Pages: 8

We understand projects as temporary organizations and agents for change (Huemann, 2022). Thus with projects, project sequences, and programs, we deliver economic, environmental, and social value to the project owner organization, stakeholders, and the society in general. Projects are not exceptions but they are a common design element in private and public organizations to enable them to fulfil their purpose. Contemporary projects come in different types and are performed in different contexts. They have a wide range of sizes, from small software development projects to digital transformation programs, international development programs to mega projects or programs to enhance infrastructure and our living in cities.

Pages: 82

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 15

Rodney and Martina explain what we understand by projects and their management. A project is a temporary organization to which resources are assigned to deliver beneficial changes. This definition captures the essential features of a project. It describes a project as a temporary organization. Other definitions call a project a temporary endeavour. It is an endeavour that lasts for a limited period of time to deliver objectives. On one level, those objectives are to deliver a beneficial outcome that provides value. On the other, it is to use resources to do work to deliver an output. If the project is to be profitable, the value must exceed the cost. Therefore, the project must be completed on time, and the output should be delivered at a cost that makes the project worthwhile. The project needs to be governed in a proper way. Governance is a strategic-level process, which provides direction. Management is an operational-level activity which guides how to do the work. Management and governance are institutional-oriented processes. Alongside are people-oriented ones, leadership, and governmentality.

Pages: 15

V.K. Narayanan explores how projects can be linked to strategy through strategic initiatives. Strategic initiatives represent a type of program that actualize strategy implementation. They represent groups of interdependent projects which contribute to the strategy of a company, require significant coordination between top and middle managers, and thus offer a bridge between strategy and program management. They usually emerge from strategy redirection and unfold over time. Being the designated architects of a firm’s strategy, senior management must fulfill six (additional) interlinked roles in strategic initiatives: alignment, choosing their leaders, sponsorship, mentoring, leverage of institutional capital, and dealing with legacy systems. The leaders of strategic initiatives face contexts (a) characterized by conflicts, (b) where their responsibility exceeds their authority, (c) with ongoing alignment, and (d) that demand extreme flexibility. Because alignment is a dynamic concept, the leaders need to continually negotiate the boundaries of their tasks, and manage the expectations of senior management and other power brokers in the organization. Resource bricolage, negotiation with internal markets, and continual aligning are central to their success. Human resource functions in the organization have a central role to play in the development of leaders of strategic initiatives.

Pages: 16

Despite decades of research on project-based work, the nature of and our ability to comprehensively and clearly define what we mean by “project success” remains a surprisingly elusive challenge. Contradictions and complications abound in identifying the standards for a successful project, often with negative consequences for project organizations that misidentify critical elements in these new initiatives. As our knowledge of project theory deepens and projects in ever-wider arenas of technical and commercial settings are developed, our understanding of what constitutes a successful project has undergone a similar evolutionary development. Jeff Pinto and Lavignon Ika address the changing nature of project success, unraveling the surprising complexity that underlies a comprehensive understanding of success, and as well, pointing to a number of important paradoxes and challenges in success. Finally, we offer several recommendations for practicing project managers as they manage for success.

Pages: 16

Rodney and Martina describe the nature of the complexity of projects. We describe the dimensions of complexity. We consider the practitioner view with six dimensions and the academic view with two dimensions. With the academic view, we meet for the first time the concept that conventional project management cannot manage complex projects. We then consider the nature of uncertainty and how it leads to bounded rationality and bounded manageability. It also leads to the difference between puzzles and mysteries. Complex projects are mysteries which require innovation. Conventional project management is not good at innovation. We then consider what has been written over the years about planning under uncertainty. We end with some views on megaprojects.

Pages: 17

Martina Huemann introduces auditing as a method to govern projects and programs and organize learning. We offer a systematic way of auditing and describe the audit process, methods, roles, and values to ensure audits and reviews provide meaningful learning opportunities to project and program teams and to the project-oriented organization. We conceptualize the audit as a communication system, which stresses the need for clear roles, and communication policies. Finally, this chapter discusses the responsibility of the PMO and provides tips for successfully performing project management audits.

