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Editorial: Temporary organizations and project management
S~'and. J. Mgmt, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 315-318, 1995 Copyright O 1995 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0956-5221/95 $9.50 + 0.00
Pergamon 0956-5221(95)00033-X
EDITORIAL: T E M P O R A R Y
ORGANIZATIONS MANAGEMENT
AND PROJECT
R O L F A. LUNDIN
Department of Business Administration, Ume~ University, Sweden
Lately, I have come to realize that several aspects of my life have been organized as projects. In my (previous) function as Dean of a business school I found that I tended to organize the work as projects (embodied in a set of folders, where the main managerial problem seemed to be how to choose which folders contained what was most urgent and to select the ones to be discarded). These experiences and some other observations on managerial behavior in connection with projects have been formalized in a paper presented to the INTERNET meeting in Vienna in 1990) (Lundin, 1990). Several other ventures in my past professional life could also be conceived as projects, be it starting a new business school, launching a new journal, doing research, or simply tutoring a never-ending procession of Ph.D. students. These examples serve to demonstrate that projects and temporary organizations apparently permeate much of our lives as individual human beings, even though we may not realize it. Not until lately - - the last few years - - have I personally come to analyze and treat my own work as projects, even though I have been inw)lved in studying projects and temporary organizations for a considerable time. Evidently, perceiving and realizing are not the same thing. Or, to repeat an ancient saying: why do the children of the shoemaker always and everywhere seem to have the worst shoes? In one way a project could be grasped in terms of the rationalistic dream. A project can be defined as the successful result of separating the realization of a task from its environment (a separation that has been denoted "bracketing"), whereby better conditions are created for the realization (given that realization is in fact what counts). Setting up a project implies starting anew, virtually without restrictions imposed by the past or the future. The concerns in a project relate exclusively to how the transformation involved in fulfilling the task can and should be handled in an efficient way, given the resources at hand. In the predominant normative model for projects, these concerns can easily be transformed into guidelines for the pre-project phase, when the main organizational structure for the project is set up and the project team is selected. And the notion of implementation carries the project well into the developments that the future will hold. So project work simultaneously involves setting up brackets for the protection of the project, and dissolving those same brackets. It seems to be a fact, though, that projects seldom function in such a simplistic manner. Temporary organizations are set up for a large number of reasons (and it seems that the frequency with which those reasons arise is increasing, or possibly that setting up projects is perceived as an increasingly popular way of solving problems in business life or elsewhere) and under a multitude of circumstances. And this multitude of circumstances and reasons have important structural consequences and other implications. Let me just explore one dichotomy a little further. In industries where projects are the regular way of doing business, the setting up of a tempo315
316
R.A. LUNDIN
rary organization for the task assumes an air of repetitiveness. Business experiences seem to have led to various conjectures on how to run projects in an efficient way under these circumstances. And it seems that learning between projects is well below what an outsider might have expected in the view of the repetitive conditions. Arranging for learning appears to be a major concern for the managers involved (or at least it should be). Projects like organizational development, that are genuinely new for most actors involved, certainly occur less frequently. In such projects (or maybe they should always be called temporary organizations) uniqueness and uncertainty seem to dominate the actors' concerns, and under these circumstances a major managerial problem appears to be how to instill order and progression into project work. The abundance and variation of projects suggest a need for differentiation in empirical and theoretical research. Yet, despite all the variations appearing in projects and temporary organizations, there seem to be several generic mechanisms to be found everywhere in the project field. In this special issue we aspire to give some examples of important issues pertaining to projects and temporary organizations. We have consequently brought together a wide selection of empirical studies and theoretical material from various project contexts. This wide selection is supplemented by some recent theoretical contributions, where connections are made with a variety of organizational theories. The (apparent) disparity of the contributions may appear overwhelming at first glance. However, it demonstrates the variation in the field, and one thing that the authors have in common is a general and genuine concern about how projects and temporary organizations work, and how we can enhance our understanding of them. It is hoped that this selection of articles will be useful to the ambitious reader aspiring to enter a research field that is not yet very well established, but which is trying to find its