Anne Live Vaagaasar

Stakeholder Management Strategies and Practices During a Project Course

In stakeholder management, a key question is: How can an actor/organization (e.g., a project) under different contingencies apply strategies to develop the relationship with each stakeholder into a favorable one seen from the focal organizations perspective? Based on an in-depth longitudinal case study, we provide detailed descriptions of how a project management team worked with its stakeholder relationships. Applying a practice approach, we explore how stakeholder management practices emerged and evolved as embedded actions and interpretations related to perceptions of each stakeholders harm and help potentials. We show how trust was both input to and outcomes of the managerial action.

Project management improvement efforts—creating project management value by uniqueness or mainstream thinking?

This paper presents a research study that is part of the large international Project Management Institute (PMI)-sponsored research project the “Value of Project Management.” Three case studies have been conducted on Norwegian enterprises. This article focuses on how enterprises improve project management and presents the improvement efforts and the stated reasons behind them. There are striking similarities as to the prioritized ways the enterprises have chosen to make improvements: use of a rather standardized model for project work and internal schooling activities. The enterprises all explain their efforts as internally driven, even if some consultancy assistance was used. This article discusses three drivers behind the improvement efforts: an economic perspective, a new institutionalism perspective, and an innovation perspective. This article identifies indicators pointing to all drivers and helps us understand why and how enterprises are improving project management. The importance of research on the practice of the most capable enterprises within the project management field is acknowledged.

Organizational rationality and project management

Purpose – Does the organizational culture of the base organization affect the way its projects are carried out? The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between one aspect of organizational culture, namely the formal rationality of the base organization and how projects are approached. The concept of McDonaldization is used to describe formal rationality; it covers four aspects: efficiency, predictability, calculability and control. Two types of approaches (here called project perspectives) to project management are studied: the task perspective (focus on a clearly defined endeavour from the start of the project) and the organizational perspective (focus on supporting the base organization in its change efforts). The relationship between formal rationality of the base organization and choice of project perspective is revealed.Design/methodology/approach – Empirical study based on a survey of 164 managers.Findings – The paper shows that the degree of formal organizational rationality af...

Development of relationships and relationship competencies in complex projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of how stakeholder relationships develop and how projects can develop the knowledge, skills, and aptitudes required to handle a multitude of stakeholder relationships. The objective is to provide in‐depth descriptions of what makes up these relationship competencies.Design/methodology/approach – A longitudinal study was made of a complex technology project. The project was followed for a year and a half. The data material includes more than 20 in‐depth interviews with key actors of the project context and more than 300 hours of participant observations.Findings – The results show that project competencies in stakeholder management are emergent phenomena which develop through trial and error, and how they, over time, appear as cultivated and fine‐tuned capabilities of communicating. This communication involves narrating, differentiated, yet carefully balanced stories. Little by little, the projects interaction patterns become fine‐tuned ...

Projects and politics : exploring the duality between action and politics in complex projects

Traditional research and literature on project management and organisation theory tend to view project organisations as non-political bodies and purely action-oriented endeavours. In contrast, this paper presents an alternative analysis drawing on the idea of projects as political and emergent processes. Based on in-depth, case-study findings of a complex development and implementation project, we suggest an analytical framework that focuses on the interrelatedness of action and political processes and which explains how project management deals with the two processes simultaneously. We identify and analyse three separate but nested organisational logics applied by the project management team to cope with the dual challenges of politics and action. The general idea is to illustrate the notion of projects as emergent processes involving both politics and action. The three logics are: 1) balancing openness and closure; 2) reformulating tasks to seek solutions; 3) relating to improve action capacity. Our findings add to the literature on the role and practice of project management in complex projects that entail both stakeholder and technological challenges.

A spatial perspective to leadership in knowledge-intensive projects

As project organizing is widespread and requires efficient knowledge sharing and integrating, there is a need for understanding how spatial solutions direct these knowledge-intensive work processes. This chapter discusses the open office zone solution in particular. Often, cost-saving is the rationale for co-locating workers in open office zones. This chapter shows the many positive effects for project work that open office zones render. Project work means ongoing problem-solving that requires sharing and integrating of tacit and explicit knowledge. These knowledge processes are enabled by co-location in open office zones as they offer extensive opportunities for frequent and rich interactions (in terms of sensory experiences) between the project practitioners, tools and artefacts, thus enabling redundancy in information and role-model learning. The chapter advises how to create the benefits of co-location in open office zones, dos and don’ts.

Managing collaborative space in multi-partner projects

Abstract Collaboration across company borders in multi-partner construction projects has proven to be challenging. An increasing number of projects aim to strengthen such collaboration by collocating project members from different companies in the same physical space. Yet we know little about the management practices required for taking advantage of such a collaborative space. To begin to remedy this shortcoming, we present an in-depth case study of a hospital construction project that applied a collaborative space and focus on the management practices influencing this space. With the help of affordance theory, we identified two types of management practices and show how they transform across project phases. These management practices included designing the physical elements of the collaborative space, and creating shared collaboration practices for the space. We contribute to the construction management literature by taking the first step in conceptualizing the connections between space, management and collaboration practices in the context of multi-partner projects. We suggest managers to consider carefully what kind of collaboration practices the space is expected to enhance and plan the physical and social space to support it.

Stakeholders, Decisions and Narrations

Abstract This paper consists of a detailed project level examination of how a project team handles a multitude of relationships. Using methodology from an ethnographic study that followed a project for years, it describes how the project team displayed an ability to meet a variety of stakeholders representing different and often divergent interests. The project teams stakeholder activities came about as a carefully cultivated communication pattern. This communication involves narrating, differentiated, yet carefully balanced stories, displaying a high sensitivity to the content and framing, and not least, the timing of messages. As this happened the team was able to exercise influence on the decision making of others and the paper points to how the social participation of the team reproduced and transformed the social structure in which it took place.