Pages: 164

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 12

Ossi Pesämaa introduces principles, issues, and concepts for measuring project performance. This chapter is prepared for an applied audience searching for inspiration to observe performance qualitatively and quantitatively. While the area of measuring performance covers a broad range of principles, issues, and concepts, this chapter can be seen as an overarching umbrella that inspires readers to dig deeper and approach project performance empirically. This chapter offers hands-on qualitative definitions and diagnostics of empirical observations.

Pages: 17

Focusing on requirements, scope and configuration, Hemanta Doloi highlights the elements of the three interrelated dimensions. Keeping stakeholders and customers at the core of decision-making in front-end requirement analysis, the processes of managing and controlling projects with a clear alignment of needs and requirements in the product or services in relation to the operating environment are established. The underlying processes are analysed and the extension of knowledge in integrated management is highlighted. It is suggested that the project scope must be defined to include only essential activities to provide the deliverables and meet requirements. However, an important issue in scope planning is the alignment of the requirement and configuration with the activities that result in a product maximisation of the business goals. Lack of effective scope planning can lead to different issues such as dissatisfied customers which potentially results in sub-standard operational performance. The project management team must adopt a comprehensive approach to managing requirements and configurations within the processes of scope management meeting or exceeding the strategic and business objectives and ensuring long-term success.

Pages: 13

Rodney and Martina describe the development of the project organization. The project organization defines the roles, responsibilities, relationships, and rights of internal project stakeholders. People need to know what is expected of them, and what are the lines of authority. We define relationships, which include communication. People need to know to whom they send information and from whom they receive it. People also need to know where they stand and from whom they will receive help and support. We introduce social representation as a social construct for defining order to enable people to orientate themselves to their work environment and to enable communication. We introduce identity, which is about people feeling they belong to the project, and know their roles, responsibilities, relationships, and rights. We introduce responsibility matrices. Traditionally, people have suggested five types of project organization, which we describe. We finish by considering three contemporary design elements.

Pages: 12

Graham Winch explores the role of the project owner organization. The project owner is at the heart of the project process; without an owner identifying the need for a new asset, developing a robust value proposition for it, and then ensuring that the asset resulting from the project is moved into beneficial use for customers, the investment cycle that we know as a project does not work. The owner needs to define clearly the project mission and supporting value proposition and raise the required finance. The owner then designs the arrangements for managing the governance interface with the delivery project and the commercial interface with suppliers. Finally, the owner needs to take the asset delivered by the project and achieve its beneficial use, thereby generating the funding to repay the finance raised.

Pages: 14

A project starts with the development of a business case, which can be modified throughout the execution and implementation of the project. The project ends with the often-difficult task of implementing the project, usually involving the utilization of the project’s output by the end-users, to achieve the desired benefits described in the business case. Jack Merideth and Ofer Zwikael discuss the need for a senior manager who will have the overall accountability for a project, oversee project execution by the project manager, and be responsible for achieving the benefits desired from the project by the funding organization, a person we refer to as the project “owner.” They describe how the project and its environment play out as the project is executed and implemented to achieve those benefits. The success of the project can be determined by three measures: the success of achieving the project plan, the success of attaining the desired benefits, and the satisfaction of the project’s funder with the overall results.

Pages: 10

Recent research often considers projects as ways to create value for organizations, instead of devices for reaching momentary goals. The subjective, multidimensional, and evolving nature of value requires consideration of value creation in complex organizational constellations and in uncertain, evolving contexts. Such conditions give rise to project actors’ errors in planning and assessing value, most often the overestimation of benefits and underestimation of costs. Miia Martinsuo introduces three main processes of managing value in projects: making the value proposition, planning and managing value streams, and delivering value outcomes. Also, she discusses the manifestations of errors in value-related planning, when the project progresses on its lifecycle. As value concerns both material and immaterial benefits and sacrifices, managing value is equally much a task of managing perceptions and impressions as managing very practical products. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for project managers who aspire to enhance their capabilities for managing value in projects.