soul. This special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management is part of these soul-searching activities. Most if not all the articles seem to share the view that in certain respects the study of temporary organizations has to break away from established project management and organizational literature. Precisely that is the theme of the first article, written by Johann Packendorff. It focuses on the contents of the traditional project management literature and on the directions that project management research is or should be taking, as he sees it. His arguments are that the traditional literature appears to build on a set of commonly accepted assumptions which can be disputed for a variety of reasons. One instance of this is the (premature) traditional quest for prescription, or maybe one should say the project management obsession with prescription. In essence Packendorff argues that studying temporary organizations should be incorporated into the general study of the organizational field. Kreiner, in his slightly philosophical article on relevance in drifting environments, is also worried by some advice that professional Project Managers sometimes tend to give. Essentially he claims that "bracketing", albeit necessary to efficient implementation can result in ineffective projects, since the efficacy of the brackets should be contingent upon environmental conditions. If the environment is drifting, brackets should in fact be abandoned since otherwise the project will be led astray. But the real question is: when do we have a drifting environment? The next article on the Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games by Bente L0wendahl demonstrates a project case that has some similarities with another renowned case, the Sydney Opera House. Both projects were successes from the viewpoint of the general outcome. What would Sydney be on the world stage without its Opera House? And the Olympic Games in Lillehammer will be remembered as the games where everything worked extremely well. Even the weather was gorgeous. Economically, though, the Sydney Opera House has been documented as a disas-
EDITORIAL
317
ter (Hall, 1980). And the Norwegians have not yet quite finished paying the Lillehammer bill. LCwendahl has chosen to focus on the fact that the Olympic project was not embedded in any other organization. The case demonstrates a societal project requiring a certain amount of creativity, and the author theorizes on the effects of non-embeddedness. In an intriguing "inside" piece, Christophe Midler describes what he calls the "projectification" of the French motor vehicle company, Renault (read the word "projectification" once more and you will hear the French accent that seems to cling to the word). The company used to a have a structure similar to any Taylorist mass production company, but has been transformed in view of the demands of the present marketing and product-development conditions. The "projectification" process has had serious implications for the way the Renault people do their work and how they see it themselves, and for the way the company functions as a whole. Major investments of a societal project type and power relationships are themes treated in the article by Bo Hellgren and Torbj6rn Stjernberg. The argument proposed by the authors is that such projects can be seen as occurring in networks of various actors, and that the networks are involved in a process of dynamic change. Empirically the article is about the design and implementation of three shopping malls. The design processes are characterized as "fuzzy", while implementation seems to call for "hierarchy". The powerful strategic position in the network is the one that controls the transformation from design to implementation. Building projects of a repetitive type are analyzed with reference to institutional theory in an article written by Anna Kadefors. The author carefully analyzes institutional aspects of building and how these aspects affect behavior in building projects. Thus she points out that institutionalization is very strong in the construction industry, and that this institutionalization had fundamental effects on flexibility and on any attempt to introduce changes in standard building procedures. The theoretical conclusion is that contrary to popular belief building projects are not in fact unique; rather, they are temporary enactments of stable institutions. Notions about institutions also play an important role in the article on company renewal by Eskil Ekstedt and Hans Wirdenius. The authors compare renewal efforts in two companies, ABB and Skanska. In contrast to building projects, renewal projects are usually envisaged not as "physical", but as "mental". However, the contexts of the renewal efforts (which happen to be very similar in their general content) do differ, since Skanska is a construction company in which people are accustomed to think in project terms, while ABB is dominated by flow process production. As demonstrated by the authors, renewal efforts should not only have mental aspects at the individual level; they should also contain structural components. Further, there appears to be a "learning paradox" hidden in the different production cultures. People in construction use their disturbance-handling know-how to neutralize renewal initiatives from the top. The issue of organizational learning is also addressed in the article by Jill Schofield and David C. Wilson. In the transformation of the British National Health Service involving the introduction of internal markets, capital investment project teams are shown to play an important role. Four cases of such teams working on capital investment projects are studied. The teams created the dual role of simultaneously managing change and creating learning. Reflection in action led to individual learning and group learning, since the project groups, initially created to reflect both professional health concerns and economic concerns, developed into very distinct communities of practice through mechanisms of the "reflection in action" type. The last piece in this selection has been written by Anders S0derholm and myself. (It should be mentioned that the editorial duties for this article, i.e. handling the reviewing process, the rewritings, and the decision to accept or reject have been performed by the regular editor of the journal, Sten J6nsson.) The article contains an attempt to outline a theory of the non-permanent,
