- Email: [email protected]
Reflections
JPMA-01798; No of Pages 6
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ScienceDirect International Journal of Project Management xx (2015) xxx – xxx www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman
Reflections Peter W.G. Morris School of Construction and Project Management, UCL, London WC1E 7HB, UK
Abstract This paper reflects on the other papers published in this Festschrift for Peter Morris. It does so from Peter’s personal perspectives on the discipline of managing projects. It begins by discussing the role of scholarship in shaping the discipline. It emphasizes the importance of the frontend and relates this to the semantic difficulties associated with the term 'project'. The centrality of people and culture in general is noted. Types of knowledge and learning are discussed especially with regard to professionalism. Governance and the value of the owner’s role are noted. The developing impact of ICT, Operations and Agile are discussed. The benefits of a historical perspective on the discipline are proposed and prospects for the future are outlined, particularly with regard to climate change. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.
It is an unquestionable honor to have a Special Issue of a leading academic journal dedicated to one’s work. It is a sobering experience: an occasion when one is forced to evaluate how one has performed, and an occasion to acknowledge the work and contributions of many others who have shared the journey now being reflected upon. One might quail. Conscious of one’s limitations it might not be unreasonable to expect you, the reader, to echo Peggy Lee and say, “Is that all there is?” Or, like Balthazar, King of Babylon, to be told, “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting” (Daniel: 5: 25). Still, in the end, we can only do our best. Personally I believe I have focused and done my best, though the impact might not have been as great and consistent as it should have been. Excuses abound but what, in the end, do I want to see said? I have been asked to comment on the papers presented in this Special Issue. This is what this End Piece does. I have organized my comments in terms of several beliefs that underscore my approach to researching, teaching, and advising about the management of projects. I also point to trends in the discipline. First then some comments about the role of scholarship in general, which to me is extremely important, and the way we can speak about the discipline.
E-mail address: [email protected].
1. The discipline and scholarship I believe that there is a discipline of managing projects. A discipline is a set of processes and practices, founded on a proven knowledge base, that work in a predictable way. I believe that we can describe how best to manage projects so that they are accomplished successfully, although we have to be careful in operationalizing this statement. What, for example, do we mean by success? As Samset and Volden say in this Special Issue, it is “a highly complex and aggregated measure.” (I discuss it below.) In staking this claim for a discipline, I am also saying that I believe there is some truth, or there are some truths, about it and that scholarship has a responsibility to uncover, evaluate, and communicate these truths. Truth is a slippery concept though, and it sometimes changes. Truth in the social sciences is different from truth about the natural sciences. It is not independent of our values as natural science is. Knowledge about Management, our subject, critically depends on context. Nevertheless, there are things that can be said, practices that can be followed, that work in a largely predictable way. I believe that scholarship has an important role to play in situating, and in nuancing, what we believe these truths to be. And scholarship is not confined to academia: the values hold generally, though speediness might be as, or more, critical. A vital part of this scholarship is methodology. It is of fundamental importance in determining the reliability of the knowledge we might claim to have uncovered, as Bresnen in
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this Special Issue shows shows in his discussion of the Modes 1 and 2 means of generating knowledge (Nowotny et al., 2001, 2003; Gibbons, 1994) (academic originating and objective versus practitioner originated and reflexive: see Bresnen’s Table 1). (Project management is Mode 2.) Using an appropriate methodology is both obvious and yet is often poorly done. We should be careful in our use of so-called facts and rigorous in our evaluation and in formulating our recommendations (Morris, 2013: Chapter 18). While I believe our proffered knowledge should be empirically grounded, we should be critical of what we see. There is no point in offering evidence of supposed good practice when it is not. Facts need theory. They are seen through theory and they contribute to theory. We should judge critically whether the theoretical paradigm being used to interpret the proposed findings is appropriate. Applying the wrong theory will lead to suspect or mistaken conclusions. Thus, for example, the finding from some research a few years ago that senior executives don’t see project management as having a strategic role in their businesses could be explained in that the model of project management used, PM BOK, is highly execution oriented and not strategic enough (Thomas et al., 2002). Other models of the discipline might allow for a more welcoming conclusion. I believe, too, that we should always bear in mind the 'so what' question when reporting our research. We should try hard to distil the practical benefits of what we write and what we say, and we should be able to communicate in straightforward language. We should avoid building theoretical castles in the air which may sound learned but which really don’t help practitioners to perform better. Not only is Project Management contextual, as a discipline it is ‘situated.’ It was ‘invented not found.’ Pinto and Winch, in their Introduction to this Special Issue, refer to the normative, predictive nature of the early attempts to describe the knowledge needed to manage projects, implying perhaps that I am a critic of this and thus of Cleland & King’s 1968 classic book Systems Analysis and Project Management as well as of the PMBOK Guide® (2013) which followed 20 or more years later. It is true that I am a critic of the Guide in that, as George Hough and I showed in the Anatomy of Major Projects (1987), it doesn’t cover the range of knowledge areas that might be needed to manage projects successfully. But the authors could not really be blamed. They produced a description which reflected the times. The paradigm began to change only with the development of the much larger ‘management of projects’ framework (Morris, 1994) and with the advent of the so-called Scandinavian School in the 1990s (Morris, 2013: 67–70) with its interest in looking at what people really do and struggle with in managing projects, and asking why things had gone wrong, or right. 2. The life-cycle It is all very well going on about truths and knowledge but what is the discipline? Does it have a distinct functional—theoretical or skill-based—core? I believe it does. Traditionally, it is about integration: the integration of all that needs doing to develop and deliver projects successfully. And what is integration? At a
minimum, coordination and control (which means that much of its work will be multi- and inter-disciplinary); and it should be skilled in advancing through the life-cycle, knowing what needs doing as the project is developed and delivered. But I believe that the job of project management should be more than just integration. It should be about creating added value. Something again that Samset and Voden endorse: “Success as a generic term means to gain…added value.” Artto et al. in this Special Issue take this forward looking at different integration methods for enhancing value through linkages with operations—see below. And success? Well, there is no fixed definition but I would say 'achieving the objectives of the project sponsor' (Jugdev and Müller, 2005). And project (or program)? Surprisingly, this has proven to be a little more contentious. For me, and indeed for Winch and Leiringer in this Special Issue, a project is a temporary endeavor. (To define and achieve specific outcomes.) A program is a collection of projects sharing a common objective and possibly common resources. But what really distinguishes projects (and programs) from non-projects is that “all projects essentially evolve through the same life-cycle sequence…something like Concept, Feasibility Design, Execution, Commission” (Morris, 2013: 13). Many temporary organizations do not have this life-cycle base. Hence, “the field can no longer—if it ever could—be considered co-extensive with the field of temporary organization” (Winch, 2014). Without this life-cycle base—strictly, the product development life-cycle—it is hard, and makes little sense, to speak of 'the project front-end,' which, it is generally now accepted, is probably the single most important area of management focus in the management of projects. (The PMBOK Guide® is based on a cycle but it’s Deming’s ‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’ Cycle, not a product development life-cycle. Again, this means that the vitally important characteristics of the different stages of the project’s development fail to get articulated.) Pinto and Winch underscore this. As they put it in the Introduction, “A large and fruitful arena has been the opening in research on the front-end, definitional stage of projects; Morris’ position here has been widely accepted and nowhere seriously challenged. There is now a significant body around what has become known as the ‘shaping’ of project front ends, most of which draws explicitly on Morris’ seminal work.” But this said, why, why, do Samset and Volden insist on calling the project just that portion of the life-cycle that is the implementation stage, post-sanction approval, calling the pre-sanction stage various things: pre-project, front-end phase, project governance? It’s a major paradigm clash. I suspect they like to think of a project as an undertaking to achieve defined target and therefore believe that activity related to deciding what those targets should be must, by definition, be pre-project. I, on the other hand, believe that developing, optimizing, and agreeing those targets prior to beginning work to achieve them leads to better outcomes and is part of what constitutes a project. Also, philosophically, I subscribe to the view that the project as an entity exists even when only an idea—a Parmenidian view: just discussing it makes it, in a sense, real. I believe—in fact I know, looking at the statistics—that projects and their management are very important to society.
