Project Management Journal

Project Management Journal, Vol. 47, No. 5, 3–5

From the Editor
Hans Georg Gemünden, Dr. rer. oec. habil., Dr. h.c. rer. oec. et soc.,
Professor of Project Management, BI – Norwegian Business
School Department of Leadership & Organization, Oslo, Norway

Project Networks—An Important—But Still Under-Researched Topic in
Project Management Research

We are living in an interconnected world and this has clear implications for project management. A recent trend study from Schoper, Gemünden, and Nguyen (2016) showed that experienced practitioners and academic researchers participating in this survey expected an increase in globally dispersed project teams until 2025, using new means for their virtual communication, and requiring a higher level of interpersonal and intercultural skills. According to this study, projects will become even more complex, leading to a higher level of professionalization of project management, an increasing need for better governance of publicly financed projects, and more project-oriented organizations with higher levels of individual and organizational project management competences. The study also indicates that projects will be assessed as project businesses, which are done together with other partners in complex business ecologies, in order to develop and deliver innovative complex integrated solutions. This means that in an interconnected world of open innovation, an increasing share of value creation will be organized in the form of a project network.

Project management research does not yet reflect this increasing importance of value creation by project networks. An analysis of the unit of analysis used in project management research articles published in the years 2000 through 2011 in the International Journal of Project Management® and Project Management Journal ®, by former PhD students at TU Berlin, Drs. Ekrot, Kock, and Kopmann, and myself show that there is a trend to analyze project networks more often. Compared with single projects or the project-oriented organization, however, the overall share is still very small (see Table 1). I searched the home pages of both journals for the years following 2011 and found only eight articles on project networks in the Project Management Journal ® and 16 in the International Journal of Project Management ®. This indicates a further increasing trend, but projects are still seldom conceptualized as networks—despite the fact that not only megaprojects are offered by large inter-organizational networks. Rather, the development of mass-customized products and services occurs also very often in globally cooperating inter-organizational networks.

These findings indicate a gap between theory and prac-
tice, which leads to a call for a special issue on projects as
networks. This special issue is edited by Robert DeFillippi,
Stephen Pryke, Jörg Sydow, and John Steen. I have also
invited Robert DeFillippi and Jörg Sydow to write an invited
article as a guiding contribution for this special issue.

The article from Robert DeFillippi and Jörg Sydow on “Project Networks: Governance Choices and Paradoxical Tensions” is the first article in this issue. It examines project networks as either a single inter-organizational project or as a series of projects interconnected by inter-organizational relationships. In the first case, such a project is clearly a temporary organization. In the second case, which occurs very often in practice, the project is temporary, but the context of the project is characterized by the long-term stable business relationships of partners, who repeatedly do business together, have invested in their relationships, and have adapted to each other. Therefore, the authors conceptualize project networks as more than temporary systems. In the following chapter, the authors elaborate on some core theoretic assumptions about project networks compared with the extant empirical research:

1. No single actor may act as a legitimate authority for the network as a whole.

2. There are no definite criteria by which the boundary of the network may be identified and controlled.

3. Each project is temporally limited and dynamically changing and (partially) reconstructed from one project to the next.

Next, the article presents four types (the four R’s) of mechanisms for governing not only projects but also project networks: responsibilities, routines, roles, and relationships. Finally, the article unearths five types of paradoxes (the distance paradox, the learning paradox, the identity paradox, the difference paradox, and the temporal paradox) impacting project networks and offers insights into the governance-based choices available for coping with these paradoxical tensions.

Personally, I would add a fifth “R” to the governing mech-
anisms and these are shared resources. Shared resources,
which are only available to (core) members of a project
network, generate a competitive advantage vis-à-vis all the
actors not parts of this network, but they can also create path
dependencies and lock-in effects. In addition, the partners
may decide which resources they want to share, and which
they want to keep exclusively for themselves or for partners
© 2013 by the Project Management Institute
Published online in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI: 10.1002/pmj.21383

First, I want to share some very good news with the project management research community and all our readers interested in project management research. The deadline for the submission of papers to the PMI research conference has been prolongated to 13 January 2014.

The PMI® Research and Education Conference, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: In Search of Theory and Evidence” will be held on 27–29 July 2014 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

We welcome conceptual, empirical, or theoretical work using project, program, or portfolio management as the subject or context of the research. PMI also solicits papers and symposia on project management education; doctoral students are encouraged to submit their work to the pre-conference doctoral colloquium. For submission guidelines and instructions, please contact PMI.org/REC2014submit. Conference registration is scheduled to open March 2014 and details can be found on PMI.org/REC2014.

The December issue of Project Management Journal® offers a rich variety of articles, each of which delivers a significant contribution to theory building in project organizing and new empirical findings with a high value of theory and practice. The first paper by Dietrich, Kujala, and Artto addresses a fundamental organizational design question in project management: How should the interdependencies between different teams in a multi-team project be managed? There are many different coordination mechanisms, but each of them has its advantages and drawbacks and they can be combined in different ways, which differ in terms of coherence and potential synergies. The organizational design reflections stated in this article can also be used for the management of programs consisting of an array of different projects or for the management of a project portfolio in which the management of interdependencies between projects is also a critical challenge.

The management of interdependencies between proj-
ects is an issue that has been neglected in multi-project
management. Very often the interdependence is restricted
to resource conflicts between projects and the solution is to
identify the bottleneck resources and the projects that con-
flict with one bottleneck resource. The solution to this prob-
lem is often a muddling-through approach that delivers an
immediate solution, yet doesn’t acknowledge that typically
there are too many projects occurring at the same time, and
that an organization usually experiences a number of bottle-
necks simultaneously. This bottleneck obstacle makes it dif-
ficult to assess the consequences of measures that have been
taken to repair an immediate problem—a problem that may
only be a symptom of a much larger and obscure problem.

In addition, there are many kinds of different interdependencies between projects that have not been addressed systematically and simultaneously. Markowitz’s pioneering work showed that the risk of a portfolio of projects can be reduced if the project portfolio mixture combines projects, which in sum show a smaller covariance of cash-flow. Thus, managing risk interdependencies between financial investments, which could have been projects, in such a way that the overall risk of a portfolio of financial investments, which could have been projects, is reduced, has been an essential element of designing portfolios since long.

Organizational design theory made the claim that the kinds of interdependencies matter; in other words, for pooled, sequential, or reciprocal interdependencies, different kinds of organizational coordination instruments—or more precisely, different kinds of coherent mixes of coordination instruments—should be used. Regarding project portfolio management, pooled interdependencies among scarce (human) resources during the development stage of a new product, process, or service, have been the focus of interest. But pooled interdependencies are not restricted to human resources in the development process or to financial resources in a more aggregated view. If potential users of a project can only cope with a limited amount of new products or product releases that are delivered to them, this creates a new, thus far, often neglected type of bottleneck. The ability and willingness of users or intermediaries may also create bottlenecks and thus “pooled” interdependencies. Transfer prices or prioritization systems have been proposed to solve the internal resource coordination problem, but do they also apply to the customer acceptance bottleneck problem? Taking a marketing perspective or a purchasing perspective, additional interdependence aspects have to be considered. If two projects share the same customer as a recipient, or the same supplier as a source, then these two projects need to be coordinated. (This may pertain to the following questions: When should which project be done? What should it deliver to other projects serving the same client?) Or: Do resource