318
R.A. LUNDIN
temporary organization in the same vein as the now famous "behavioral theory of the firm". Our argument is that "action" rather than "decision" is at the heart of the temporary organization. (Action and time are common concerns in both unique and repetitive projects.) The action imperative plays an important part in many project mechanisms. In the article we attempt to select some elements, such as the notion of sequencing, from the project management literature and to combine our selection with elements of traditional organizational theory, to form a coherent outline for a theory of the temporary organization. It has been a great pleasure working, on the one hand, with all the authors from various countries who have contributed to this special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management on temporary organizations and projects, and, on the other, with the large group of reviewers who have helped us all with their knowledge and advice. Should the reader disapprove of any of the articles, please remember that the blame falls not only on the author(s) but even more heavily on the editor. And should the reader also feel that any of the arguments could be developed further, do not hesitate to contact the author(s). I am quite confident that all the authors share with me a general concern for theorizing and understanding the field of temporary organizations. We sincerely hope that you will join us in that concern. And so, concluding this editorial also brings to an end this special issue project. But, as demonstrated in several of the articles, "bracketing" seldom works. It is my hope that this is not the end of something, but rather that we have aroused some interest in the research minded community in doing serious work in the field of temporary organizations. This field is important, and I believe such efforts to be highly worthwhile.
REFERENCES Hall, Peter, Great Planning Disasters (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). Lundin, Rolf A., Incentives for Chief Executives to Manage by Projects. In: R. Gareis (Ed.), Handbook of Management by Projects (Vienna: Manz, 1990), pp. 48-53.
Pergamon 0956-5221(95)00033-X
EDITORIAL: T E M P O R A R Y
ORGANIZATIONS MANAGEMENT
AND PROJECT
R O L F A. LUNDIN
Department of Business Administration, Ume~ University, Sweden
Lately, I have come to realize that several aspects of my life have been organized as projects. In my (previous) function as Dean of a business school I found that I tended to organize the work as projects (embodied in a set of folders, where the main managerial problem seemed to be how to choose which folders contained what was most urgent and to select the ones to be discarded). These experiences and some other observations on managerial behavior in connection with projects have been formalized in a paper presented to the INTERNET meeting in Vienna in 1990) (Lundin, 1990). Several other ventures in my past professional life could also be conceived as projects, be it starting a new business school, launching a new journal, doing research, or simply tutoring a never-ending procession of Ph.D. students. These examples serve to demonstrate that projects and temporary organizations apparently permeate much of our lives as individual human beings, even though we may not realize it. Not until lately - - the last few years - - have I personally come to analyze and treat my own work as projects, even though I have been inw)lved in studying projects and temporary organizations for a considerable time. Evidently, perceiving and realizing are not the same thing. Or, to repeat an ancient saying: why do the children of the shoemaker always and everywhere seem to have the worst shoes? In one way a project could be grasped in terms of the rationalistic dream. A project can be defined as the successful result of separating the realization of a task from its environment (a separation that has been denoted "bracketing"), whereby better conditions are created for the realization (given that realization is in fact what counts). Setting up a project implies starting anew, virtually without restrictions imposed by the past or the future. The concerns in a project relate exclusively to how the transformation involved in fulfilling the task can and should be handled in an efficient way, given the resources at hand. In the predominant normative model for projects, these concerns can easily be transformed into guidelines for the pre-project phase, when the main organizational structure for the project is set up and the project team is selected. And the notion of implementation carries the project well into the developments that the future will hold. So project work simultaneously involves setting up brackets for the protection of the project, and dissolving those same brackets. It seems to be a fact, though, that projects seldom function in such a simplistic manner. Temporary organizations are set up for a large number of reasons (and it seems that the frequency with which those reasons arise is increasing, or possibly that setting up projects is perceived as an increasingly popular way of solving problems in business life or elsewhere) and under a multitude of circumstances. And this multitude of circumstances and reasons have important structural consequences and other implications. Let me just explore one dichotomy a little further. In industries where projects are the regular way of doing business, the setting up of a tempo315