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Something like 18–22% of GDP in OECD countries is in fixed capital formation, i.e. largely projects. Add to this projects and programs for organizational change, new product development, software upgrades, movies, military exercises, and other life-cycle based undertakings, let alone the huge needs in non-OECD countries, and their contribution to societal health becomes clearly enormous. Yet in general, we lack good statistics on projects’ performance and their characteristics. (And/or we are sometimes careless in using them—I have seen data on project overruns stemming from the 1930s quoted as evidence that we don’t do well in managing projects!) That is why Samset and Volden’s paper is so valuable. Why in fact knowledge on how to manage projects is very important—though one might be excused for not thinking so to judge by the lack of overt attention it gets in the non-project management scholarly journals. 3. Knowledge We talk blithely about the body of knowledge and assume we are referring to the PMBOK Guide® but there are other bodies of knowledge (BOKs). As well as PMI, APM, IPMA, and ENAA have their own BOKs, and there are several other similar official guides such as OGC’s and ISO’s. Thin though its actual knowledge base might be, the PMBOK Guide® de facto outlines the scope of the knowledge that the profession—at least that part of the profession which is represented by PMI—thinks is special to it. That’s the principle of a profession’s body of knowledge anyway. In effect the BOK stakes out the discipline’s ontology. Of course holding the standard is not without its difficulties. Hodgson and Paton in this Special Issue examine the tensions that they see between a profession’s normalized view of its knowledge ‘standards’ and the fragmentation they believe to be inevitable as the knowledge gets applied, particularly via powerful firms or government and similar agencies—being localized versus being cosmopolitan (Gouldner:, 1957, 1958). This is important inter alia with respect to certification— 'credentialism' as Hodgson and Paton term it. How useful is a certificate of competence in project management? For me, the answer is not obvious but inclines toward the skeptical. Not only is there the local versus cosmopolitan tension, there are different types of knowledge in play—Aristotle’s episteme, techne, and phronesis, for example, ([natural] science based, skill based and analytical)—and there are different kinds of projects and project management challenges. Certification is unlikely to do harm but one may doubt how reliable a guarantee of competence it really could be. Project management bodies of knowledge vary in scope and nature and exist in many forms. In reality, there are vast receptacles of more sophisticated versions of the knowledge that might be needed to manage projects other than the professional societies’ BOKs. Some will be in hardened p.m. professionals’ minds, ready for enforcing with all the conviction of reacting to their last major intellectual event. (Bresnen emphasizes the impact that one or two leading figures can have on institutional standards.) Or it may be represented in a more considered manner by books, notes, lecturers, and colleagues as part of a university
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post-graduate degree program. Or it might be a firm-specific set of guidelines outlining 'how we manage projects.' Accessing this information, evaluating and communicating it—let alone formulating it—requires more than simply following the methodology steps of one of say ten topic areas. Reflection is needed, both by he who is to shape our knowledge and he (she) who is to learn it—in sense-making and sense-giving to use Fellows and Liu’s language in this Special Issue. We need to be clear on what kind of knowledge is to be learnt and what is the most appropriate means of learning it. The scholar has to work hard, for the leading knowledge generator in this field is rarely the academic but rather a practitioner. Mode 2 research, as Bresnen proposes for project management. The job of the academic is one of validation (Bresnen) and sense-making (Fellows and Liu): rigorously validating and making sense of the lessons to be learnt from the challenges faced by the practitioner community; and, with skill, may be helping the practitioner reflect on it, acknowledging and distilling out the effect of cultural schema on the normalization of p.m. knowledge. And communicating the new insight. A loftier version of the “ten topic methods” approach of the PMBOK Guide® is to base the needed knowledge—extant and evolving—on routines (Nelson and Winter, 1982). This is the approach taken by Davies and Brady for this Special Issue. They address the capabilities—virtually the operating procedures— that form the “distinctive knowledge required to undertake unit and batch production in projects.” But their paper switches to, and is soon more about, the management of the resources needed than about the knowledge needed. This will be hard going for many project and program managers, not least because few have much say in whether the firm should be undertaking an exploration or exploitation type project to develop their resource base, as Davies and Brady propose. Their job is to meet the owners’ objectives. Yet as Winter has pointed out, the ability to move pro-actively in shaping one’s capabilities and competencies and one’s use of exploratory as opposed to exploitative project management depends on where one is in the supply chain (Winter, 2003). A signaling provider, or a baggage-handling supplier, for example will have more freedom to behave pro-actively with regard to his resource base than might an owner or a Tier 1 supplier. They will have greater decision-making space. True, this sounds like something the portfolio management function should be advising on but while the emphasis on routines is useful, the 'either/or' binary contrast between exploration and exploitation seems false: most projects can’t afford not to have both. These ideas need testing in more run-of-the-mill medium-size projects I feel. 4. Roles Winch and Leiringer also take up the resource-based view of capabilities in their discussion of the “strong owner.” It is strange how other people see things differently! Winch and Leiringer acknowledge the importance of an effective owner as discussed in The Anatomy of Major Projects (Morris and Hough, 1987). In Reconstructing Project Management (Morris, 2013), I go to great lengths to emphasize the importance of the sponsor in the conduct
Please cite this article as: P.W.G. Morris, 2015. Reflections Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.08.001
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of a project’s evolution and management. The sponsor is, by definition, “a member of the Client organization” (ibid: 146); Figure 10.1 is titled “Owner/ supplier p.m. roles.” Thus, while agreeing whole-heartedly with their recommendations, I find it surprising to read that in Reconstructing Project Management the role of the strong owner is only discussed “in the context of legal and contractual matters—in effect the owner is reduced to a client as a mere contract giver—and not related to the discussions of stakeholder management, institutional context and project strategy.” If that is true, it is certainly not what I meant. If it is true, it is probably because I tend to see the functional need—for strategy, stakeholder management, risk management, etc., etc.