Jonas Söderlund

Building theories of project management : Past research, questions for the future

Project management has long been considered as an academic field for planning-oriented techniques and, in many respects, an application of engineering science and optimization theory. Much research has also been devoted to the search for the generic factors of project success. Project management has, however, in the last decade received wider interest from other academic disciplines. As the field rapidly expands, the need for an internal discussion and debate about project management research increases. Project management and project organization is a complex subject and, we argue, is usefully examined from several perspectives. In this paper we discuss the emerging perspectives within the project field. The paper also presents a number of questions that project research to a greater extent should acknowledge. The questions concern issues such as why project organizations exist, how they behave and why they differ. The principal argument is that too much effort has been dedicated to clarifying the reasons of project success and failure, while downplaying a number of important research questions that need to be discussed in order to further the knowledge about project management.

Pluralism in Project Management: Navigating the Crossroads of Specialization and Fragmentation

Project management is a rapidly expanding subfield of management and organization studies. This paper seeks to make sense of this development and the current state of project management research. It reviews the literature published over the last five decades in 30 leading management and organization journals. In total, 305 articles were included in the data set. The paper proposes a categorization of the published articles into seven schools of thought: Optimization School, Factor School, Contingency School, Behaviour School, Governance School, Relationship School and Decision School. The schools vary in terms of their main focus and use of the project concept, major research questions, methodological approaches and type of theorizing. It is suggested that a better awareness on how to make use of the schools and the identified perspectives would stimulate cross-fertilization, unification and thus enhance a pluralistic understanding of projects and project management at the same time as it would prepare research to frame more accurately the problems of contemporary projects. In that respect, the paper offers ideas on how to navigate at the crossroads between specialization and fragmentation, between the search for novel topics and improvements of existing knowledge.

DEVELOPING PROJECT COMPETENCE: EMPIRICAL REGULARITIES IN COMPETITIVE PROJECT OPERATIONS

Projects play key roles in many modern industries and firms. The management of these economic systems, project management, is continuously developed and considered to be at the core of competitive advantage. Traditional research on project management has, however, paid scant attention to the capabilities needed for firms that depend on projects in their business operations. Furthermore, traditional work on the capabilities and competence of the firm pays limited attention to the specific traits of project processes. In the present paper, project competence is considered to be one of three strategic competencies frequently observed in modern firms. We develop an overall model for the analysis of project competence. The proposed model identifies four building blocks of project competence, namely project generation, project organising, project leadership and teamwork. In an empirical study we elaborate on some empirical regularities in the operations of firms that to a large extent depend on projects. The companies studied are ABB, Ericsson, Skanska and Posten. We illustrate the possibilities of this model and show some variations between the companies. The article illustrates how the project competence framework might explain the differences among the competitiveness of firms.

Managing Complex Development Projects: Arenas, Knowledge Processes and Time

The literature on project management has been dominated by techniques and methods for separating activities and making thought out plans. Closely related to this research stream is the research on product development, which seems to advocate somewhat of a different strategy where managing projects is a matter of enabling the crossing of functions and knowledge bases. This paper attempts to integrate these two lines of research. The paper is based on two in-depth case studies of project management in product development contexts. The projects under study were highly complex and consisted of multiple interrelated parts, which called for ‘tightly coupled’ organizational solutions. From our point of view, much effort by the project management teams was put into establishing a project that was responsive and where participating local units were oriented toward various ‘global’ measures. In our conception, the overall deadline seemed to have played an important role for promoting communal and interactive problem solving. Furthermore, the deadline emphasized the need for global arenas where the interactive problem solving could take place. It is argued that time-based controls set a global time for the project. The paper also demonstrates the importance of various global arenas, such as testing activities and project management forums, in order to keep track of time limits and to trigger global knowledge processes. Furthermore, based on the notion of ‘separation’ and ‘coupling’ of subsystems and project phases, the paper suggests a model identifying four types of project organizations. The paper contributes to the knowledge on project management in complex product development.

What project management really is about : Alternative perspectives on the role and practice of project management

Projects play key roles in most modern industries and firms. The management of these economic activities, project management, is continuously developed and today considered to be at the center of c ...

