From the editor

Citation

Walker, D.H.T. (2008), "From the editor", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 1 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmpb.2008.35301daa.001

From the editor

Article Type: From the editor From: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Volume 1, Issue 4

About the IJMPiB

This issue is the fourth and final in the first volume of The International Journal of Managing Projects in Business (IJMPiB). It seems appropriate to reflect on the four issues and test whether the initial aims of the journal are being met. As stated in editorial of the first issue, the aim and vision for the journal is to be an effective vehicle for encouraging PM knowledge generation and its development and refinement. It encourages PM theorists and practitioners to effectively stand back and critically reflect on how PM is evolving through reflecting in action as well as reflecting on action to make sense of the interplay between theory and observation. This generates deeper understanding of “why” we should and “how” we should improve PM practice. IJMPiB also has an “international” flavour of papers published.

Contributing authors in this issue are based in Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the USA. Issue 4 of the IJMPiB adheres to its ethos. We continue to have papers that explore and extend issues relating to questioning the boundaries of PM that help to document and analyse PM emerging practice and future trends. It also has PM techniques practical papers, a paper about action research, and practical reflective learning papers. We also have in this issue our first practice note which we flagged in Issue 1 as being important to the journal.

Some statistics about Volume 1

There were 35 papers in total comprising: nine double-blind peer reviewed academic papers published in Issue 1; eight in Issue 2; nine in Issue 3; and nine in Issue 4. The general formulae for IJMPiB has been to present six substantial papers varying in length with an aim for around 6,000+ words plus references, tables, etc. (though we do and have accepted longer papers). This allows authors to more fully develop the contextual and discussion parts of their papers. Journals papers in many other publications could be criticised as having truncated context and discussion of results, due to word count limitations, and this deprives authors and readers gaining full benefit of salient issues raised in papers that may remain tacitly exposed or otherwise hidden.

Each IJMPiB issue featured two research notes that highlight a recent PM-related doctoral thesis that provides direct links to where the full thesis may be electronically downloaded. The aim of this publication innovation is to enable PM academics and practitioners to more directly access the complete thesis. This facility can benefit all of us. Often, especially until a few years ago, a thesis was only available in hard copy form through an inter-library loan which can take months to arrange. By “showcasing” the thesis, its approach and contribution, authors can become more widely cited. Perhaps, more importantly for readers, this link gives them ready and rapid access to the entire thesis. We hope that this will stimulate more PM research, help set high standards of scholarship and also to expose practitioners to current cutting-edge PM research. The thesis research notes also provide us all with a tangible reminder of the breadth and depth of scholarship that is going on in the PM discipline.

Two issues (1 and 3) featured an invited research note and in Issue 4 there the first of what we hope will be a regular series of practice note is presented.

All papers are peer reviewed. The general papers and research notes are double blind peer reviewed. Naturally, the thesis research notes cannot be double blind by definition (it becomes obvious who at least one of the authors may be), however, they are peer reviewed. Likewise, the practice notes. Research and practice notes are shorter in length than general papers. Research notes should present reflection and retrospection of leading research work while the practice notes provide reflection and guidance on how emerging PM practice, perhaps a new tool, technique, approach, etc. is linked to well-established theory – often filtering in from general management or engineering or another source of useful PM intelligence. Finally, each of the four issues includes a book review that would be of interest to PM academics and practitioners that may not yet have entered their PM world.

A firm policy of the journal has been to encourage authors from all over the world to contribute their PM insights and of the 73 contributing authors in Volume 1, the breakdown by affiliation location is illustrated in Table I.

The distribution will change from one volume to the next but the main point to be made here is that clearly there is a lot of worthwhile PM work being published from a truly global source. This is consistent with the experience of the other two main PM journals – the International Journal of Project Management and the Project Management Journal – and this indicates a healthy level of global contribution.