—separately from the question of agency: who will actually perform the function. Thus, in my very early years as a researcher in the late 1960s/early 1970s, I saw the need in the construction industry for someone to act as the client’s manager of his overall project—something the architect or engineer was supposed to do but didn’t, at least in a pro-active manner (Morris, 1973). Who would do this would sort itself out, which it did. It's now called 'the project manager'! Meanwhile I concentrated on what needed doing—the function. So what happens now when the strong owner is not present? (I see it often and it is a root cause of much project difficulty.) If project management is truly to be a profession then a professional project manager ought to be able to advise, and if necessary act for, the owner on what he should be doing. In reality, however, insofar as many project management firms also act as contractors, they would find this difficult. The culture is different. (That’s why Bovis, a construction management company that had a long-term relationship with Marks & Spencer, the retailer, had a separate division exclusively for this work: to align culture.) And though there has been quite a deal of work showing why 'the body of knowledge' needs situating contextually (not just Fellows and Liu but also Hodgson and Paton in this Special Issue) there has so far at least been little on the hard issues associated with the ethics of professionalism. (Even despite the 2014 Special Issue of The International Journal of Managing Projects in Business (Vol. 5 (4).) For me, the owner—the client, the sponsor—and his needs are paramount. It’s his money we are spending. It’s a mind-set thing. Hence when Winch and Leiringer say, “We can infer that owners will need to ‘match’ suppliers’ commercial capabilities with their own,” philosophically I would immediately say it should be the other way around! (Though in practice it is a naive owner who deploys inferior resources to manage his contracts.) 5. People Klakegg, Williams, and Shiferaw in their informative paper in this Issue comparing governance frameworks for public sector projects in The Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom remark persistently on the effect of culture on implementing good practice. In fact, they go further, underscoring the role of personal skills, knowledge, and behaviors as well as individual goals and strategies: “despite…the positive impact in terms of professionalization and implementation of good practices, there will always be situations and/or individuals that are not right. The
suboptimization effect caused by humans chasing their own success, rather than that of society, will always be present.” Yes: ultimately, “projects are done by people, for people, through people.” And “one should never compromise on people, but one always does.” (Two of my home-made aphorisms!) People can ruin a project or make it great. Look what the impact of generating a high-performance team was on BP’s Andrew project. (Reconstructing Project Management: pages 79–80). Yet 'people' as a knowledge topic are not even mentioned in the PMBOK Guide®! One can sympathize: it is an immensely complex area. The literature on leadership alone is well over 2000 papers (Yukl, 1989). One can soon get lost in a forest of theories—theories which may not necessarily help. 6. Technology Many say that projects have defined beginnings and defined ends. Basically, they have to be right, but the issue can be subtle—a kind of quantum world of uncertainty and speed, birth and transfiguration! Both Artto, Ahola and Vartiainen’s, and Whyte, Stasis and Lindqvist’s papers illustrate how new developments are potentially changing the traditional norms of project management practice including when the project begins and ends. Whyte, Stasis, and Lindqvist describe the configuration management practices on three mega project-driven organizations: Airbus, CERN, and Crossrail. Much that they describe seems to have changed little since configuration management was first developed on the Atlas missile program in the mid 1950s (Morris, 2013: 32), but that little is changing. Partly this might be as information management moves further into using Agile development practices leading, inter alia, to more flexible change management. Partly it is developing from the dramatic increase in user analytics now becoming available, for example, on operating performance. (Google is collecting great globs of operational data on aspects of urban living—traffic, energy, construction, water, health, etc., for example—which can then be fed into projects (and research programs) for better modeling and massively enhanced intelligent briefing—Big Data meets Smart Cities!). Both examples are suggesting more flexible approaches to organizing projects, particularly in the front-end (Whyte and Levitt, 2011). Getting the definition of what is wanted for, and by, users is notoriously difficult, and as such is one of the principal drivers behind the emergence of Agile. Agile is another conundrum. It comes in several forms—SCRUM, XP, RUP, DSDM (Leffingwell, 2007). Most ignore the life-cycle basis of projects and are pre-eminently short duration focused: close user-developer coupling, time-boxing, prototyping, configuration management, etc. But ways are being found to incorporate its features within the higher-level disciplines of the management of projects. Anti-pathetic to those disciplines Agile may be, but we should remember that there are many projects that are small and short, either alone or as parts of larger projects, which in either case may benefit from incorporating aspects of Agile into their bigger frameworks (Serrador and Pinto, 2015). This is certainly an area that warrants more research and development. Artto, Ahola, and Vartiainen use systems theory to examine the role of Operations in the management of projects—an issue
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very similar to the management of requirements in systems engineering. There are all kinds of problems in integrating Ops’/ user data into the project: how accurately does it represent what the user really wants? Has Operations the budget, or people, to spend time working on the project? How do you avoid the temptation for Operations to indulge in a bit of gold-plating? And if there has to be a trade-off between capex spend and opex, who will make that decision? The sponsor? And where did he or she get the knowledge upon which to make that decision? All this, everything discussed so far in this paper, has called upon a wider, bigger, canvass on which to discuss the management of projects than many in the profession still employ today. Developing our understanding of this bigger area has been the essence of my work over the last 45 years and is most clearly represented by ‘The Management of Projects’ conception. 7. ‘The Management of Projects’, past, present, and future ‘The Management of Projects’ (Morris, 1994) was not ‘a theory.’ It was meant rather as a framework for doing what it says on the can: managing projects (and programs etc.). Many people now equate it with managing the front-end but it was meant to be broader than that. It certainly included the front-end and the project’s shaping (though this is a term I picked up only later from IPA (Merrow, 2011)). It also included influencing stakeholders, both positive and negative, to the project. And it included managing a whole range of topics external to the project (finance, regulatory, permitting, weather, geophysical), internal to it (technology, procurement, organization, people), or across both (governance, strategy). Most of these topics have their own well-rounded bodies of theory and in this sense ‘The Management of Projects' is pluralistic. All it does is deploy that base management function of integration across a multi-disciplinary context in an inter-disciplinary manner. And it works! I believe in the power of thinking in this way, with its emphasis on holism, on strategy, the front-end, technology, commercial matters, organization, and people. It doesn’t just unsettle a settled science, it leads to better projects. I believe my work on the historical origins of modern project management—‘modern’ as defined by the tools, techniques, and practices now used routinely by the p.m. professional bodies—is valuable. I like history. It is interesting and it illuminates the present. That is also why it should be of interest to other scholars of the domain. Yet, the Special Issue on it in this journal in 2013 (Vol. 31(5)) and the fascinating retrospective on classics in project management in The International Journal of Managing Projects in Business (Vol. 7 (4)) edited by Söderlund and Geraldi (2013) not withstanding, few have joined me in this area: but see Lenfle on Manhattan (2011), Johnson on Apollo (2001) and on Schriver (1997), while Söderlund (2002) and Bredillet et al. (2007) and Morris (2013): 110) have written on the evolution of ‘schools’ of project management. Looking at the history of the discipline helps us learn, puts things into perspective, provides depth, and sharpens accuracy. Scholarly history should be better informed and more accurate, and this should help us in making better decisions. Thus when the UK’s Royal Society calls for a “Global Apollo” program to develop low carbon fuels (King