Pages: 12

The prevailing model for construction delivery has been based on a highly competitive tendering approach based on cost/time bids with the client (and facility operations team) taking a hands-off orientation towards direct project delivery involvement. This traditional approach is increasingly challenged by a radically different integrated and collaborative concept in which the project design (contractor and often major services subcontractors) delivery team, the facility operations team, and the project owner’s representative form a united team to design and deliver the project. This integrated project delivery (IPD) form is governed by a multi-party Alliancing contractual contract, binding participating teams into a single functioning entity that is contractually assured to meet a mutually agreed fixed cost/time delivery plan. The contract uses the agreed cost/time target to incentivise participants through a gain-pain sharing mechanism based on the final project cost/time and agreed on key result performance measures. IPD performance is governed by the contract form adopted, effective collaborative, and integrative inter-personal participant behaviours, and a systemic focus on innovation and reflexivity action in response to unanticipated events affecting ‘the delivery plan’. Superior performance requires participants to develop and use a specific set of knowledge, skills, attributes, and experience to support effective participant team integration and collaboration. Derek Walker and Beverley Lloyd-Walker explain how this novel project delivery form achieves this challenge.

Pages: 16

In today’s society, project work gains traction across many industries. As projects are characterised by novelty and uncertainty, emerging digital technologies promise solutions that improve performance and help deliver full benefits. Amidst this digitisation, digital technologies such as data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) streamline the large amount of data generated. However, this critical information is only partially leveraged during and after projects to date. Project data are generated, collected, and analysed across all stages of project management and delivery. Eleni Papadonikolaki and Carlos Galera-Zarco conceptualise the relation between projects, information, and data, and discuss key application areas of data analytics in projects, for instance in scheduling and costing. Next, they present the state-of-the-art applications, means, and tools of data analytics in key areas of project management. Finally, they set out challenges and future opportunities around project data analytics especially with regard to leadership, teamwork, and talent management.

Pages: 10

Digital infrastructures are increasingly used in project delivery. They are made up of complex and evolving sets of interconnected software packages and applications. Managing digital infrastructures is challenging as they are largely invisible to their users while their functioning is uninterrupted, and as they involve various technical and social boundaries beyond the scope of projects. Especially, the growing global production of generic software implies that although digital infrastructures facilitate complex project work, they also shape and standardize certain work practices and power relations that appear novel to project practitioners. Jennifer Whyte and Ali Eshraghi discuss some practical lessons and considerations for future project managers.

Pages: 17

Our ability to manage risk is directly proportional to our chances of successfully delivering our project. David Hillson explains why, starting from first principles. Risk is “uncertainty that matters” and we need to understand and manage any uncertainty that can affect our objectives. This includes future events, variability, ambiguity, and emergence. We can address future risk events using a simple and intuitive process based on answering eight basic questions. Variability risk can be modelled, ambiguities can be clarified, and we can become resilient to emergent risks. But processes and models don’t manage risk; people manage risk. We need emotional intelligence if we are to understand the effect of underlying risk attitudes for ourselves and others and manage them intentionally. By recognising the full range of risks faced by our project and addressing them proactively and intentionally, we can give our projects the best chances of success every time.

Pages: 9

Projects are conducted in an environment increasingly characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and are due to their nature susceptible to unexpected events. These unexpected events can create a project crisis if their impact is severe and a threat to the achievement of high-priority project objectives. A successful response to a project crisis requires a responsive and functioning structure, good interpersonal relationships and competent people. However, there is a tendency that the measures necessary to successfully manage a crisis tend to be absent when they are required the most. Christine Unterhizenberger suggests that enhanced resilience will enable the project to recover better from crisis situations by facilitating desirable structures and behaviours prior to the occurrence of a crisis. She also raises awareness for potential opportunistic aspects in a crisis.

Pages: 16

Sustainability is one of the most important challenges of our time. How can prosperity be developed without compromising the life of future generations? As companies are integrating sustainability in their products, services and business processes, the concept of sustainability has more recently also been linked to project management. From the emerging sustainability school of project management, two types of relationship between sustainability and project management appeared: the sustainability of the deliverable that the project realises, and the sustainability of the process of delivering and managing the project. Gilbert Silvius, Ron Schipper and Martina Huemann identify the areas of impact of sustainability on project management. They also cover examples and instruments for the integration of sustainability into project management and conclude that sustainable project management needs a scope, paradigm and mind shift in managing projects.