General themes for papers in Volume 1 include strategy, leadership, skills development and academic-practice links, organisational learning and development of PM tools and techniques. Papers accepted for early 2009 will continue to include papers relating to global teams and the impact of PM culture issues. This will widen the discussion on the extensive range of project work being undertaken and how we might re-frame our perception of the limits and boundaries of PM studies. We will also be publishing papers in 2009 that widen the perception of PM research methods that can be applied with an emphasis on qualitative research methods. This will help us gain deeper insights into the “lived experience” of people engaged in PM activities and opens up opportunities to challenge current dogma about “how projects should be managed”. The Artto and Kujala paper in this issue signposts avenues that lead towards the development of a new body of knowledge for project business focusing on effectively managing both firms and projects in their networked business environments. This should generate discussions triggered by this paper that should open our minds to different conceptions of PM work that currently constrain traditional preconceptions of good PM practice. This should accelerate the emerging debates on types of project work and how managing non-traditional type projects should take place. Some of this work was first published over 15 years ago (Turner and Cochrane, 1993) and more recently (Shenhar and Dvir, 1996; Andersen, 2006; Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006). Volume 2 in 2009 should provide a continuing and deeper set of interesting and stimulating papers to help challenge PM practitioners and academics to reflect in perhaps different ways on what they have experienced. In this regard, an emphasis on PM strategy, organisational learning through projects and programs and the relevance of existing traditional PM tools and techniques, will lead PM practitioners and academics to reframe their ideas and values. We hope that Volumes 1 and 2 will stimulate interested in project managers feeling challenged and prompted to re-think the meaning of projects.

About this issue

The first paper in issue 4 “Project business as a research field” by Professors Karlos Artto and Jaakko Kujala, both based in Finland, provides a leading-edge paper that describes project business as a research field by introducing a project business framework and four major research areas inherent in that framework. These are:

1. 1.

   management of a project;

2. 2.

   management of a project-based firm;

3. 3.

   management of a project network; and

4. 4.

   management of a business network.

They also suggest specific research areas and themes within the framework that are relevant and contribute to new knowledge in the project business field. The paper reveals avenues of thought about the nature of projects that lead towards the development of a new body of knowledge for project business focusing on effectively managing both firms and projects in their networked business environments. This paper will be of great value to anyone currently faced with undertaking a literature review of global emerging trends in the PM field as it provides an extensive, highly current and well structured review of research being undertaken within these four framework areas.

The second paper “Top management involvement in project management – a cross country study of the software industry” by Dr Ofer Zwikael is currently based in New Zealand and he follows research themes that he explored in his paper in Issue 3 (Zwikael, 2008). It relates to top management support and the emphasis placed by different senior managers in several sectors across three countries on the nature of this support. He focuses on the software industry and identifies different critical top management support processes in each of three countries (Japan, Israel, and New Zealand) and discovered that six processes have been found to have a higher contribution to project success than others. He also found that in all three countries, top managers do not invest more effort in critical processes, than in non-critical ones. Instead, he found that executives choose to perform easy-to-do processes. Critical top management support processes, which have higher impact on project success, often do not receive an appropriate level of attention from senior managers in the software industry. His paper suggests a detailed list of these critical top management support processes that significantly improve project success in different cultures. The paper also discusses this list in comparison with what is currently done by executives in the software industry and concludes with specific recommendations to managers in the software industry. This paper extends our understanding of PM process success.

The third paper “Emotional intelligence (EI) capabilities training: can it develop EI in project teams?” by Dr Rebecca Turner from the USA and Dr Beverley Lloyd-Walker from Australia examines the influence of increased emotional intelligence capabilities on project success. This paper should be of interest to readers who are intrigued about the role that emotional intelligence training may have on leadership styles, team behaviours and outcomes of job satisfaction and job performance that are steps along the way to building effective teams that can deliver PM success. The research reported upon in this paper is limited to one organisation within the defence contracting industry in the USA and while the same size of the studied group is small (42), it nevertheless reveals an interesting experimental intervention in a PM situation that has not received as much attention in the PM journals than other more traditional settings. Results indicate that developing emotional intelligence capabilities will contribute to increased PM success. The literature review provides interesting insights into this aspect of PM leadership that has only recently been gaining attention and the study focuses upon a group demographic in a project setting that has received little attention so this paper is another that hopefully will trigger further studies in this project type domain.