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et al., 2015), one can readily see the flaws in the comparator, the Apollo Moon program—less obvious a single objective; no directed R&D; inadequate, piecemeal funding. But the Royal Society is right to make us look to the future. We shouldn’t dwell in the past. Mankind faces many serious threats and opportunities. Climate change, for example, is now inevitable and its impact will be huge. Crucially, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now persuaded most scientists and policy makers that the rise in carbon levels in the Earth’s atmosphere, and hence the ambient temperature of the planet, is due to the actions of man, but no one has yet developed an implementation plan to address the problem and its consequences, which will be serious. As a result of global warming, trillions of dollars will need spending to mitigate its effects and adapt our environment. And this will need doing on top of a huge necessary infrastructure spend—some $55 trillion over the next 30–35 years (McKinsey and Company, 2013). (Frankly, I question the figure, partly because it is based on previous years’ proportions of GDP spent on infrastructure. But there is now considerable built stock and we have no reliable idea of what new stock will really be required.) It seems to me that the discipline ought, if only ethically, to be involved in this discussion. Organizationally, for example, it soon becomes clear that there is no ‘strong owner’ acting as “the single point of integrative accountability” (Morris, 2013: 153). And on the other hand, the way we seek to address global warming will affect the way we see, define, use, and develop the discipline. We can’t afford not to be engaged in this era of planetary and societal change. 8. That’s it! To sum up! Lots have changed since modern project management was born in the mid 1950s. Lots in turn are changing yet. We now have a more rounded discipline. We understand better the differences in managing mega projects compared with managing smaller, more agile ones. We are more value oriented. Contracting and delivery are more often based on performance in operation. Delivery is often in terms of outcomes and services rather than outputs and products. Resources are more frequently procured and managed on a relationship basis. Public/private partnerships are increasingly being used to fund and manage what was previously just state-funded infrastructure. Important though project delivery is the locus of attention has grown to include managing the front-end development period and to encompass shaping, to the extent possible, the context in which the project will be approved and executed. So how do I feel about truth and the discipline now that we’ve reflected on the contributions to this Special Issue? Well, there are certainly still difficulties: we don’t have an adequate name for the discipline, we can’t agree the content of its distinctive body of knowledge, we lack reliable statistics on it, and we sometimes drift off into discussing theories that don’t seem very connected with its practice! And despite being the paradigm of choice for approximately 25% of national economic activity, in principle anyway, it is still hardly taken seriously by mainstream academia. Maybe the field is just too big and we should recognize the positives more in what we have achieved, as Bresnen suggests.
Please cite this article as: P.W.G. Morris, 2015. Reflections Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.08.001
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After all, we understand the front-end better. We can explain good practice in most aspects of the field. We are beginning to influence the shaping of national and international policies. Looking at the broad sweep of our accomplishments, I believe it’s clear: we are making progress! Let Klakegg et al. sum up on behalf of everyone who has contributed to this Special Issue: “Our main conclusion is positive: some of the challenges pointed out by Peter Morris and his colleagues as early as the 1980s have become manageable.” Amen to that! Let’s keep working at it! There’s more to come!! Conflict of interest statement The author declares no conflict of interest. References Bredillet, C., Anbari, F., Turner, R., 2007. Exploring research in project management: nine schools of project management research. Proj. Manag. J. 27, 4. Cleland, D.I., King, W.R., 1968. Systems Analysis and Project Management. McGraw-Hill, New York. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., Trow, M., 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. Sage, London. Gouldner, A.W., 1957. Cosmopolitans and locals: toward an analysis of latent social roles - I. Adm. Sci. Q. 2 (3), 281–306. Gouldner, A.W., 1958. Cosmopolitans and locals: toward an analysis of latent social roles - II. Adm. Sci. Q. 2 (4), 444–480. Johnson, S., 2001. Samuel Phillips and the taming of Apollo. Technol. Cult. 42 (4), 685–709. Jugdev, K., Müller, R., 2005. A retrospective look at our evolving understanding of project success. Proj. Manag. J. 36 (4), 19–31. King, F., Browne, J., Layard, R., O’Donnel, G., Rees, M., Stern, N., Turner, A., 2015. A Global Apollo Programme to Combat Climate Change. The Royal Society, London. Leffingwell, D., 2007. Scaling Software Agility. Addison-Wesley, Boston.
Lenfle, S., 2011. The strategy of parallel approaches in projects with unforeseeable uncertainty: the Manhattan case in retrospect. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 29 (4), 359-272. McKinsey & Company, 2013. Infrastructure Productivity: How to Save $1 Trillion a Year. McKinsey Global Institute. Merrow, E.W., 2011. Industrial Megaprojects: Concepts, Strategies, and Practices for Success. Wiley, Hoboken NJ. Morris, P.W.G., 1973. An organizational analysis of project management in the building industry. Build. Int. 6 (6), 595–616. Morris, P.W.G., 1994. The Management of Projects. Thomas Telford, London. Morris, P.W.G., 2013. Reconstructing Project Management. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. Morris, P.W.G., Hough, G.H., 1987. The Anatomy of Major Projects. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. Nelson, R.N., Winter, S.G., 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change Cambridge, Mass The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., Gibbons, M., 2001. Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press, Cambridge. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., Gibbons, M., 2003. ‘Mode 2’ revisited: the new production of knowledge. Minerva 41 (3), 179–194. Serrador, P., Pinto, J.K., 2015. Does Agile work? — A quantitative analysis of agile project success. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 33 (5), 1040–1051. Söderlund, J., 2002. On the development of project management research: schools of thought and critique. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 28 (1), 20–31. Thomas, J., Delisle, C., Jugdev, K., Buckle, P., 2002. Selling project management to senior executives – the case for avoiding crisis sales. Proj. Manag. J. 33 (2), 19–28. Whyte, J., Levitt, R., 2011. Information management and the management of projects. In: Morris, P.W.G., Pinto, J., Söderlund, J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Project Management. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 365–388. Winch, G.M., 2014. Three domains of project organising. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 32, 721–731. Winter, S.G., 2003. ̳Understanding dynamic capabilities. Strateg. Manag. J. 49 (8), 1402–1406. Yukl, G., 1989. Managerial leadership: a review of theory and research. J. Manag. 15 (2), 251–252.