Pages: 75

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 10

Martina and Rodney describe the processes of projects. There are three types of processes, which are the investment process, the project delivery process and the project management process to manage the project. The investment process delivers the outcome of the project or program and often encompasses a sequence of projects. It takes a more long-term perspective and that is what delivers value. The project delivery processes create the output. How these processes are designed depends on the project approaches taken. They can be predictive, adaptive or combined elements from both approaches, which are then called hybrid. The project management processes are processes such as project starting, project coordinating, project controlling, and project closing down. It is the management process of the project and ensures that the project delivers.

Pages: 11

Early project phases are crucial for the chance of project success, yet uncertainties stemming from the dynamic context of projects are difficult to manage in a pure waterfall approach. Marian Bosch-Rekveldt, Hans Bakker and Marcel Hertogh explore how the feasibility and planning phases could benefit from a more flexible approach, specifically focusing on interaction, collaboration and adopting a change mindset. The real-life example of the complex Zuidasdok project illustrates that uncertainties are part of the project manager’s job and these uncertainties have to be dealt with rather than reduced. This implies additional requirements for individual and team competencies. In addition to affinity with the content and more flexible project management tools, collaborative skills are becoming more and more crucial as ‘People are Key’. These skills create a pole position for the later stages of the project and allow us to act upon any changes in the context.

Pages: 14

Today’s projects need to solve wicked problems. The solution is often unclear to the project owner which makes it hard to explain to the project manager what the project outcome should be, a reason why agile project approaches have become more and more applied in practice. Ruth Lechler, Martina Huemann, and Patrick Lehner introduce Design Thinking as an agile project approach to develop products and services in co-creation with end users. The approach best fits projects when the solution or even the problem is not well known yet and innovation desired. This chapter discusses Design Thinking as a process, toolbox, and mindset and encourages its application in projects. Benefits and challenges of Design Thinking are provided.

Pages: 26

Today, majority of the projects are managed with a combination of agile and traditional approaches and methods, identified as “hybrid”. However, many questions about what defines a hybrid approach, when it can be applied, which different types of hybrid can be identified, and what the implications of hybrid are, are still unanswered. Dagmar Silvius-Zuchi and Gilbert Silvius discuss the characteristics of the predictive, adaptive, and hybrid approaches to projects, and develop a set of criteria to assess the suitability of an approach for a given project within an organizational context. In the final sections, they identify different types of hybrid approaches and discuss the implications for selected project management methods and the project organization. They aim to support project managers and project owners in designing an effective approach and organization for their projects.

Pages: 11

Conventional project management is a deductive construct that is good at solving the puzzles we meet under resolvable uncertainty. It assumes we are managing known-knowns, and emphasizes control. It assumes project management processes are monitorable, predictable, and controllable. Complex projects require a different approach. We need an inductive or abductive approach that creates narratives. We need to envisage different scenarios, start by planning for them all, and then eliminate scenarios as more information becomes available. Rodney and Martina describe scenario planning and future planning as ways of taking a more experimental, descriptive, and innovative approach to managing projects.

Pages: 135

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 13

Projects vary considerably in scale, complexity and context and so do the roles, responsibilities, and profiles of those who manage them. The primary role of the project manager is to meet goals and deliver value on behalf of the project owner and there are things that need to be done on all projects to achieve this. What project managers actually do and the way that they do must be tailored to the needs of each project and will reflect the style and experience of the project manager. Lynn Crawford identifies what project managers do, how they become project managers and develop their competence, the personal characteristics they bring to the role and how this interacts with the many different contexts within which they operate.

Pages: 12

Lynn Crawford describes the role of the project sponsor. Project sponsors provide a critical link between the project owner or owning organization and the projects that are undertaken to deliver desired value and benefits. Effective project sponsorship and top management support have consistently been shown to be key to successful project delivery. Yet the sponsor role is most often a part-time role, with a limited number of people with sufficient authority and seniority available to meet the governance requirement of taking accountability for the project. Those who are asked to take on the role are usually over-committed and time-poor. The role is not well understood, there is often little guidance provided and little appetite or time for training and development. This chapter aims to provide greater clarity on the nature of the sponsor role, the governance and support responsibilities, what they do, what it takes to develop the skills to be effective and tailor actions and behaviours to suit the needs of each project.

