Karlos Artto

Problems in managing internal development projects in multi-project environments

Abstract This article identifies problems in managing multiple internal development projects. The research methodology employed organisation-specific interviews, surveys and workshops on two case project portfolios. Project portfolio management studies provide one view on existing knowledge in this area. The study results in six relevant problem areas: (1) Inadequate project level activities, (2) Lacking resources, competencies and methods, (3) Lacking commitment, unclear roles and responsibilities, (4) Inadequate portfolio level activities (5) Inadequate information management and (6) Inadequate management of project-oriented organisation. The article suggests further analysis and development of managerial practices on these areas.

Intelligent products: a step towards a more effective project delivery chain

International projects present really difficult logistics challenges. In international investment projects, a vast number of individualised deliveries has to be managed through a large supply network in a tight timeframe. This article investigates how the logistic challenges of international projects can be solved by utilising advanced web technologies and product identification. The paper presents a control system being built at Helsinki University of Technology, which is based on distributed programming, and wireless identification technologies. The aim of the system is to change the controlling mechanisms of project deliveries by giving the deliveries themselves the means with which to control their route. This enables the material flows in the project delivery chains to be controlled from the inside of the material flow itself.

Project business as a research field

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce project business as a research field. The project business view in this paper puts focus on the management of firms and their businesses, and this way the paper complements the existing project‐centric view of the role of projects and their management in various business contexts.Design/methodology/approach – The paper proposes a conceptual framework for project business and identify relevant research areas and themes. These research areas and themes are derived by using the knowledge and experience obtained from scientific project business research conducted in Finland since the early 1990s.Findings – This paper describes project business as a research field by introducing a project business framework and the four major research areas inherent in the framework: management of a project, management of a project‐based firm, management of a project network, and management of a business network. It also suggests specific research areas and themes within the ...

Project strategy: strategy types and their contents in innovation projects

Purpose – Previous literature on project strategy has adopted the narrow view that a project is to be conducted under the governance of a single strong sponsor or parent organization. The purpose of this study is to provide a critical analysis on prior project management (PM) literature addressing different context‐specific strategies of single projects.Design/methodology/approach – Literature analysis.Findings – There are two important determinants in the projects context that affect the strategy of a single project: a projects autonomy in its environment and the complexity of projects stakeholder environment. Based on these two determinants, we characterize four types of alternative positions that projects can have in their context: parents subordinate and autonomous projects that occur in a stakeholder environment that is not complex, and projects with weak and autonomous positions in a complex stakeholder environment. The developed project strategy framework is applied in the context of innovation...

Project-based management as an organizational innovation: drivers, changes and benefits of adopting project-based management

This paper examines project-based management as an organizational innovation. Institutional theory and innovation diffusion literature suggest that the drivers for adopting an organizational innovation may differ across organizations, and that the drivers may be linked with the timing of the innovation. A survey questionnaire was used for data collection, and the sample consisted of 111 companies representing a variety of industries. The results of this study identified external pressure and internal complexity as drivers for introducing project-based management. The degree of process change, depth of project-based management adoption, and local success of project-based management introduction as changes caused by adopting project-based management are examined. The study also reveals benefits from introducing project-based management in the form of improvement in project culture, and efficiency improvement.

Managing projects front-end: incorporating a strategic early view to project management with simulation

Abstract The article introduces a project management approach, which focuses on adopting a strategic view in the project implementation process. Such strategic view means that a consideration on the purpose of the project as a whole must be maintained in the course of project implementation. This includes adopting and maintaining the focus on the functionality and operability features of the project product. The functionality simulation approach itself is well known, e.g. in system engineering design. This article puts discrete event simulation in place in the project implementation process by suggesting that it can help to introduce new insights to conventional project scope management practices. Four simulation cases are presented to illustrate empirically how the management focus is casted in a strategic way to the functionality and operability of the project product. The cases provide understanding of the use of such simulation approach in the course of the project implementation process. The suggested simulation of the functionality of the project product introduces a directing view to project scope management, and this way it provides directions for operative tools that are designed for putting the component parts of the project together.