The fourth paper “An effect-cause-effect analysis of project objectives and trade-off assumptions” by Dr Avninder Gill in Canada takes a critical examination of the trade-offs among project objectives and their underlying assumptions. This paper advances our understanding of the theory of constraints “effect-cause-effect” methodology that has been applied to examine the assumptions behind successfully managing business projects. The paper evaluates the extent that trade-offs among project objectives actually exist and explores the possibility of their co-existence in a project management environment through illustrating several North American examples. This realization can significantly impact the project trade-off models in existing literature. The paper provides deeper PM insights into how the theory of constraints tool can be applied in managing traditional type projects. It would be of particular interest to PM readers who are looking for improving their ability to improve their project planning.

The fifth paper “Risk management framework for pharmaceutical research and development projects” by Dr Young Hoon Kwak and Colleen K. Dixon in the USA identifies best practices from high-technology industries that face many of the same challenges around uncertainty, complexity, and risk that are faced by the pharmaceutical industry. They review the literature of recent risk management publications from three high-technology industries that yielded thirteen best practices in project risk management that could potentially be applied to pharmaceutical R&D projects to improve managing risks and uncertainties of managing projects. By reviewing lessons learned from industries that share many of the challenges of pharmaceutical R&D projects, they suggest that implementation of risk management in the context of drug development projects will require adaptation to the specific needs and challenges of those projects. This paper broadens our understanding of pharmaceutical R&D projects and risk management.

The final paper, “Dual cycle action research: a professional doctorate case study” is written by Dr Kersti Nogeste from Australia and this paper expands upon a research thesis note paper published earlier in Issue 2 of this journal (Nogeste and Walker, 2008). This paper should be useful to readers who have an interest in how action learning can be used by a reflective practitioner to study PM Phenomina. It also provides a very useful discussion of research approaches in its justification for the adopted action research approach. The paper provides both academic researchers and reflective PM practitioners with a practical guide to applying dual cycle action research to both conduct research and solve a real-life problem situation. Any doctoral candidate who is considering this research approach will find this paper highly useful as a sound and reliable reference to help shape their research approach and to cite this authority.

This fourth issue also introduces the work of two recently completed and published doctoral theses. The first thesis research report note is by Dr Dale Christenson from Canada that relates to his doctoral thesis (Christenson, 2007). His thesis addressed the research question:His thesis may be downloaded from URL: http://adt.lib.rmit.edu.au/adt/public/adt-VIT20080108.151855/. He reported that first, the study established that a clear, well articulated and convincing project outcomes vision that was effectively communicated made a strong and positive impact upon perceived project success. Second, a protocol was developed and thoroughly tested to develop a project vision. This protocol was found to be successful for the projects it was trialed on and reasons for its acknowledged success were explicated. Third, the study highlighted four emergent issues that require further investigation but for the moment may be risks that need to be managed or opportunities to be exploited. These are: the benefits of an incremental or phased approach; the need for sustainment; the necessity of addressing horizontality; and the imperative of vision champions. This thesis would be of particular interest to those readers who are interested in change management or business transformation projects where development of a strong and well understood and accepted project vision is essential for planning and mobilizing people to successfully deliver PM success.

The second thesis research report note is from Dr Elmar Kutsch in the UK. His paper highlights the main findings of a successfully defended doctoral thesis that studied factors or interventions causing the discrepancy between how adequate project risks should be managed and how project risks are actually managed. He found that specific risk-related interventions strongly influence the effective use of project risk management – project managers tended to deny, avoid, or ignore risks and to delay the management of risk. Risks were perceived as discomforting, not agreed upon. IT project managers were unaware of risks and considered them to be outside their scope of influence and preferred to let risks resolve themselves rather than proactively engaging with them. As a consequence, factors such as the lack of awareness of risks by IT project managers appeared to constrain the application of project risk management with the result that risk had an adverse influence on the outcome of IT projects. His thesis contradicts the myth of a “self-evidently” correct project risk management approach. It defines interventions that constrain project manager’s ability to manage project risk. This work fits well with the aim of the IJMPiB to challenge orthodox theory based on traditional projects because even with IT projects these days, they combine software development with business process change. This means that most traditional “hard” or “tangible product” project types now require integration of change and transformation so these projects need to be reappraised in terms of risk for example.

This issue also provides a short addition to the research note published in Issue 1 by Hodgson and Cicmil (2008) where they wished to add a point of clarification.

