Project Management Journal, Vol. 47, No. 5, 3–5
© 2016 by the Project Management Institute
Published online at www.pmi.org/PMJ
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
From the Editor
Hans Georg Gemünden, Dr. rer. oec. habil., Chair for Technology and
Innovation Management, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Photo credit: Markus Bullick
2 December 2013 ■ Project Management Journal ■ DOI: 10.1002/pmj
Photo credit: Markus Bullick