Managing inter-firm industrial projects — on pacing and matching hierarchies

The purpose of this article is to present a conceptual framework useful for understanding and analyzing the management and organization of the execution phase of inter-firm industrial projects. On the basis of an exploratory case study of a project within the ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) Group, we develop two concepts. One is pacing, which focuses on the mutual coordination of activities between client and contractor. Pacing refers to the temporal orientation of the parties involved in inter-firm projects. The other concept is matching hierarchies, which focuses on how the interacting parties establish joint-decision making in order to handle overall project-related dependencies and conflicts. The suggested concepts are linked to each other in the sense that a configuration with matching hierarchies provides the arena for solving pacing problems, while, on the other hand, the pacing process provides the mechanism for linking hierarchies.

Management Education for Practicing Managers: Combining Academic Rigor With Personal Change and Organizational Action

For several decades, management educators have discussed the difficulty of accommodating the competing values of academic rigor and organizational relevance. Only a few articles, however, consider approaches for integrating theory and practice in educational programs for working managers. Building on 15 years of experience in executive education, this article presents an approach grounded in experiential and action learning, which combines personal learning and organizational action without compromising academic standards. The following educational practices are discussed and evaluated: reflection reports, personal learning contracts, roundtable examinations, live cases, action-oriented thesis work, and organizational knowledge theaters. Taken together, the approach constitutes a powerful program design to address multiple learning loci and combinations of reflection and action, albeit one with considerable challenges and difficulties, as the authors discuss.

HRM and Project Intensification in R&D-Based Companies: A Study of Volvo Car Corporation and AstraZeneca

Projects have become the standard mode of organising R&D activities. The main focus of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the project operations of the R&D-based firm and its Human Resource Management (HRM). This paper draws on a comparative case study of AstraZeneca and Volvo Car Corporation. It is argued that the project intensification currently under way has some important structural and content effects on the HRM practice of the firms. As to the content effects, we identify five critical areas within the HRM practice where special attention is needed due to project intensification. As to the structural effects, we identify two separate logics for HR specialists: the HR-based logic and the task-based logic. These logics give new knowledge about the design of the HR organisation and how the HR departmental structures should be adapted in a project-intensive setting. The case studies also illustrate three alternative roles for line managers when they assume increased HR responsibility.

Reconceptualising line management in project-based organisations : The case of competence coaches at Tetra Pak

Purpose: The aim of the article is to analyse HR devolution from HR departments to the line. Two important problems are addressed. The first problem concerns the disregard for the changes in line m ...

Lagomizing, organic integration, and systems emergency wards: Innovative practices in managing complex systems development projects

In complex systems development, project management is a key factor for innovation, for bringing together system capabilities to actually working systems and taking them to the customer. The critical question then is: How can successful project management in this field be conceptualized, practiced, and understood? In the extant literature, there is a plethora of suggested tools for advanced planning and scheduling, for system decomposition and modularization, and for reducing interdependencies and avoiding errors. There is also a growing criticism of these “planning approaches,” suggesting various contingency and flexibility approaches, to reflect and adapt to complexity and change. This critique, however, tends to lack grounded suggestions for effective managerial practices and does not distinguish between general flexibility needs and specific project structures required to make complex systems development at all possible. This article centers on the development of large, complex systems with an empirical focus on the telecom industry. Key challenges here, it is argued, are to understand complexity, reduce complexity, and rapidly act on the consequences of complexity to ensure timely delivery of reliable and predictable systems to highly demanding customers. To cope with these challenges, a set of innovative practices has been developed within Ericsson, a world leader in mobile network systems. We focus on three such practices, which together represent examples of a “neo-realistic” approach to project management: (1) lagomizing, a top-down redefinition of project goals to reduce complexity and transform expectations; (2) organic integration, an articulation and visualization of a shared understanding of system capabilities; and (3) Systemakut, the Systems Emergency Ward, a real-time, high-visibility agora for managing integration, handling errors, and making swift decisions and in public. The study is based on a research methodology involving knowledge coproduction, where the team of authors represents both academic knowledge and practitioner experience of managing innovations in complex systems development projects.