Project Management Journal

Following contemporary development in which most temporary, focused, and organized endeavors can be regarded as a project and studied as a temporary organization, here we ask: How can these phenomena be defined without hindering pluralism in understanding, development, and theorizing? Based on the notions of family resemblance—the idea that it is not a specific trait, but a variety of traits that are shared by some, but not all, members of a family—we propose a new dynamic framework we believe is useful in advancing the studies of projects and temporary organizations toward more opportunities for rigorous theorizing.

This article aims at understanding organizational change through the study of project management office (PMO) transformations. This article suggests that performance resulting from a PMO transformation is moderated by the organizational context, change management, and by changes in coordination mechanisms—control or service orientation. This exploratory study adopted a quantitative methodology involving a sample of 184 PMO changes. It confirms the multifaceted nature of the context involved in a PMO transformation. External events play a key role in triggering change and improving performance. Key findings suggest that increasing the PMO's supportive role improves project performance, business performance, and project management maturity. Conversely, increasing the PMO's control role does not improve performance. This study's major contribution is to provide some empirical evidence concerning organizational change management.

Executive sponsorship is critical to project success; however, the impact of the sponsorship role on project management value and sustainability is not known. Using correlation analysis we examine survey responses from 91 U.S. executives. Formalizing and providing training on the sponsorship role and responsibilities are both significantly related to senior management's perception of the sustainability of project management value. Unexpectedly, no significant relationship exists between the prevalence of the sponsorship role and project management value outcomes. These results extend our understanding of the importance of the sponsorship role and provide practical guidance for those seeking to improve the sustainability of project management value.

Many companies struggle with effective and efficient accomplishment of enterprise application integration (EAI), resulting in significant time and budget overruns. Concerning project management, a major reason for failure is considered to be effort underestimation. This underestimation is an aftermath of applying estimation methods that do not account for all relevant factors influencing EAI project effort. Applying the Repertory Grid Technique, we explore factors affecting the effort of such projects by conducting 22 semi-structured expert interviews. We provide an extensive overview of 91 effort-influencing factors and their classification in nine categories, which can be used as a checklist in EAI projects.

In this study we investigate what software development project team members consider to be a good project manager. Previous research has been carried out using project manager self-assessments, other project stakeholder views, or recruiters’ views. This qualitative study used the repertory grid technique to identify the characteristics that project team members associate with a good project manager. This technique has been adopted because of its strength in eliciting personal constructs. Among the 18 characteristics identified, the seven most relevant were classified and compared with previous findings, which reveals differences between the team members’ and project managers’ and other stakeholders’ perceptions. Those findings complement the existing skill set and could be considered when recruiting and training project managers and staffing projects.

This article proposes a probabilistic approach to project operational risk and project portfolio risk diversification. The analysis rests on a fundamental distinction between a fractional and an additive approach for constructing portfolios. Since the additive approach excludes variance as a measure of risk, the project's operational risk is defined by its probability of loss. Paradoxically, the effectiveness of any firm's portfolio risk diversification process will be negatively related to the operational risk of its representative project. We also present the conditions under which risk management and efficiency management can contribute to the firm's strategic imperative of lowering its operational risk.

Knowledge sharing is a precondition for engineering project design teams to achieve an efficient design; however, designers are not always willing to share knowledge with other team members. To improve knowledge sharing, this article investigates the effect of knowledge leadership on knowledge sharing in engineering project design teams by examining the role of social capital. Our results show a significant indirect effect of knowledge leadership on knowledge sharing through the mediating role of social capital. Therefore, effective knowledge sharing depends on knowledge leaders to develop a share vision, and promote a trustworthy and collaborative environment for designers.