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Reflections Peter W.G. Morris School of Construction and Project Management, UCL, London WC1E 7HB, UK
Abstract This paper reflects on the other papers published in this Festschrift for Peter Morris. It does so from Peter’s personal perspectives on the discipline of managing projects. It begins by discussing the role of scholarship in shaping the discipline. It emphasizes the importance of the frontend and relates this to the semantic difficulties associated with the term 'project'. The centrality of people and culture in general is noted. Types of knowledge and learning are discussed especially with regard to professionalism. Governance and the value of the owner’s role are noted. The developing impact of ICT, Operations and Agile are discussed. The benefits of a historical perspective on the discipline are proposed and prospects for the future are outlined, particularly with regard to climate change. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.
It is an unquestionable honor to have a Special Issue of a leading academic journal dedicated to one’s work. It is a sobering experience: an occasion when one is forced to evaluate how one has performed, and an occasion to acknowledge the work and contributions of many others who have shared the journey now being reflected upon. One might quail. Conscious of one’s limitations it might not be unreasonable to expect you, the reader, to echo Peggy Lee and say, “Is that all there is?” Or, like Balthazar, King of Babylon, to be told, “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting” (Daniel: 5: 25). Still, in the end, we can only do our best. Personally I believe I have focused and done my best, though the impact might not have been as great and consistent as it should have been. Excuses abound but what, in the end, do I want to see said? I have been asked to comment on the papers presented in this Special Issue. This is what this End Piece does. I have organized my comments in terms of several beliefs that underscore my approach to researching, teaching, and advising about the management of projects. I also point to trends in the discipline. First then some comments about the role of scholarship in general, which to me is extremely important, and the way we can speak about the discipline.
E-mail address: [email protected].
1. The discipline and scholarship I believe that there is a discipline of managing projects. A discipline is a set of processes and practices, founded on a proven knowledge base, that work in a predictable way. I believe that we can describe how best to manage projects so that they are accomplished successfully, although we have to be careful in operationalizing this statement. What, for example, do we mean by success? As Samset and Volden say in this Special Issue, it is “a highly complex and aggregated measure.” (I discuss it below.) In staking this claim for a discipline, I am also saying that I believe there is some truth, or there are some truths, about it and that scholarship has a responsibility to uncover, evaluate, and communicate these truths. Truth is a slippery concept though, and it sometimes changes. Truth in the social sciences is different from truth about the natural sciences. It is not independent of our values as natural science is. Knowledge about Management, our subject, critically depends on context. Nevertheless, there are things that can be said, practices that can be followed, that work in a largely predictable way. I believe that scholarship has an important role to play in situating, and in nuancing, what we believe these truths to be. And scholarship is not confined to academia: the values hold generally, though speediness might be as, or more, critical. A vital part of this scholarship is methodology. It is of fundamental importance in determining the reliability of the knowledge we might claim to have uncovered, as Bresnen in
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this Special Issue shows shows in his discussion of the Modes 1 and 2 means of generating knowledge (Nowotny et al., 2001, 2003; Gibbons, 1994) (academic originating and objective versus practitioner originated and reflexive: see Bresnen’s Table 1). (Project management is Mode 2.) Using an appropriate methodology is both obvious and yet is often poorly done. We should be careful in our use of so-called facts and rigorous in our evaluation and in formulating our recommendations (Morris, 2013: Chapter 18). While I believe our proffered knowledge should be empirically grounded, we should be critical of what we see. There is no point in offering evidence of supposed good practice when it is not. Facts need theory. They are seen through theory and they contribute to theory. We should judge critically whether the theoretical paradigm being used to interpret the proposed findings is appropriate. Applying the wrong theory will lead to suspect or mistaken conclusions. Thus, for example, the finding from some research a few years ago that senior executives don’t see project management as having a strategic role in their businesses could be explained in that the model of project management used, PM BOK, is highly execution oriented and not strategic enough (Thomas et al., 2002). Other models of the discipline might allow for a more welcoming conclusion. I believe, too, that we should always bear in mind the 'so what' question when reporting our research. We should try hard to distil the practical benefits of what we write and what we say, and we should be able to communicate in straightforward language. We should avoid building theoretical castles in the air which may sound learned but which really don’t help practitioners to perform better. Not only is Project Management contextual, as a discipline it is ‘situated.’ It was ‘invented not found.’ Pinto and Winch, in their Introduction to this Special Issue, refer to the normative, predictive nature of the early attempts to describe the knowledge needed to manage projects, implying perhaps that I am a critic of this and thus of Cleland & King’s 1968 classic book Systems Analysis and Project Management as well as of the PMBOK Guide® (2013) which followed 20 or more years later. It is true that I am a critic of the Guide in that, as George Hough and I showed in the Anatomy of Major Projects (1987), it doesn’t cover the range of knowledge areas that might be needed to manage projects successfully. But the authors could not really be blamed. They produced a description which reflected the times. The paradigm began to change only with the development of the much larger ‘management of projects’ framework (Morris, 1994) and with the advent of the so-called Scandinavian School in the 1990s (Morris, 2013: 67–70) with its interest in looking at what people really do and struggle with in managing projects, and asking why things had gone wrong, or right. 2. The life-cycle It is all very well going on about truths and knowledge but what is the discipline? Does it have a distinct functional—theoretical or skill-based—core? I believe it does. Traditionally, it is about integration: the integration of all that needs doing to develop and deliver projects successfully. And what is integration? At a
minimum, coordination and control (which means that much of its work will be multi- and inter-disciplinary); and it should be skilled in advancing through the life-cycle, knowing what needs doing as the project is developed and delivered. But I believe that the job of project management should be more than just integration. It should be about creating added value. Something again that Samset and Voden endorse: “Success as a generic term means to gain…added value.” Artto et al. in this Special Issue take this forward looking at different integration methods for enhancing value through linkages with operations—see below. And success? Well, there is no fixed definition but I would say 'achieving the objectives of the project sponsor' (Jugdev and Müller, 2005). And project (or program)? Surprisingly, this has proven to be a little more contentious. For me, and indeed for Winch and Leiringer in this Special Issue, a project is a temporary endeavor. (To define and achieve specific outcomes.) A program is a collection of projects sharing a common objective and possibly common resources. But what really distinguishes projects (and programs) from non-projects is that “all projects essentially evolve through the same life-cycle sequence…something like Concept, Feasibility Design, Execution, Commission” (Morris, 2013: 13). Many temporary organizations do not have this life-cycle base. Hence, “the field can no longer—if it ever could—be considered co-extensive with the field of temporary organization” (Winch, 2014). Without this life-cycle base—strictly, the product development life-cycle—it is hard, and makes little sense, to speak of 'the project front-end,' which, it is generally now accepted, is probably the single most important area of management focus in the management of projects. (The PMBOK Guide® is based on a cycle but it’s Deming’s ‘Plan-Do-Check-Act’ Cycle, not a product development life-cycle. Again, this means that the vitally important characteristics of the different stages of the project’s development fail to get articulated.) Pinto and Winch underscore this. As they put it in the Introduction, “A large and fruitful arena has been the opening in research on the front-end, definitional stage of projects; Morris’ position here has been widely accepted and nowhere seriously challenged. There is now a significant body around what has become known as the ‘shaping’ of project front ends, most of which draws explicitly on Morris’ seminal work.” But this said, why, why, do Samset and Volden insist on calling the project just that portion of the life-cycle that is the implementation stage, post-sanction approval, calling the pre-sanction stage various things: pre-project, front-end phase, project governance? It’s a major paradigm clash. I suspect they like to think of a project as an undertaking to achieve defined target and therefore believe that activity related to deciding what those targets should be must, by definition, be pre-project. I, on the other hand, believe that developing, optimizing, and agreeing those targets prior to beginning work to achieve them leads to better outcomes and is part of what constitutes a project. Also, philosophically, I subscribe to the view that the project as an entity exists even when only an idea—a Parmenidian view: just discussing it makes it, in a sense, real. I believe—in fact I know, looking at the statistics—that projects and their management are very important to society.