Pages: 11

Projects are performed by people. Nevertheless, the literature is relatively silent when it comes to people in projects, their needs and capabilities, and the dynamics of team development. Reinhard Wagner reveals why projects are a suitable organizational form for people to fulfil their basic needs, namely autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Because without the intrinsic motivation of those involved, not much can be achieved in projects. So, even when selecting team members for a project, attention should be paid to their motivation and fitness. Team development begins early in the project, often even before the first substantive work has been prepared. Since the composition of teams often changes over the course of the project, team development is an ongoing task. Leadership plays an essential role in establishing a viable team. Currently, leadership in numerous projects is changing from something that one person performs to a self-organized, balanced effort within the team.

Pages: 20

Pernille Eskerod and Martina Huemann offer a comprehensive understanding of stakeholder engagement, which is defined as the purposeful stakeholder-related practices to support value creation by the project. In contemporary projects, stakeholder engagement is rather considered a must to provide fertile grounds for co-creating better futures. Different perspectives on stakeholder engagement are taken. These include project stakeholder engagement as mindset, process, toolbox, and roles. The basis for stakeholder engagement is a mindset that supports stakeholder orientation. Principles of such a mindset include inclusiveness, value transparency, perceived fairness, future orientation, co-creation, and multiple engagement forms. Stakeholder engagement processes a cyclic and comprise (1) identifying and empathizing with project stakeholders, (2) building a relationship, interacting and co-creating with project stakeholders, and (3) disengaging project stakeholders. Additionally, the authors offer a toolbox to support stakeholder engagements and summarize the roles on projects for stakeholder engagement.

Pages: 12

Natalya Sergeeva, Graham Winch, and Eunice Maytorena-Sanchez present a new model, called the Project Leadership Model, which focuses on what leaders how leaders make sense of their project, and thereby create narratives to build knowledge and understanding of the project. The model encompasses sensemaking, relating, projecting, creating, and judging. The origins of the model can be traced back to the concept of incomplete leadership. The authors provide examples of the model in practice. They further discuss the nature, role, and types of project narratives and counter-narratives, and investigate the process of narrating as fundamental to leading projects. The practical implications of project narratives and narrating are outlined.

Pages: 12

Ralf Müller addresses balanced leadership in projects. More specifically, leadership approaches, their particularities in a project context, and the need to balance different leadership approaches in situational contingency over time. He starts with a brief overview of leadership, definition, positioning against management, and the differences between leadership styles and approaches. Sections about horizontal, shared, distributed, and balanced leadership follow. Finally, the coordination needed for shifting leadership approaches over time is explained through the concept of the socio-cognitive space. Practical examples support the discussions of related models and processes. In addition to understanding the differences and particularities of the approaches, the reader will benefit from the chapter’s guidance in choosing a ‘best fit’ leadership approach in different project situations.

Pages: 8

Martina Huemann and Ruth Lechler examine what motivates young project professionals from Generation Y to work on projects. Generation Y has unique preferences when it comes to work, highly valuing flexibility, growth opportunities, and engaging in meaningful tasks. They argue that projects provide an appealing work environment that aligns with the career aspirations of these professionals. Drawing upon self-determination theory, they share their research findings and introduce the Model of Young Project Professionals’ Motivation. Within this model, four sets of motivators are identified: learning and development, creating and delivering, relating and connecting, and working autonomously. Closing the chapter, we provide practical recommendations for organizations to attract and retain young project professionals, focusing on creating an environment that supports these motivators.

Pages: 11

The individuals working together on a project differ in personality, gender, age, management status, work experience, seniority, cultural background, etc. In any social system such as a project, diversity is inherent and cannot be prevented. Anna Khodijah describes how diversity, in particular cultural diversity, influences the project and how the project manager (and project team) should deal with the effect of diversity to reach high performance. Several practices to manage diversity in the project are proposed.

