About this issue – perceptions of project management in traditionally non-PM industry sectors

Citation

Walker, D.H.T. (2010), "About this issue – perceptions of project management in traditionally non-PM industry sectors", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 3 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmpb.2010.35303aaa.001

About this issue – perceptions of project management in traditionally non-PM industry sectors

Article Type: From the Editor From: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Volume 3, Issue 1

This special issue is timely and appropriate, coming at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This follows on from, and complements, the valuable work having been undertaken by research groups through the re-thinking project management (PM) and (the continuing) making projects critical. The results of work from these two research clusters has been widely published in the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), the Project Management Journal (PMJ) as well as in the book edited by Hodgson and Cicmil (2006). It has also spurred work undertaken in Canada (Sauer and Reich, 2009). The progress of understanding PM in a wider context has been in evidence for a decade and a half through the research efforts of clusters of researchers in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and through the outcomes from the International Research Network on Organizing by Projects that was established in 1993 (refer to: www.irnop.org/) and held its 9th bi-annual conference in Berlin in October 2009.

While this special issue in no way presents itself as “leading the charge” it does however, help to “pass the baton” in the PM journey of self-discovery that has been manifest in papers published in IJPM and PMJ. The aim of this issue was to provide a focal point for demonstrating that PM applies in different ways and can be seen from a number of perspectives. In this way, as a special issue, it provides a series of papers providing a theme of different ways of looking at the lived experience of PM. The papers presented in this issue have been chosen to challenge some readers, who may still be accustomed to thinking of PM in terms of more traditional sectors. While many of my colleagues acknowledge that PM is now ubiquitous in terms of industry sectors there is still a lot of debate about what PM really means and what we should be focused on in research and developing PM practice. This is something that is addressed in the research note by Peter Morris from his Helsinki address at the 2009 International Project Management Association Global Conference.

The first paper by Tomas Blomquist and Rolf A. Lundin from Sweden entitled “Projects – real, virtual or what?” provides an interesting narrative that traces the story of an engineering PM university lecturer who is challenged by a student about what PM actually means. The story is mainly based on something that actually happened well over a decade ago that changed the way that teacher and student perceived PM. It uses a story-telling style to explore the meaning of PM. By using this style, it also opens up our minds to the value of using story telling as a valid way of re-framing “the truth” as we perceive it. This provides some welcomed justification for PM research to consider narrative as a research and sense-making approach – this is still in its infancy in the PM world but have been common in other fields of social sciences. This paper will be one that I believe will make excellent reading for PM students and can be used by PM instructors and coaches as a useful way to get discussion rolling about the nature of PM and projects.

The second paper follows as another way to interpret the meaning of PM as described by practitioners. The paper entitled “Project management artefacts and the emotions they evoke” by Stephen Jonathan Whitty, based in Australia, naturally follows in the vein of helping us understand how the “culture” of PM can be understood through various artefacts that we take for granted but certainly define our PM tribal roots. This uses a phenomenological approach that Whitty used to explore the often-tacit meanings ascribed to everyday gestures, artefacts and emotions used by PM practitioners. This paper is novel and challenging because it tackles the impact and application of emotion as a PM tool. Whitty has written some very interesting papers on different ways to perceive PM (Whitty, 2005; Whitty and Schulz, 2007) and this paper is every bit as engaging as his previous work. I am sure that this paper will make readers think more deeply, not only about the validity of considering emotions as a valid topic for PM research, but also how recognising and understanding the impact of emotions can help practitioners to become better “people managers”.

The third paper by Charles Smith and Mark Winter from the UK entitled “The craft of project shaping” draws upon their previous work drawn from selected examples of narratives from stories originally presented to workshops in 2003 and 2004 under the umbrella of the Re-thinking Project Management and Making Projects Critical research groups. This also uses a story telling research approach and from that they develop a model that helps us better understand how the perceived reality of projects are shaped. This is a very interesting and under-discussed topic though Smith (2007) has written a fine book (see Volume 1 Issue 2, Book review) on related topics and others have studied part of this topic with relation to the role of vision in PM (see, for example, the doctoral thesis by Christenson (2007)). I certainly felt that Figure 1 in their paper is one that should be cited many times in the future as a clear way to describe how the perception of a project's purpose is shaped.

The fourth paper is one of three that presents projects in a different context that is commonly reported upon. The paper entitled “Project management in the international development industry: the project coordinator's perspective” by Lavagnon A. Ika, Amadou Diallo and Denis Thuillier from Quebec, Canada provides us with some insights into PM in the aid project world. It seeks to examine the empirical relationship between PM efforts (the extent to which project coordinators – the project managers in the aid industry sector – make use of available PM tools), project success and success criteria. It suggests that project success is insensitive to the level of project planning efforts but a significant correlation does exist between the use of monitoring and evaluation tools and project “profile”, a success criterion which is an early pointer of project long-term impact. This is (as with earlier papers above) a nice piece of heretical research that counters the mantra of command and control as being the reality of projects as is suggested by many traditional PM textbooks. The value of this paper, and a few others in this ilk that have been published in IJPM and PMJ in recent years, is that it further opens up a discourse on how different types of projects (going back to over 15 years now to Turner and Cochrane (1993)) place different demands for a coherent response to manage these projects. The aid industry has its own set of tools and approaches that we in traditional and non-traditional PM can learn from and vice versa.