Please cite this article as: P.W.G. Morris, 2015. Reflections Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.08.001
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Something like 18–22% of GDP in OECD countries is in fixed capital formation, i.e. largely projects. Add to this projects and programs for organizational change, new product development, software upgrades, movies, military exercises, and other life-cycle based undertakings, let alone the huge needs in non-OECD countries, and their contribution to societal health becomes clearly enormous. Yet in general, we lack good statistics on projects’ performance and their characteristics. (And/or we are sometimes careless in using them—I have seen data on project overruns stemming from the 1930s quoted as evidence that we don’t do well in managing projects!) That is why Samset and Volden’s paper is so valuable. Why in fact knowledge on how to manage projects is very important—though one might be excused for not thinking so to judge by the lack of overt attention it gets in the non-project management scholarly journals. 3. Knowledge We talk blithely about the body of knowledge and assume we are referring to the PMBOK Guide® but there are other bodies of knowledge (BOKs). As well as PMI, APM, IPMA, and ENAA have their own BOKs, and there are several other similar official guides such as OGC’s and ISO’s. Thin though its actual knowledge base might be, the PMBOK Guide® de facto outlines the scope of the knowledge that the profession—at least that part of the profession which is represented by PMI—thinks is special to it. That’s the principle of a profession’s body of knowledge anyway. In effect the BOK stakes out the discipline’s ontology. Of course holding the standard is not without its difficulties. Hodgson and Paton in this Special Issue examine the tensions that they see between a profession’s normalized view of its knowledge ‘standards’ and the fragmentation they believe to be inevitable as the knowledge gets applied, particularly via powerful firms or government and similar agencies—being localized versus being cosmopolitan (Gouldner:, 1957, 1958). This is important inter alia with respect to certification— 'credentialism' as Hodgson and Paton term it. How useful is a certificate of competence in project management? For me, the answer is not obvious but inclines toward the skeptical. Not only is there the local versus cosmopolitan tension, there are different types of knowledge in play—Aristotle’s episteme, techne, and phronesis, for example, ([natural] science based, skill based and analytical)—and there are different kinds of projects and project management challenges. Certification is unlikely to do harm but one may doubt how reliable a guarantee of competence it really could be. Project management bodies of knowledge vary in scope and nature and exist in many forms. In reality, there are vast receptacles of more sophisticated versions of the knowledge that might be needed to manage projects other than the professional societies’ BOKs. Some will be in hardened p.m. professionals’ minds, ready for enforcing with all the conviction of reacting to their last major intellectual event. (Bresnen emphasizes the impact that one or two leading figures can have on institutional standards.) Or it may be represented in a more considered manner by books, notes, lecturers, and colleagues as part of a university
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post-graduate degree program. Or it might be a firm-specific set of guidelines outlining 'how we manage projects.' Accessing this information, evaluating and communicating it—let alone formulating it—requires more than simply following the methodology steps of one of say ten topic areas. Reflection is needed, both by he who is to shape our knowledge and he (she) who is to learn it—in sense-making and sense-giving to use Fellows and Liu’s language in this Special Issue. We need to be clear on what kind of knowledge is to be learnt and what is the most appropriate means of learning it. The scholar has to work hard, for the leading knowledge generator in this field is rarely the academic but rather a practitioner. Mode 2 research, as Bresnen proposes for project management. The job of the academic is one of validation (Bresnen) and sense-making (Fellows and Liu): rigorously validating and making sense of the lessons to be learnt from the challenges faced by the practitioner community; and, with skill, may be helping the practitioner reflect on it, acknowledging and distilling out the effect of cultural schema on the normalization of p.m. knowledge. And communicating the new insight. A loftier version of the “ten topic methods” approach of the PMBOK Guide® is to base the needed knowledge—extant and evolving—on routines (Nelson and Winter, 1982). This is the approach taken by Davies and Brady for this Special Issue. They address the capabilities—virtually the operating procedures— that form the “distinctive knowledge required to undertake unit and batch production in projects.” But their paper switches to, and is soon more about, the management of the resources needed than about the knowledge needed. This will be hard going for many project and program managers, not least because few have much say in whether the firm should be undertaking an exploration or exploitation type project to develop their resource base, as Davies and Brady propose. Their job is to meet the owners’ objectives. Yet as Winter has pointed out, the ability to move pro-actively in shaping one’s capabilities and competencies and one’s use of exploratory as opposed to exploitative project management depends on where one is in the supply chain (Winter, 2003). A signaling provider, or a baggage-handling supplier, for example will have more freedom to behave pro-actively with regard to his resource base than might an owner or a Tier 1 supplier. They will have greater decision-making space. True, this sounds like something the portfolio management function should be advising on but while the emphasis on routines is useful, the 'either/or' binary contrast between exploration and exploitation seems false: most projects can’t afford not to have both. These ideas need testing in more run-of-the-mill medium-size projects I feel. 4. Roles Winch and Leiringer also take up the resource-based view of capabilities in their discussion of the “strong owner.” It is strange how other people see things differently! Winch and Leiringer acknowledge the importance of an effective owner as discussed in The Anatomy of Major Projects (Morris and Hough, 1987). In Reconstructing Project Management (Morris, 2013), I go to great lengths to emphasize the importance of the sponsor in the conduct
Please cite this article as: P.W.G. Morris, 2015. Reflections Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.08.001
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of a project’s evolution and management. The sponsor is, by definition, “a member of the Client organization” (ibid: 146); Figure 10.1 is titled “Owner/ supplier p.m. roles.” Thus, while agreeing whole-heartedly with their recommendations, I find it surprising to read that in Reconstructing Project Management the role of the strong owner is only discussed “in the context of legal and contractual matters—in effect the owner is reduced to a client as a mere contract giver—and not related to the discussions of stakeholder management, institutional context and project strategy.” If that is true, it is certainly not what I meant. If it is true, it is probably because I tend to see the functional need—for strategy, stakeholder management, risk management, etc., etc.