A Negotiation Approach to Project Sales and Implementation

We conceive the project sales and implementation process as a continuous joint decision-making process between the customer and supplier. We draw a parallel between the stage model of negotiations and phases of the project sales and implementation process, and apply the framework of negotiation analysis to the context of project management. A sample of negotiation strategies for both counterparts is presented to illustrate how the negotiation analytic framework can be used to describe and analyze different strategies the supplier and customer can employ in different phases of the project sales and implementation process. We find that a qualitative application of the approach facilitates the description of generic negotiation maneuvers in projects, supports the analysis of project negotiations, and provides several practical suggestions to improve negotiation outcomes.

Integration of strategic level and operative level front-end innovation activities

The front-end phase is in the literature generally regarded as the most critical phase of the innovation process. This is due to its inherent uncertain and ambiguous nature and its significant potential to improve overall innovation capability in industrial firms. The front-end phase precedes and feeds the new product development project phase by creating a continuous stream of new incremental and radical product concepts. This article makes a distinction between strategic and operative level front-end activities, which are often confused and unclearly articulated in literature. Strategic level front-end activities form a basis for the success of operative level operations and necessitate top management involvement. Effective integration of strategic level and operative level frontend activities both in top-down and bottom-up processing is a cornerstone for creating an efficient innovation process. The objective of this article is to empirically examine how the integration of strategic and operative level front-end activities is perceived by top managers in the product innovation context. The research design is a multiple case study. The data has been collected from 20 large and medium-sized innovation-intensive Finnish companies with semi-structured interviews. The empirical data analysis focuses on clarifying the integration mechanisms and perceived integration challenges of strategic and operative level front-end activities. The findings indicate that companies exploit different strategy-making processes, and that each strategy-making mode is prone to particular challenges. The relationship between the integration challenges and employed strategy-making modes is partly moderated by the company size. The results also indicate that the efficiency of integration of strategic and operative level front-end activities is dependent on the level of concreteness of the defined business strategies, the amount of business-minded decision making, and the balance between control and creativity. Based on the empirical findings, this paper draws implications for effective front-end management and ends up with discussing contextual factors affecting effective integration, and creating propositions for effective front-end management.

That is not how we brought you up: how is the strategy of a project formed?

Purpose – The requirements of various participants of a project may conflict with the strategy of the projects parent organization and, consequently, the project may form its individual strategy independently, to better align with the factors in its environment. The purpose of this paper is to describe the formation of the strategy of a project as a response to the projects environment, providing insight into a projects strategy formation, where the project does not merely reflect the strategy of the parent but where the parent is only one influential actor (of many) in the projects environment.Design/methodology/approach – To increase understanding of the relationship between the projects environment, the strategy of the project‐based firm and the strategy formation of a project, the authors analyze a project of a metallurgy firm in an empirical case study. The authors use project literature and corporate venturing literature, look for the dimensions of project strategy and the factors in the projec...

Is there only one way of project management theorizing, or are there multiple sector-specific project management domains?

Purpose Many literature reviews on project management (PM) research are limited to studies published only in PM journals but some reviews do expand their analysis on PM research published also in journals belonging to the management studies field. However, the authors found no previous literature reviews comparing the PM content in different sectors outside the management studies field. Therefore, the analysis and findings of PM content derived from the sector-specific engineering and technology-focused journals are new. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyze PM content in nine different sectors, where each sector and its inherent research is connected to specific engineering, technological, or industry-related disciplines. The authors conduct an evidence-informed literature review on PM knowledge in the distinct literatures of these nine sectors. The period of analysis is 24 years from 1986-2009. The authors discuss potential consequences of the findings’ sector-specificity for future PM domain development. Findings The perspective on different origins of PM leads to a meta-level PM concept covering several different PM domains, each with its own sector specific and separated development path. Research limitations/implications The literature analysis purposefully excluded PM journals and management studies, and the authors focused only on sector-specific engineering and technology-focused journals that represent knowledge and wisdom of different PM contents in nine sectors. Practical implications The findings have significant potential to contribute to scholarly discussion on the development of a universal PM theory. For applicability across sectors, the authors suggest a modular PM theory with different sector-specific modules for knowledge, concepts, and underlying assumptions. Originality/value Currently, this discussion has been mainly focused on theorizing concepts and approaches in management studies only. This study expands the understanding to engineering and technology-focused journals across nine industry sectors/domains.