International Journal of Project Management最新文献

The long-term goals and objectives that infrastructure projects aim to deliver are contextualised by complex grand challenges, which involve an entanglement of economic, social, and ecological issues. However, there have been criticisms that infrastructure projects fall short of delivering equitable value to effectively address grand challenges. These criticisms underpinned the recent calls for rethinking the purpose and definition of infrastructure projects. This essay argues that adopting a political ecology perspective can be useful to start identifying the limitations of the current understandings of external stakeholders and value in infrastructure projects, which lead to the criticised shortcomings. Political ecology considers social, ecological, and economic issues as an assemblage that manifests through power relations. Thus, for project studies, it implies a reconceptualization of external stakeholders and project value around the notions of agency, vulnerability, and empowerment. This reconceptualization provides new theoretical and practical directions for project formation, stakeholder management and project leadership in the pursuit of rethinking the purpose and definition of infrastructure projects for effectively tackling the grand challenges of our times.

The role of shared leadership in improving project success has received increasing interest, yet there is still insufficient understanding of the contextual factors that enable – or prohibit – the emergence of shared leadership within project-based organisations. Based on primary data drawn from three experiential marketing agency case studies using 34 semi-structured interviews and 33 hours of observation, this paper examines how project-based organisations can effectively facilitate the sharing of leadership. The findings show that trust is a key antecedent to shared leadership in project teams. Specifically, we propose that to enable shared leadership to emerge, individuals should establish intragroup trust - trust with co-workers within their project teams and inter-group trust – trust between members of different project teams, and between project teams and the leadership team. This research is among the first to closely examine whether factors which enable the emergence of shared leadership occur at multiple levels within project-based organisations, and through the use of qualitative approaches, offers a deeper understanding of why trust matters so much within shared leadership in these organisations. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed, and given the exploratory nature of the study, avenues for further research are proposed.

Worldwide, there are numerous reports of major infrastructure projects failing at handover to the operations phase following completion of the project development and delivery phase. While poor risk identification and prioritization has been identified as one of the causes of this failure, we know little about the specific risk factors project beneficiaries consider most important at this point of handover. With these issues in mind, we draw on a survey of key dry port project beneficiaries in Brazil to examine and prioritize the risks considered most important at handover to operations. Paying particular attention to project beneficiary heterogeneity and incongruence, we find eight key risk factors – ‘Cost’, ‘Location’, ‘Infrastructure’, ‘Accessibility’, ‘Operational’, ‘Economic’, ‘Political and social’, and ‘Environment’ that warrant emphasis. We reveal congruence among some project beneficiaries in terms of prioritization. We also find variations in handover to operations risks based on project characteristics. However, these characteristics appear to have very limited impact on prioritization. Our findings further point to risk blind spots at critical moments of project handover to operations. Overall, this paper contributes to project risk management/prioritization literature in the context of handover to operations.

Beneficiary engagement – external “nonmarket” stakeholder engagement in international development settings – can empower end-users to achieve project success. But we do not know what level of it (involvement/participation) influences short (project management success) and long-term project success (project impact). We examine the influence of beneficiary engagement levels on project success dimensions through stakeholders’ perceptions. Based on a quantitative analysis of 154 projects, we show both beneficiary involvement and beneficiary participation positively influence short and long-term project success. We find project characteristics such as beneficiary inputs do not significantly influence beneficiary engagement, but implementation context including beneficiary trust in project governance does. While some of these findings appear unexpected, they add to external stakeholder engagement literature, especially in low-and middle-income countries. We suggest a “one-size-fits-all” approach prevails in beneficiary engagement practice. Since beneficiary engagement is no longer an option, but an obligation, supervisors and managers should focus on increasing its beneficial impact.

Supportive knowledge management and good relationships are both important aspects for enhancing individual learning across projects, however little research has presented a systematic theory on the cause-effect relationships between the above themes. With support of data collected from the industry survey, this study has established and validated a conceptual model that maps individual learning outcomes on knowledge governance, learning intention and relational capital from a holistic view. The results reveal that a supportive knowledge governance system could significantly promote individual learning across projects, and this effect is mainly achieved by inspiring individuals’ learning intention. This study also demonstrates that the relational capital can enhance the relationship between knowledge governance and individual's learning intention. The outcomes advance the theory of knowledge management by presenting the conceptual model that helps answer the question: "How can knowledge governance and relational capital improve individual learning across projects?" The results can also guide participants to have superior project performance with assistance of experience and knowledge from different projects in practice.

This paper adopts a processual perspective to understand how multiple crises evolve and interact in projects. After reviewing the literature on crises in projects and finding that it typically considers crises in isolation, we endeavored to study the case of an infrastructural megaproject that involved the construction of a high-speed railway in Italy to understand how crises interact and how this conditions the effectiveness of crisis management approaches. Through an exploratory qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews and secondary data, our work sheds new light on the link between crisis interdependencies, crisis management responses, and outcomes. In particular, our work unveils the temporal unfolding and interaction between multiple, diverse crises, which can be independent of each other or be linked by sequential or pooled interdependencies. Our findings underscore that crisis management responses that target crisis-specific effects can be successful in the face of independent or sequentially interdependent crises but can lead, at best, to midground outcomes when dealing with combined effects that result from crises that display pooled interdependence. Our results contribute to the literature at the crossroad between project and crisis management and represent a first step towards developing a theory that matches the complexity of crisis phenomena in megaprojects.

Competitive pressures and the need for innovation are shaping strategic partnerships. Participants involved in these partnerships share knowledge, collaborate in project activities, and make joint decisions to achieve complex project objectives. However, achieving effective collaboration in partnerships is challenging due to miscommunication, missing skills, missing resources, and lack of trust. This study develops a conceptual model based on existing literature, to investigate the effect of partners’ knowledge bases, project complexity, and trust between partners on innovation and project success. We analyze the model using a survey of managers of European research projects and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Our results show the significant impact of changes in a project itself on its success, and the considerable impact of project complexity and trust on the ability of partners to alter the project itself. We also observe the significant impacts of similarity and complementarity of knowledge on trust between partners, and introduce the issue of whether partners jointly command the knowledge needed to complete the project, showing its importance in determining project success.

Digitalization, with its potential to enhance the openness of client–contractor knowledge collaboration (KC) at the front end of complex engineering projects, is gaining traction among project scholars and practitioners. Despite this growing interest, project actors still struggle to bring client and contractor experts into an open, digitally enabled collaborative space where they can freely access and cocreate project-related knowledge. In this context, our case study explores client–contractor KC in the front-end phase of oil and gas projects in Norway to understand why project actors struggle to achieve KC openness in the digital age. Based on our qualitative analysis, we developed a model that displays two intertwined aspects giving rise to tensions between knowledge sharing and protection. First, we show that these tensions stem from fragmented awareness of the expertise in the collaborating project organization. Second, we highlight how intrainstitutional complexity, instantiated in coexisting conflicting logics of digital and collaborative action, underlies divergent beliefs and behavior toward client–contractor KC and its digitalization. We offer novel insights into the project management literature by showcasing how organizational heterogeneity, in terms of expertise and institutions, challenges project organizations' pursuit of open, digitally enabled client–contractor KC during the front-end project phase.