—separately from the question of agency: who will actually perform the function. Thus, in my very early years as a researcher in the late 1960s/early 1970s, I saw the need in the construction industry for someone to act as the client’s manager of his overall project—something the architect or engineer was supposed to do but didn’t, at least in a pro-active manner (Morris, 1973). Who would do this would sort itself out, which it did. It's now called 'the project manager'! Meanwhile I concentrated on what needed doing—the function. So what happens now when the strong owner is not present? (I see it often and it is a root cause of much project difficulty.) If project management is truly to be a profession then a professional project manager ought to be able to advise, and if necessary act for, the owner on what he should be doing. In reality, however, insofar as many project management firms also act as contractors, they would find this difficult. The culture is different. (That’s why Bovis, a construction management company that had a long-term relationship with Marks & Spencer, the retailer, had a separate division exclusively for this work: to align culture.) And though there has been quite a deal of work showing why 'the body of knowledge' needs situating contextually (not just Fellows and Liu but also Hodgson and Paton in this Special Issue) there has so far at least been little on the hard issues associated with the ethics of professionalism. (Even despite the 2014 Special Issue of The International Journal of Managing Projects in Business (Vol. 5 (4).) For me, the owner—the client, the sponsor—and his needs are paramount. It’s his money we are spending. It’s a mind-set thing. Hence when Winch and Leiringer say, “We can infer that owners will need to ‘match’ suppliers’ commercial capabilities with their own,” philosophically I would immediately say it should be the other way around! (Though in practice it is a naive owner who deploys inferior resources to manage his contracts.) 5. People Klakegg, Williams, and Shiferaw in their informative paper in this Issue comparing governance frameworks for public sector projects in The Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom remark persistently on the effect of culture on implementing good practice. In fact, they go further, underscoring the role of personal skills, knowledge, and behaviors as well as individual goals and strategies: “despite…the positive impact in terms of professionalization and implementation of good practices, there will always be situations and/or individuals that are not right. The
suboptimization effect caused by humans chasing their own success, rather than that of society, will always be present.” Yes: ultimately, “projects are done by people, for people, through people.” And “one should never compromise on people, but one always does.” (Two of my home-made aphorisms!) People can ruin a project or make it great. Look what the impact of generating a high-performance team was on BP’s Andrew project. (Reconstructing Project Management: pages 79–80). Yet 'people' as a knowledge topic are not even mentioned in the PMBOK Guide®! One can sympathize: it is an immensely complex area. The literature on leadership alone is well over 2000 papers (Yukl, 1989). One can soon get lost in a forest of theories—theories which may not necessarily help. 6. Technology Many say that projects have defined beginnings and defined ends. Basically, they have to be right, but the issue can be subtle—a kind of quantum world of uncertainty and speed, birth and transfiguration! Both Artto, Ahola and Vartiainen’s, and Whyte, Stasis and Lindqvist’s papers illustrate how new developments are potentially changing the traditional norms of project management practice including when the project begins and ends. Whyte, Stasis, and Lindqvist describe the configuration management practices on three mega project-driven organizations: Airbus, CERN, and Crossrail. Much that they describe seems to have changed little since configuration management was first developed on the Atlas missile program in the mid 1950s (Morris, 2013: 32), but that little is changing. Partly this might be as information management moves further into using Agile development practices leading, inter alia, to more flexible change management. Partly it is developing from the dramatic increase in user analytics now becoming available, for example, on operating performance. (Google is collecting great globs of operational data on aspects of urban living—traffic, energy, construction, water, health, etc., for example—which can then be fed into projects (and research programs) for better modeling and massively enhanced intelligent briefing—Big Data meets Smart Cities!). Both examples are suggesting more flexible approaches to organizing projects, particularly in the front-end (Whyte and Levitt, 2011). Getting the definition of what is wanted for, and by, users is notoriously difficult, and as such is one of the principal drivers behind the emergence of Agile. Agile is another conundrum. It comes in several forms—SCRUM, XP, RUP, DSDM (Leffingwell, 2007). Most ignore the life-cycle basis of projects and are pre-eminently short duration focused: close user-developer coupling, time-boxing, prototyping, configuration management, etc. But ways are being found to incorporate its features within the higher-level disciplines of the management of projects. Anti-pathetic to those disciplines Agile may be, but we should remember that there are many projects that are small and short, either alone or as parts of larger projects, which in either case may benefit from incorporating aspects of Agile into their bigger frameworks (Serrador and Pinto, 2015). This is certainly an area that warrants more research and development. Artto, Ahola, and Vartiainen use systems theory to examine the role of Operations in the management of projects—an issue
Please cite this article as: P.W.G. Morris, 2015. Reflections Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.08.001
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very similar to the management of requirements in systems engineering. There are all kinds of problems in integrating Ops’/ user data into the project: how accurately does it represent what the user really wants? Has Operations the budget, or people, to spend time working on the project? How do you avoid the temptation for Operations to indulge in a bit of gold-plating? And if there has to be a trade-off between capex spend and opex, who will make that decision? The sponsor? And where did he or she get the knowledge upon which to make that decision? All this, everything discussed so far in this paper, has called upon a wider, bigger, canvass on which to discuss the management of projects than many in the profession still employ today. Developing our understanding of this bigger area has been the essence of my work over the last 45 years and is most clearly represented by ‘The Management of Projects’ conception. 7. ‘The Management of Projects’, past, present, and future ‘The Management of Projects’ (Morris, 1994) was not ‘a theory.’ It was meant rather as a framework for doing what it says on the can: managing projects (and programs etc.). Many people now equate it with managing the front-end but it was meant to be broader than that. It certainly included the front-end and the project’s shaping (though this is a term I picked up only later from IPA (Merrow, 2011)). It also included influencing stakeholders, both positive and negative, to the project. And it included managing a whole range of topics external to the project (finance, regulatory, permitting, weather, geophysical), internal to it (technology, procurement, organization, people), or across both (governance, strategy). Most of these topics have their own well-rounded bodies of theory and in this sense ‘The Management of Projects' is pluralistic. All it does is deploy that base management function of integration across a multi-disciplinary context in an inter-disciplinary manner. And it works! I believe in the power of thinking in this way, with its emphasis on holism, on strategy, the front-end, technology, commercial matters, organization, and people. It doesn’t just unsettle a settled science, it leads to better projects. I believe my work on the historical origins of modern project management—‘modern’ as defined by the tools, techniques, and practices now used routinely by the p.m. professional bodies—is valuable. I like history. It is interesting and it illuminates the present. That is also why it should be of interest to other scholars of the domain. Yet, the Special Issue on it in this journal in 2013 (Vol. 31(5)) and the fascinating retrospective on classics in project management in The International Journal of Managing Projects in Business (Vol. 7 (4)) edited by Söderlund and Geraldi (2013) not withstanding, few have joined me in this area: but see Lenfle on Manhattan (2011), Johnson on Apollo (2001) and on Schriver (1997), while Söderlund (2002) and Bredillet et al. (2007) and Morris (2013): 110) have written on the evolution of ‘schools’ of project management. Looking at the history of the discipline helps us learn, puts things into perspective, provides depth, and sharpens accuracy. Scholarly history should be better informed and more accurate, and this should help us in making better decisions. Thus when the UK’s Royal Society calls for a “Global Apollo” program to develop low carbon fuels (King