316
R.A. LUNDIN
rary organization for the task assumes an air of repetitiveness. Business experiences seem to have led to various conjectures on how to run projects in an efficient way under these circumstances. And it seems that learning between projects is well below what an outsider might have expected in the view of the repetitive conditions. Arranging for learning appears to be a major concern for the managers involved (or at least it should be). Projects like organizational development, that are genuinely new for most actors involved, certainly occur less frequently. In such projects (or maybe they should always be called temporary organizations) uniqueness and uncertainty seem to dominate the actors' concerns, and under these circumstances a major managerial problem appears to be how to instill order and progression into project work. The abundance and variation of projects suggest a need for differentiation in empirical and theoretical research. Yet, despite all the variations appearing in projects and temporary organizations, there seem to be several generic mechanisms to be found everywhere in the project field. In this special issue we aspire to give some examples of important issues pertaining to projects and temporary organizations. We have consequently brought together a wide selection of empirical studies and theoretical material from various project contexts. This wide selection is supplemented by some recent theoretical contributions, where connections are made with a variety of organizational theories. The (apparent) disparity of the contributions may appear overwhelming at first glance. However, it demonstrates the variation in the field, and one thing that the authors have in common is a general and genuine concern about how projects and temporary organizations work, and how we can enhance our understanding of them. It is hoped that this selection of articles will be useful to the ambitious reader aspiring to enter a research field that is not yet very well established, but which is trying to find its soul. This special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management is part of these soul-searching activities. Most if not all the articles seem to share the view that in certain respects the study of temporary organizations has to break away from established project management and organizational literature. Precisely that is the theme of the first article, written by Johann Packendorff. It focuses on the contents of the traditional project management literature and on the directions that project management research is or should be taking, as he sees it. His arguments are that the traditional literature appears to build on a set of commonly accepted assumptions which can be disputed for a variety of reasons. One instance of this is the (premature) traditional quest for prescription, or maybe one should say the project management obsession with prescription. In essence Packendorff argues that studying temporary organizations should be incorporated into the general study of the organizational field. Kreiner, in his slightly philosophical article on relevance in drifting environments, is also worried by some advice that professional Project Managers sometimes tend to give. Essentially he claims that "bracketing", albeit necessary to efficient implementation can result in ineffective projects, since the efficacy of the brackets should be contingent upon environmental conditions. If the environment is drifting, brackets should in fact be abandoned since otherwise the project will be led astray. But the real question is: when do we have a drifting environment? The next article on the Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games by Bente L0wendahl demonstrates a project case that has some similarities with another renowned case, the Sydney Opera House. Both projects were successes from the viewpoint of the general outcome. What would Sydney be on the world stage without its Opera House? And the Olympic Games in Lillehammer will be remembered as the games where everything worked extremely well. Even the weather was gorgeous. Economically, though, the Sydney Opera House has been documented as a disas-
EDITORIAL
317
