International Journal of Project Management最新文献

There is an increasing discussion on the role of projects and temporary organising in the face of global and local crises. Categorically, the temporary, non-linear and complex nature of crisis from its onset has several theoretical and methodological parallels in the study of projects. To provide an outsider perspective in the process of cultivating this research stream within Project Studies, we interviewed Christine Pearson, Professor of Global Leadership at Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Pearson is globally known for her work on organisational crisis and is the author of the seminal work “Reframing Crisis Management.” In this interview, Pearson unpacks the evolution of conceptual frameworks in crisis research and elaborates on the role of projects in the face of crisis, specifically emphasising the non-linear conceptualisation of crisis. She highlights the role of project leadership in the context of crisis and finishes with potential future directions for contribution of the discipline of Project Studies to crisis literature, as she calls this research stream a “fertile territory.” These insights can be specifically used by project scholars in view of crisis associated with man-made hazards, natural hazards, or accidents, as well as broader management scholars to use theories developed in study of crisis by project scholars.

Recent literature emphasizes agility's importance for a project portfolio's success in a dynamic environment. Conceptually, dynamic capabilities should be relevant antecedents for portfolio agility since they help organizations cope with dynamic environments. Dynamic capabilities disaggregate into three dimensions: sensing market and technology opportunities, seizing opportunities through prioritizing and exploiting them, and continuously reconfiguring assets and structures. Although previous literature emphasizes the importance of dynamic capabilities for project portfolio management (PPM), former research rarely analyzed dynamic capabilities in PPM empirically. Further, dynamic capabilities can be conceptualized differently, and it remains unclear how different conceptualizations coexist and what effects they have on the results of a study. This paper quantitatively investigates the relationship between dynamic capabilities’ dimensions (sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring) and project portfolio agility and success using a multi-informant, cross-industry sample of 135 project portfolios. The findings show that dynamic capabilities positively relate to portfolio agility and that portfolio agility mediates the relationship between dynamic capabilities and portfolio success. Surprisingly, sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring do not have entirely complementary effects. Instead, at least two of the three dimensions must be strongly present to enhance portfolio agility positively. The study underscores the importance of dynamic capabilities for portfolio agility. It contributes to the literature on portfolio agility in PPM and a more differentiated view of dynamic capabilities' dimensions and their consequences.

Project managers activate their agentic powers in the (re)production of project governance structure and the institutional context of projects. By examining three ongoing Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects within the Dutch policy path, we provide evidence that managers aim to improve their working conditions when enacting three project governing practices: upscaling issues, adapting, and reproducing. Additionally, we show that public project managers mobilized as a group of interest within the public parent organization are able to influence the policy context and improve their control position for future PPP agreements. We identify "emerging associativity" and "ideological legitimization" as core processes of managerial agency, deployed in project practice and influencing institutional contexts.

Project performance measurement aims to identify deviations from intended goals and reduce ‘the gap’ between actual and expected performance. However, despite extensive measurement and control efforts, the gap is hard to close and, intriguingly, not necessarily related to the project's perceived performance, which is what will ultimately influence a stakeholder's satisfaction. Based on service quality research, this study explores the differences between perception and expectations of performance. Our mixed method study involving eighteen interviews and 85 survey responses in an IT-enabled change context shows that expectations and perceptions are fundamentally different concepts. As they are different, managing the gap between expectations and perceptions may be a nugatory task. The paper expands the literature on project performance measurement by questioning its foundations and offering a first step towards developing a more dynamic and subjective understanding of project performance that is consistent with a project's evolving nature.

Despite its declared importance for governing complexity in projects, few empirical studies have studied how different types of supply chain integration (SCI) activities (e.g., coordinative and collaborative integration) interplay and affect performance. To address this gap, the purpose of this paper is to study how complexity can be governed through coordinative and collaborative SCI, and how their interplay affects performance in project-based buyer-supplier relationships. We apply structural equation modeling, using dyadic empirical data from 102 infrastructure projects. The overall results verify our developed model and illuminate how the interplay between contractual and relational governance, in terms of coordinative and collaborative SCI, mediates the effect of technical and organizational complexity on project performance. This study contributes to theory and practice by distinguishing between contractual governance based on formal coordinative SCI and relational governance based on emerged collaborative SCI, as well as showing how their interplay affects performance in project-based supply chains.