Pages: 16

Behavioral science has witnessed an explosion in the number of biases identified by behavioral scientists, to more than 200 at present. Bent Flyvbjerg identifies the most important behavioral biases for project management, including political and cognitive bias. Specifically, the chapter focuses on strategic misrepresentation, optimism bias, uniqueness bias, the planning fallacy, overconfidence bias, and the base-rate fallacy. Each bias is defined and its impacts on project management are explained, with examples. Base-rate neglect is identified as a primary reason that projects underperform. This is supported by the presentation of the most comprehensive set of base rates that exists in project management scholarship, from 2,062 projects. Finally, reference class forecasting, premortems, and decision hygiene are recommended as cures to bias.

Pages: 15

In an increasingly uncertain and contested world, ethics plays a crucial role in enabling professionals to conduct their affairs, make decisions and interact with others. Darren Dalcher provides managers with the vocabulary, practical tools and frameworks needed to address ethical and moral challenges. He identifies the importance of ethics, before providing a snapshot of ethical challenges and attitudes and presenting some of the key pressures on professionals. He introduces ethics as a clash of value systems leading to ethical dilemmas and offers frameworks and tools for considering and utilising ethics at the personal, collective and professional levels. The concept of responsibility is introduced as a lens for developing professional practice, before highlighting a multiplicity of types of responsibility and presenting a professional code of ethics that can be applied in organisations seeking to develop moral and ethical capability. The approach thus positions ethics as a critical ingredient in avoiding moral hazards and securing enduring success and sustainability.

Pages: 114

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 14

Is this piece of work a project or a program? This question has been asked for many years and in many contexts with varying answers. The definition is important, but some pieces of work benefit from being called a program, and some do not. Harvey Maylor and Ruth Murray-Webster describe an alternative pragmatism. Indeed there are programmatic aspects to most managerial and leadership tasks, and considerable overlap with technical project management, change management and strategy. They consider ‘managing programs’ to be an expression of this diversity of influences. They frame the challenge of managing programs in systems terms, with managers as designers of systems of work. The challenge is the creation of ‘holism’ in the delivery of the purpose of the program. It must meet the organisational requirement: providing a layer of coordination to achieve benefits that could not be achieved, where individual aspects of that program are managed separately.

Pages: 14

Companies use projects as temporary organizations to develop innovative solutions and transform themselves. Concurrently running many interdependent projects requires the dedicated management of project portfolios. Project portfolio management (PPM) means selecting the most beneficial projects and coordinating their successful realization. Hans Georg Gemünden and Alexander Kock describe PPM’s main objectives, highlighting its essential role for organizations as the central link between strategy and projects. They then illustrate the major challenges associated with PPM, which are rooted in projects’ uncertainty and interdependency, and stakeholders’ diverging interests and biases. Based on a review of empirical work, they then discuss how companies can address these challenges by providing strategic and operational transparency. After reviewing the main portfolio practices, they finally focus on empirically derived best practices of how organizations can enhance innovation and deal with risk in their PPM.

Pages: 12

Hans Georg Gemünden and Alexander Kock address the issue of managing sequences of projects that build on each other, and create, develop, or terminate paths of innovation development and innovation exploitation or paths of organizational transformation. They first describe the nature of project sequences and explain why it is useful to manage project sequences. We then present the goals of project sequence management. After illustrating the main challenges of project sequence management, they derive, based on empirical work and theoretical foundations, five principles for good project sequence management.

Pages: 16

In a world of limited resources, the ability to achieve one’s desired outcomes by selecting and managing the most appropriate projects is an increasingly fundamental skill. An ability to forecast and prioritize successful options from a bucket of candidate projects has become a source of sustainable competitive advantage for businesses and firms. Machine learning allows companies to exploit knowledge gained from past projects and to use this knowledge to make better decisions about new projects. However, some major challenges persist, such as the difficulty of creating a consistent and sufficiently large dataset and the computational burden of the algorithms. Costanza Mariani and Mauro Mancini provide an overview of the methods currently used to select projects, thus highlighting how supervised and unsupervised machine learning can be applied to different phases of project portfolio selection to forecast the outcomes of projects, classifying and clustering upcoming projects in a predictive way.