ter (Hall, 1980). And the Norwegians have not yet quite finished paying the Lillehammer bill. LCwendahl has chosen to focus on the fact that the Olympic project was not embedded in any other organization. The case demonstrates a societal project requiring a certain amount of creativity, and the author theorizes on the effects of non-embeddedness. In an intriguing "inside" piece, Christophe Midler describes what he calls the "projectification" of the French motor vehicle company, Renault (read the word "projectification" once more and you will hear the French accent that seems to cling to the word). The company used to a have a structure similar to any Taylorist mass production company, but has been transformed in view of the demands of the present marketing and product-development conditions. The "projectification" process has had serious implications for the way the Renault people do their work and how they see it themselves, and for the way the company functions as a whole. Major investments of a societal project type and power relationships are themes treated in the article by Bo Hellgren and Torbj6rn Stjernberg. The argument proposed by the authors is that such projects can be seen as occurring in networks of various actors, and that the networks are involved in a process of dynamic change. Empirically the article is about the design and implementation of three shopping malls. The design processes are characterized as "fuzzy", while implementation seems to call for "hierarchy". The powerful strategic position in the network is the one that controls the transformation from design to implementation. Building projects of a repetitive type are analyzed with reference to institutional theory in an article written by Anna Kadefors. The author carefully analyzes institutional aspects of building and how these aspects affect behavior in building projects. Thus she points out that institutionalization is very strong in the construction industry, and that this institutionalization had fundamental effects on flexibility and on any attempt to introduce changes in standard building procedures. The theoretical conclusion is that contrary to popular belief building projects are not in fact unique; rather, they are temporary enactments of stable institutions. Notions about institutions also play an important role in the article on company renewal by Eskil Ekstedt and Hans Wirdenius. The authors compare renewal efforts in two companies, ABB and Skanska. In contrast to building projects, renewal projects are usually envisaged not as "physical", but as "mental". However, the contexts of the renewal efforts (which happen to be very similar in their general content) do differ, since Skanska is a construction company in which people are accustomed to think in project terms, while ABB is dominated by flow process production. As demonstrated by the authors, renewal efforts should not only have mental aspects at the individual level; they should also contain structural components. Further, there appears to be a "learning paradox" hidden in the different production cultures. People in construction use their disturbance-handling know-how to neutralize renewal initiatives from the top. The issue of organizational learning is also addressed in the article by Jill Schofield and David C. Wilson. In the transformation of the British National Health Service involving the introduction of internal markets, capital investment project teams are shown to play an important role. Four cases of such teams working on capital investment projects are studied. The teams created the dual role of simultaneously managing change and creating learning. Reflection in action led to individual learning and group learning, since the project groups, initially created to reflect both professional health concerns and economic concerns, developed into very distinct communities of practice through mechanisms of the "reflection in action" type. The last piece in this selection has been written by Anders S0derholm and myself. (It should be mentioned that the editorial duties for this article, i.e. handling the reviewing process, the rewritings, and the decision to accept or reject have been performed by the regular editor of the journal, Sten J6nsson.) The article contains an attempt to outline a theory of the non-permanent,
318
R.A. LUNDIN
temporary organization in the same vein as the now famous "behavioral theory of the firm". Our argument is that "action" rather than "decision" is at the heart of the temporary organization. (Action and time are common concerns in both unique and repetitive projects.) The action imperative plays an important part in many project mechanisms. In the article we attempt to select some elements, such as the notion of sequencing, from the project management literature and to combine our selection with elements of traditional organizational theory, to form a coherent outline for a theory of the temporary organization. It has been a great pleasure working, on the one hand, with all the authors from various countries who have contributed to this special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management on temporary organizations and projects, and, on the other, with the large group of reviewers who have helped us all with their knowledge and advice. Should the reader disapprove of any of the articles, please remember that the blame falls not only on the author(s) but even more heavily on the editor. And should the reader also feel that any of the arguments could be developed further, do not hesitate to contact the author(s). I am quite confident that all the authors share with me a general concern for theorizing and understanding the field of temporary organizations. We sincerely hope that you will join us in that concern. And so, concluding this editorial also brings to an end this special issue project. But, as demonstrated in several of the articles, "bracketing" seldom works. It is my hope that this is not the end of something, but rather that we have aroused some interest in the research minded community in doing serious work in the field of temporary organizations. This field is important, and I believe such efforts to be highly worthwhile.
REFERENCES Hall, Peter, Great Planning Disasters (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). Lundin, Rolf A., Incentives for Chief Executives to Manage by Projects. In: R. Gareis (Ed.), Handbook of Management by Projects (Vienna: Manz, 1990), pp. 48-53.