system, perform business/technology actions to improve ethics about busi- ness and technology, and develop effective levels of manage- ment presence.
4. Stability of business/technology implementation: Middle manag- ers achieve stable integration when they implement projects using their cognitive and technological ability; have organi- zation interactions with operations; have management values with their superiors, peers, and subordinates; possess project ethics; and have the management presence appropriate for performing job duties, not only adequately, but also competi- tively (with peers and higher-ranking executives in the orga- nization hierarchy).
5. Technology project leadership: Leadership is attained by the middle manager when he or she can employ cognitive and technological skills, organization interactions, management, a sense of business ethics, and a sense of management presence to compete effectively for executive positions. This middle manager is capable of obtaining increasingly executive-level positions through successful interviewing and organization performance.
   Performance Dimensions
6. Business technology cognition: Pertains to skills specifically related to learning, applying, and creating resources in busi- ness and technology, which include the necessary knowledge of complex operations. This dimension essentially establishes the middle manager as “operationally” proficient with tech- nology and forms a basis for movement to more complex and mature stages of development when managing technology projects.
7. Organizational interactions: This focuses on the middle man- ager’s knowledge and practice of proper relationships and management interactions during technology projects. This pertains to in-person interactions, punctuality of staff, work completion, conflict resolution, deference, and other protocols in technology projects.
8. Management values: Measures the middle manager’s ability
   to articulate and act on mainstream corporate values credited with shaping technology project work ethic: independent ini- tiative, dedication, honesty, and personal identification with technology project goals, based on the philosophy of manage- ment protocol of the organization.
9. Project ethics: Reflects the middle manager’s commitment to the education and professional advancement of other persons in technology and in other departments.
10. Management presence: Involves the middle manager’s view of the role of a project-based manager during a technology project implementation and the capacity to succeed in