International Journal of Project Management最新文献

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.

A lean approach in projects offers the opportunity to better connect people, processes, workflows, and delivery within projects. This is particularly important in contemporary project environments which is characterized by high levels of uncertainty, complexity, and pace of change. While knowledge from previous learning may exist, though it is often inaccessible or untapped and different levels of understanding about delivery approaches can prevail. We investigate how a lean approach in projects facilitates and can improve learning in project environments. Through thematic analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews, we found that applying a lean approach considers individual, project and organisational levels of knowledge and understanding, and triggers action underpinned by improved socio-behavourial interactions, leadership, and support. A lean approach enhances the quality of learning, better integrating timely actions and reducing the likelihood of lessons lost, to achieve effective project management.

This research explores temporary organizing in crisis. Recognizing crises in temporary organizations as involving the existential loss of meaning for plans and prospects, we present a qualitative study of the complex negotiation between integration and fragmentation of a temporary organization experiencing crisis. Embracing communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) theorizing, we analyse the real-time, digital communication during the crisis as episodes of temporary organizing. Our analysis reveals three interdependent communicative practices for coordinating—framing, co-creating, and connecting—that constitute “islands of certainty” or ephemeral instances of integration providing orientation for otherwise fragmented coordinating. These findings contribute to understanding coordinating as a sophisticated communicative practice of meaning negotiation about the possible future of a temporary organization in crisis. Specifically, this study reveals increased integration communication when the integrity of a project's future is contested, yet high degrees of communicative fragmentation when there is a shared prospection of the project's future.

This study focuses on the co-creation of value in the front end of urban development projects (UDPs) established by coalitions of public and private actors to develop specific urban premises or areas. Creating value in UDPs calls for collaboration between municipal actors and private companies, specifically in the front end phase, during which major design decisions are made. This qualitative case study builds on data collected through 27 semi-structured interviews in a middle-sized city in Finland. Our data analysis resulted in the categorisation of four value co-creation processes involving municipal actors and private companies, namely, zoning, exploring, procuring and negotiating. The study's results offer insights into how value co-creation can be facilitated in UDPs. This study contributes to recent value-creation literature by providing a novel understanding of each value co-creation process, its characteristics and its corresponding co-created values.

The evolution of the international business environment during the past twenty years due to globalization and the recent pandemic determined an increase in international projects requiring new organizational and individual capabilities to ensure project success. Cross-cultural competencies have been analyzed within the cross-cultural management field and organizational behavioral studies, with limited research available in the international project management field.

Through a comprehensive literature review, the current research outlines the gap within the project management domain concerning the need triggered by the pandemic to acquire cross-cultural and digital abilities among project professionals. We disclose how the existent globalized virtual environment differs from the new one triggered by the pandemic due to the forced shift to the digital setting with a strong impact on in-person interactions, verbal and non-verbal communication.

The originality of this work resides in the development of a novel project professional ability framework, including digital and cross-cultural components that emerged during the pandemic. Secondly, we propose the application of the identified cross-cultural and digital abilities within the project process group of the life cycle based on their scope and outputs.