The last decades of research in project studies show us that humans, rather than technologies, software or mathematical models, shape project success. This is simultaneously fascinating and problematic since, while technologies, software or mathematical models are relatively predictable and straightforward, humans are far more complex, with extremely intricate links between motivations and emotions. This consideration is particularly true in complex projects where a plethora of diverse stakeholders have very different emotions and motivations toward the same project. To address this challenge, this essay proposes using design thinking principles, tools, and techniques to "humanise" complex projects. By bringing together stakeholders, including non-market stakeholders such as local communities, with diverse goals and interests and aligning them with a common purpose, design thinking can help to shape, plan, and deliver successful complex projects. While design thinking is commonly discussed in innovation studies, this essay aims to encourage its investigation and discussion in project studies.

This study aims to provide an explanation for the lack of implementation of innovation generated through publicly funded research. While previous scholars have categorized organizational cycles as either virtuous or vicious, cycles of inter-institutional projects can have simultaneous benefits for some organizations while causing drawbacks for others. Such a cycle was observed across inter-institutional projects in port logistics, where the primary objective was to implement innovation. During the investigation of ten projects, it became apparent that an excessive emphasis on certain practices at the expense of others, unintentionally resulted in delays in innovation implementation while collaborations continued to thrive. These practices led to a self-perpetuating cycle of inter-institutional projects that rarely resulted in implemented innovations. In contrast to the solutions proposed in existing literature to address organizational cycles, this study suggests that temporary hybridizing competing logics may be the root cause of cycles of inter-institutional projects.

Megaprojects are social tools that are designed by humans to produce large-scale, capital-intensive technology. Intriguingly, despite major advances in megaproject management practice, policy, and tools in the last decades, delays, budget blowouts, and scope creep remain empirical regularities. In this essay, to crack the megaproject puzzle, I advocate drawing on new stakeholder theory - a nascent stakeholder perspective in strategy research that invites us to look at the legal and economic criteria that enable and constrain strategic choice. Preliminary insights from ongoing work deploying this cognitive lens suggest that managers and sponsors of the legal entity in charge of a new megaproject are in a bind. To get a capital investment sanctioned, they must follow a normative tradition, where ‘on time and budget’ is gold standard and ‘value for money’ is defined by an additive logic that establishes user willingness to pay for the project outcomes must outweigh the production costs. But, ex-post, for the project to progress, managers and sponsors must distribute the value to be jointly produced with essential stakeholders in ways that go above the threshold necessary to conform to the law and regulations. These insights suggest that empirical regularities are not isomorphic with bad management and/or dishonesty, but rather an outcome of the ‘rules of the game’. I call on future research to explore the incentives that lie behind strategic choices to make non-credible commitments before a capital investment is sanctioned, and post hoc, to renegotiate the value distribution towards the production of a socially valuable outcome.

To fight climate change and to cope with the energy crisis, a green and sustainable transformation of the existing urban space is needed. Key for the increase of a city districts’ energy efficiency is the successful management of urban innovation projects. Urban innovation projects target heterogeneous innovation fields like heat supply, thermal insulation, mobility, and smart city approaches. They cover various technological and social innovations, affect almost all areas of urban life and economy, and, hence, need to involve heterogonous stakeholders. As such, urban innovation projects are more complex than many other projects, which results in difficulties of the implementation of the innovations alternatives in the local urban environment. This study focuses on the role of stakeholder involvement breadth and depth to foster the likelihood of implementation of new solutions in urban innovation projects. We ask how information processing capabilities affect the efficacy of stakeholder involvement. The empirical analysis provides evidence based on text mining of planning documents and survey data from 106 German urban innovation projects. The results reveal the benefits and challenges of stakeholder involvement and show how digital tools may help to overcome information processing obstacles.