Pages: 10

Shankar Sankaran explains the Organizational Project Management (OPM) model, which can help organizations integrate all project management-related activities in an organizational hierarchy or network to ensure that projects create value for stakeholders. The model has seven layers and 22 elements derived from the literature. It includes some novel concepts that have not been used in previous conceptions of OPM, namely, organizational philosophy, projectification, and governmentality, which have become important in managing projects. The OPM model has practical value to practitioners and organizations delivering projects as an assessment tool to evaluate their OPM capability. The model has been validated through theory and its application in organizations.

Pages: 15

Martina describes the model of the project-oriented organization and its specific features expressed in its strategy, structure, and culture. The model offers a theoretical perspective applicable to any organization that performs projects. The project-oriented organization is based on organizational fit theory combined with a business process perception, which allows one to assess how well organizations are equipped to perform their projects. The organizational design of a project-oriented organization includes permanent and temporary structures, which follow different management logics causing tensions and contradictions. This chapter then focuses on Human Resource Management in project-oriented organizations and provides an overview of challenges and potentials.

Pages: 15

Ralf Müller addresses the governance of projects from an intra-organizational and inter-organizational perspective. Governance – the framework for managers to execute their management tasks – needs to be set up in contextual contingency and synchronized between the organization’s project, program, portfolio, corporate, and inter-organizational layers to accomplish its benefits. The present chapter starts by looking at project governance for a single project in a company and then widens the perspective on the governance of programs and portfolios and its links to corporate governance, followed by a discussion on the governance of inter-organizational networks for project delivery. Throughout the text, models are provided to visualize and explain the particular governance functions at each layer. Through that, this chapter provides insights and implementation hints for the different governance tasks at different layers in corporate hierarchies, or nodes in corporate networks, and across inter-organizational networks.

Pages: 14

Monique Aubry offers a project management office (PMO) toolbox for those who are designing a new PMO or wish to update or modify existing PMO. The toolbox approach makes it possible to design a PMO specific to an organizational context. This chapter is the result of a multiyear research program dedicated to the study of PMOs. The toolbox contains four basic elements from which to build a PMO: organizational context, characteristics of projects, PMO structural characteristics, and PMO activities. The chapter also offers five fundamentals on PMOs which inform PMO design with the use of the toolbox: the toolbox approach, thinking globally, working with frequent changes, understanding and managing chaos versus order, and building performance. Together, PMO toolbox and fundamentals form a reference framework which can be transferred to the professional world.

Pages: 34

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 10

Yvonne Schoper and Helgi Thor Ingason describe the projectification of society. Projectification is defined as the economic trend of an increasing diffusion of projects as a form of business organisation. This development contains many positive but also some negative changes. Organisations, economies, and societies become more flexible and innovative, and their capability to solve complex problems and transformations is increased by a sufficiently large amount of capable project managers in an organisation or society, they can be able to better deal with changing environments. On the other hand, the projectification trend means that the role of the workplace as a social institution is changing, and that traditional roles of employers and employees need to be redefined when more people work self-employed. This may lead to the loss of labour law rights and increasing insecurity in the work market. Its impact on societies is still to be researched.

Pages: 17

Project managers are in a time of enormous potential as smart cities emerge around the world. Some cities have become significant leaders in this area: Amsterdam, Barcelona, and various cities in North America, Australia, and Asia are included in this important group. Their progress has created a legacy of experience and insight that can guide younger cities as they evolve toward their own versions of smartness. The central figure, of course, in smart city efforts has to be the citizen. It is certainly easy to lose track of this all-important stakeholder as emphasis remains on a tech-centric view of city life with data acquisition and system efficiency as hallmarks of progress. Beverly Pasian and Aaron Shenhar focus on the citizens, how they are currently profiled, project types that could enhance their quality of life, and the means to engage them.

Pages: 5

Throughout its history, project management has faced three dilemmas: whether you view the project as a system or a process; whether you deliver value or achieve the triple constraint¸; and whether you adopt flexibility or strict control. Rodney reviews the three dilemmas.