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et al., 2015), one can readily see the flaws in the comparator, the Apollo Moon program—less obvious a single objective; no directed R&D; inadequate, piecemeal funding. But the Royal Society is right to make us look to the future. We shouldn’t dwell in the past. Mankind faces many serious threats and opportunities. Climate change, for example, is now inevitable and its impact will be huge. Crucially, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now persuaded most scientists and policy makers that the rise in carbon levels in the Earth’s atmosphere, and hence the ambient temperature of the planet, is due to the actions of man, but no one has yet developed an implementation plan to address the problem and its consequences, which will be serious. As a result of global warming, trillions of dollars will need spending to mitigate its effects and adapt our environment. And this will need doing on top of a huge necessary infrastructure spend—some $55 trillion over the next 30–35 years (McKinsey and Company, 2013). (Frankly, I question the figure, partly because it is based on previous years’ proportions of GDP spent on infrastructure. But there is now considerable built stock and we have no reliable idea of what new stock will really be required.) It seems to me that the discipline ought, if only ethically, to be involved in this discussion. Organizationally, for example, it soon becomes clear that there is no ‘strong owner’ acting as “the single point of integrative accountability” (Morris, 2013: 153). And on the other hand, the way we seek to address global warming will affect the way we see, define, use, and develop the discipline. We can’t afford not to be engaged in this era of planetary and societal change. 8. That’s it! To sum up! Lots have changed since modern project management was born in the mid 1950s. Lots in turn are changing yet. We now have a more rounded discipline. We understand better the differences in managing mega projects compared with managing smaller, more agile ones. We are more value oriented. Contracting and delivery are more often based on performance in operation. Delivery is often in terms of outcomes and services rather than outputs and products. Resources are more frequently procured and managed on a relationship basis. Public/private partnerships are increasingly being used to fund and manage what was previously just state-funded infrastructure. Important though project delivery is the locus of attention has grown to include managing the front-end development period and to encompass shaping, to the extent possible, the context in which the project will be approved and executed. So how do I feel about truth and the discipline now that we’ve reflected on the contributions to this Special Issue? Well, there are certainly still difficulties: we don’t have an adequate name for the discipline, we can’t agree the content of its distinctive body of knowledge, we lack reliable statistics on it, and we sometimes drift off into discussing theories that don’t seem very connected with its practice! And despite being the paradigm of choice for approximately 25% of national economic activity, in principle anyway, it is still hardly taken seriously by mainstream academia. Maybe the field is just too big and we should recognize the positives more in what we have achieved, as Bresnen suggests.
Please cite this article as: P.W.G. Morris, 2015. Reflections Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.08.001
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After all, we understand the front-end better. We can explain good practice in most aspects of the field. We are beginning to influence the shaping of national and international policies. Looking at the broad sweep of our accomplishments, I believe it’s clear: we are making progress! Let Klakegg et al. sum up on behalf of everyone who has contributed to this Special Issue: “Our main conclusion is positive: some of the challenges pointed out by Peter Morris and his colleagues as early as the 1980s have become manageable.” Amen to that! Let’s keep working at it! There’s more to come!! Conflict of interest statement The author declares no conflict of interest. References Bredillet, C., Anbari, F., Turner, R., 2007. Exploring research in project management: nine schools of project management research. Proj. Manag. J. 27, 4. Cleland, D.I., King, W.R., 1968. Systems Analysis and Project Management. McGraw-Hill, New York. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., Trow, M., 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. Sage, London. Gouldner, A.W., 1957. Cosmopolitans and locals: toward an analysis of latent social roles - I. Adm. Sci. Q. 2 (3), 281–306. Gouldner, A.W., 1958. Cosmopolitans and locals: toward an analysis of latent social roles - II. Adm. Sci. Q. 2 (4), 444–480. Johnson, S., 2001. Samuel Phillips and the taming of Apollo. Technol. Cult. 42 (4), 685–709. Jugdev, K., Müller, R., 2005. A retrospective look at our evolving understanding of project success. Proj. Manag. J. 36 (4), 19–31. King, F., Browne, J., Layard, R., O’Donnel, G., Rees, M., Stern, N., Turner, A., 2015. A Global Apollo Programme to Combat Climate Change. The Royal Society, London. Leffingwell, D., 2007. Scaling Software Agility. Addison-Wesley, Boston.
Lenfle, S., 2011. The strategy of parallel approaches in projects with unforeseeable uncertainty: the Manhattan case in retrospect. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 29 (4), 359-272. McKinsey & Company, 2013. Infrastructure Productivity: How to Save $1 Trillion a Year. McKinsey Global Institute. Merrow, E.W., 2011. Industrial Megaprojects: Concepts, Strategies, and Practices for Success. Wiley, Hoboken NJ. Morris, P.W.G., 1973. An organizational analysis of project management in the building industry. Build. Int. 6 (6), 595–616. Morris, P.W.G., 1994. The Management of Projects. Thomas Telford, London. Morris, P.W.G., 2013. Reconstructing Project Management. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. Morris, P.W.G., Hough, G.H., 1987. The Anatomy of Major Projects. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester. Nelson, R.N., Winter, S.G., 1982. An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change Cambridge, Mass The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., Gibbons, M., 2001. Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity Press, Cambridge. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., Gibbons, M., 2003. ‘Mode 2’ revisited: the new production of knowledge. Minerva 41 (3), 179–194. Serrador, P., Pinto, J.K., 2015. Does Agile work? — A quantitative analysis of agile project success. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 33 (5), 1040–1051. Söderlund, J., 2002. On the development of project management research: schools of thought and critique. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 28 (1), 20–31. Thomas, J., Delisle, C., Jugdev, K., Buckle, P., 2002. Selling project management to senior executives – the case for avoiding crisis sales. Proj. Manag. J. 33 (2), 19–28. Whyte, J., Levitt, R., 2011. Information management and the management of projects. In: Morris, P.W.G., Pinto, J., Söderlund, J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Project Management. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 365–388. Winch, G.M., 2014. Three domains of project organising. Int. J. Proj. Manag. 32, 721–731. Winter, S.G., 2003. ̳Understanding dynamic capabilities. Strateg. Manag. J. 49 (8), 1402–1406. Yukl, G., 1989. Managerial leadership: a review of theory and research. J. Manag. 15 (2), 251–252.
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