Anne Keegan

The Management of Innovation in Project-Based Firms

Abstract How relevant are traditional innovation ideas for project-based firms? This paper asks if project-based firms provide a context supportive of innovation or indeed if they view it as useful. Based on research in firms from a variety of sectors, including telecommunications, information systems, computers, financial services and engineering, procurement and construction, the paper reveals that the very project control systems around which the firms operate serve to stifle innovation. Project-based firms—regardless of sector—prioritise efficient management of projects, tolerating the use of slack resources only when absolutely necessary. Finally innovation is not seen as universally useful, but primarily as costly and dangerous. It concludes that the space at which ‘innovation’ and ‘projects’ comes together is still dominated by ideas on how to correctly manage projects, rather than how to effectively manage innovation. Innovation of ideas on managing innovation projects may be merited.

Quantity versus Quality in Project-based Learning Practices.

In the midst of the turbulence wrought by the global economy, it has become common to see projects as an essential medium for achieving change. However, project-based learning practices-as a subset of organizational learning practices-have not kept pace with this development. To explore this concern, we have carried out a study on practices adopted by organizations for learning through projects involving nineteen companies from across Europe and from a range of different industries. We use the concepts of variation, selection and retention in organizational learning to analyze our findings and report the challenges faced by project-based organizations in each of the areas highlighted. We conclude that time pressures, centralization and deferral are the key characteristics of learning in project-based firms and that these impede project-based members in learning from and through projects.

Mechanisms of governance in the project-based organization:: Roles of the broker and steward

The last 50 years has seen a shift in the nature of work, from mass production, with stable customer requirements and slowly changing technology, to the current situation where every product or service may be supplied against a bespoke design, and technology changes continuously and rapidly. This modern environment is a more project-based economy. The management of the former situation was well understood, based on classical management theory, developed over the previous 100 years. Classical management offers the traditional organization many strengths derived from the functional hierarchy at its core. These include strong central planning, governance and control, knowledge management and human resource development. The project-based organization requires a new approach to its management, which addresses the unique, novel and transient nature of its work, but retains the strengths of classical management. This paper is one of a series aimed at deriving such a management paradigm for the project-based organization. In this paper, we describe governance structures adopted by successful project-based organizations, and how they use them to manage the interface between projects and their clients. We describe two roles observed at this interface, labelled the broker and steward. We provide a Transaction Cost perspective of the governance mechanisms observed and the two roles. We note that the same governance mechanisms are adopted whether the project is managed in the market or the hierarchy. This is in stark contrast to the classically managed organization, and suggests different pressures act on the project-based organization requiring hybrid governance structures to be adopted for all projects. We outline the roles of the broker and steward in the different project governance structures we have identified. We consider why it is necessary to have two roles, a broker and a steward, and not one person fulfilling both.

The versatile project-based organization: governance and operational control

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, there has been a shift in the management paradigm, from the functional, bureaucratic approach, almost universally adopted in the first half of the century, to project and process-based approaches. This shift has been in response to the changing nature of work from mass production, with essentially stable customer requirements and slowly changing technology, to the current situation where every product supplied may be against a bespoke design, and technology changes continuously and rapidly. Whereas the functional, bureaucratic approaches to management are underpinned by a strong theoretical basis, the classical theory of management developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the process and project-based approaches do not have a strong theoretical basis. Furthermore, in adopting project- and process-based approaches to overcome the weaknesses of the functional approach, managers have also lost its strengths; they have not replaced some of the essential roles it fulfils. With the eventual aim of developing a theoretical basis for the project and process-based approach, which recovers the strengths of classical management, we at Erasmus University Rotterdam are conducting a research project to determine how project-based organizations are managed. In this paper we present initial findings, especially as they relate to the management of the process of product delivery, that is in the areas of operational control and governance. We also briefly review the issues identified in the management of human resources.

The management of operations in the project-based organisation

Project-based organisations require a different approach to their management from the functional hierarchical line-management approaches adopted for most of the 20th century. The latter works well where products are stable. During the latter half of the century, however, the nature of work has changed so that now, for many organisations, almost every product or service is supplied against a bespoke design, and markets and technologies change continuously. The classical management theories developed to manage mass production no longer apply; the new organisation needs new theories for its management. At Erasmus University, we are investigating the management of project-based organisations, to identify practices adopted by firms internationally. In this paper, we report our findings about operations management practices adopted. We suggest a six-step process model for operations management, and show that different approaches are used in the implementation of this model, depending on the size of projects undertaken and the number of customers. We describe different approaches in each of the four cases: large projects-few customers; large projects-many customers; many projects-few customers; and many projects-many customers.

The fatal smirk: Insider accounts of organizational change processes in a police organization

Purpose – The key to success and failure in change projects may lie not in groundbreaking events or heroic gestures but in the many seemingly meaningless acts and events that occur throughout all change projects. In order to gain a better understanding of factors leading to success in change projects, the purpose of this paper is to examine insider accounts of successful and unsuccessful change projects in a non‐business public context, namely the German police.Design/methodology/approach – The research can be located in the exploratory, inductive research tradition and consistent with that we used in‐depth semi‐structured interviews to elicit the views of 92 high potential future managers as to what constitutes a(n) (un)successful project, and what factors lead to (un)successful project outcomes.Findings – The qualitative approach adopted allows for the tracing of a range social behavioural issues identified by members of the organization as criteria to evaluate the success of projects – commitment of pe...

Book reviews: Destructive Leaders and Dysfunctional Organizations—A Therapeutic Approach Alan Goldman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 238pp. £24.99 (pbk), £60.00 (hbk). ISBN 9780521717342

At best, the voice of the author is conflicted and contradictory between her claims to challenge dominant scholarly discourses, a desperate attempt to make her voice heard and accepted by the qualitative research community to whom this book seems to be destined and by whom she considers it to be marginalized, and the use of the very medium that she roundly criticizes to do it. Her perspective is also much too dogmatic and potentially tautological at times. It is also unfortunate that in projecting her own anxiety, doubt, vulnerability and trauma in a book that is aimed at a wider audience, and this uncritically, the author also normalizes her own subjective experience and generalizes it as if it is what all autoethnography should be. Can learning be transferred from autoethnographic accounts of the healthcare field to management? Potentially yes, and the phenomenology of client and practitioner responses under pressure is certainly of interest. If many of the accounts offered are often self-indulgent, several sections of the book are particurlarly distinctive, and fill a gap in the current autoethnographic literature: Muncey’s illuminating accounts of the creative process of writing, and genuinely useful examples of techniques for initiating and energizing that process, are examples of this. The actual autoethnographic extracts are also at times extremely powerful. But the emphasis on trauma, victims, addiction and vulnerability—though these are not absent from management—adheres perhaps too much to its context and limits transferability, the emphasis on healing having only distant resonances, and then only with Elton Mayo.