This issue contains its first practice note. When the IJMPiB journal was established, the concept of what a practice note might look like was not well developed. We knew that we did not want a self-serving promotion of a product, tool or service. We knew that we wanted practitioners to be encouraged to submit papers about genuine advances that are innovative, novel and may take time to be evaluated and thus reach the refereed journals for publication. These kinds of potential publications can stimulate research to validate or explore the new advance and it can provide sufficient background knowledge to illustrate limitations, suggested implementation protocols, etc. The question remains what is the difference between a practice note and an academic case study paper? This first practice note paper will hopefully help us clarify the wisdom of the approach adopted in publishing this kind of paper. Dr Lynda Bourne submitted this practice note paper as a further development of her Stakeholder Circle concept that appeared as a thesis research note in Issue 1 (Bourne and Walker, 2008) that highlighted a number of papers and book chapters flowing from that work. When at my suggestion Dr Bourne submitted the paper, it naturally contained many self-referenced citations and that crystallised a possible heuristic for identifying the difference between practice notes and research papers. Practice notes (like the research thesis notes) necessarily contain a lot of self-reference citations because any rigorous explanation of an emerging new practice innovation is likely to rely on referring back to a long string of previous work by the developer/author. Reviewers of academic papers are somewhat suspicious of a large degree of self-referencing – even when it is necessary to refer back to a solid body of work. Thus, one measure of a practice note may be that it refers to an innovation that is based upon a body of work that the developer needs to cite to establish credibility and yet this trail of references makes double-blind reviews somewhat farcical. The more obvious solution to this problem is to scrutinise it as a non-blind review and that is what we have decided to trial here for practice note papers. The paper by Dr Bourne most definitely extends the work that she has published elsewhere, and in this paper she explores a stakeholder relationship management maturity approach to assisting organisations successfully implement a stakeholder “mindset” or culture. She notes that this capability maturity model approach to users of the tool, to assess how they may best approach its use, has been developed to the level described in this paper through a process of reflection, action research and continuous improvement. The ideas expressed in this paper need to be tested further. The paper includes an invitation to researchers and practitioners to contribute to, or collaborate in, this process. It presents not only additional insights about how this stakeholder engagement tool can be used, but it also reflects upon stakeholder engagement practice.

The intention of this journal is to also provide a review of relevant and useful new PM publications that can enhance the PM academic and practitioner’s stock of knowledge that can be reflected upon. In this issue we review two books of relevance to PM professionals. The first is “Tools for Complex Projects” by Kaye Remington and Julien Pollack that is published by Gower. This book is topical and timely as there has been much debate and discussion about whether the subject of “complex project management” is relevant or not given that all projects involve varying degrees of complexity whose assessment lies in the eye of the beholder. This book treats the subject area intelligently and is most likely a book that should be part of every project managers’ stock of textbook resources. Professor Terry Williams, University of Southampton, UK reviews this book and he is a recognised expert in this area.

The second book review is of a supply chain management book entitles Logistics and Supply Chain Integration written by Dr Ian Saddler. I decided to review this text when I had occasion to meet Dr Sadler a number of times and reflect that supply chain management and PM shared many common areas of interest. Indeed, when developing a PM course of Ethics and PM Procurement six or seven years ago I researched supply chain management as a field of study that PM could borrow heavily from. The book that Dr Sadler has produced is aimed at students of Logistics but like many management fields its content is highly relevant to PM theory and practice. I was delighted to be able to review this book when it was published earlier this year.

Finally, this has been a full and interesting year. Mobilising a new journal with all that it entails is a major project management exercise in itself and so I was able to use my PM skills in the process of facilitating the contributors to realise this first volume. What I did not frankly expect was that I learned so much that I could immediately apply from the papers submitted (those accepted, rejected, under revision and pending publication early in 2009). My own PM background has been in the “traditional” large-scale construction projects as well as managing research projects and editing and co-authoring books. This places me at the very thick of what this journal is about – challenging new ways in which different types of projects are realised. I learned a lot about PM myself this year and I thank all contributors and reviewers for their time, effort, energy and courage in exposing their ideas and research findings to the scrutiny of a double blind peer review.

Abbreviations: RQ.; How does the effective development and communication of a “project vision” impact project outcomes?

Derek H.T. Walker