The fifth paper, from Markus Hällgren from Sweden, entitled “Groupthink in temporary organizations” contributes to our understanding of groupthink in temporary organizations, more specifically based upon a mountain climbing expedition project in which tragic consequences followed adherence to what would be recognised by many PM practitioners and academics, as sound PM practices. He suggests PM practices that can help avoid groupthink which has wider applications than mountaineering projects. Furthermore, he argues that project managers find themselves in a balancing act between freedom, efficiency and fast decisions. The context should be allowed to determine which approach is the correct one to use. He also argues that “blowing the whistle” should never be a problem and never be punished. This paper takes an historic in-depth case study approach based on accounts of several survivors. He is currently involved in parallel research on other mountaineering projects and so this paper adds to our perspective of positive as well as negative PM attributes.

The last paper, by Kersti Nogeste from Australia, is entitled “Understanding mergers and acquisitions (M&As) from a program management perspective”. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the practice of program management can be used to manage strategically oriented initiatives such as mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This is a PM related area that receives scant attention and yet we in the business world are seemingly continually buffeted by the fallout from M&As and related restructuring and re-framing of organisations. This paper takes a program management stance and opens our eyes to the ramifications of a merger or acquisition upon organisational change, customer services, human resource management, marketing and a number of other aspects that are so heavily impacted that they spawn projects within the acquisition program of change. Her research approach is that of a reflective practitioner who was intimately involved in the case study. As a result she developed her own deep insights along with having access to program participants who provided their own deep knowledge and insights from which conclusions could be drawn. Being a reflective practitioner is what many of us espouse as a desirable state for project managers. Therefore, this paper has value as an exemplar paper from a practitioner (as is the case with paper two), who with the benefit of doctoral level research training allows us to gain a glimpse into their world.

A research note follows by Peter W.G. Morris from the UK based upon a keynote address he presented at the 2009 IPMA Conference in Helsinki. He is a well-respected and honoured PM academic. His paper provides some very timely food for thought about where PM research is heading and how we should attempt to shape the future of PM as a discipline.

This issue also introduces the work of two recently completed and published doctoral theses. The first thesis research report note is entitled “The emergent realities of project praxis in socially complex project environments” from Jocelyn Small who is from Australia, did her doctorate while working on a very complex change management project in Middle East and now lives in Norway. It is co-authored by her Supervisor Derek Walker from RMIT University. Her doctor of PM thesis is highly relevant to this special issue as it actually started out as a study about quality management – business improvement – change management but morphed into a study that moved beyond focussing on the instrumentality of project actuality to explore project praxis as social process. She used soft systems methodology (SSM) to explore and investigate a very complex human situation and designed a conceptual framework to guide her thinking to explore the social nature of projects, through acknowledging the interconnected nature of human realities, the pragmatism of knowledge and the emergent nature of cognition. This work certainly does fall outside the bounds of a traditional PM doctoral thesis (if there is such a thing). Part of its value is that in undertaking the study the hidden meanings and social complexity of a truly multinational, multi-religious, multi-disciplinary project team became clearer through use of SSM as a research tool. For those interested in SMM this will be a useful resource, though for a range of reasons this thesis is embargoed until the end of 2011. It will then appear on the Australian Digital Thesis Library: http://adt.caul.edu.au/

The second thesis research report note is entitled “Dynamic capability through project portfolio management in service and manufacturing industries” by Catherine P. Killen with her PhD thesis Supervisor Robert A. Hunt. The work was undertaken through the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her doctoral thesis is focused on the relationship between project portfolio management (PPM) and competitive advantage in service and manufacturing organisations. She used a two-phase mixed method study that comprised a quantitative questionnaire-based survey and a qualitative multiple-case study to address the “what” and the “how” of the research questions. Findings support prior PPM studies and suggest a positive relationship between structured PPM capabilities and improved outcomes. The research compared service and manufacturing environments; future challenges are likely to result from the increasing blurring of the boundaries between service and manufacturing industries. This also fits in well with the study of PPM as an extension to notions of projects as isolated entities and places it in better context.

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 book reviewed is entitled Making Essential Choices with Scant Information: Front-end Decision Making in Major Projects by Williams et al. (2009). This book has a focus on the front end of projects which is an area stressed as important by the Peter Morris research note. The second book review is entitled Project Governance written by Müller (2009) which is one of the Gower Series on PM that provides books of around 100 or so pages based on new PM aspects or provide an expansion on existing PM topics that attract scant attention in traditional PM texts. Both of these books are well written and can be of great value to academics, practitioners and students.

Finally, I would like to thank both contributors and reviewers who have generously given time and energy to make this issue possible. I hope to see many more papers that address the important and emerging frontiers of PM, more papers that make us sit up and (re)think what the nature of PM and projects really is.

Derek H.T. Walker