XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

This paper presents a new conceptualization of the project-oriented organization. The project-oriented organization is conceptualized as an entrepreneurial, future- and stakeholder-oriented innovating organization, which uses projects as temporary, task-focused organizations, to define, develop, and implement its strategies, to transform its structure, culture and behavior, and to define and develop new products, services, and business models.

The traditional task in project management is to manage individual projects properly, so that the project process is well planned and organized, the team members are well motivated and coordinated, the requirements of the project clients and project suppliers are well met and that they actively perform their duties, and the value creating objectives of the project are achieved for all stakeholders. In contrast, the task of the project-oriented organization is, to lead the organization properly, so that the right projects are carried out, that these projects receive competent project managers and project staff, the project results are used sustainably, and the value creating objectives of all stakeholders of the project-oriented organization are achieved.

According to this view, upper and middle managers “are focused on creating the conditions to support and foster projects, both in its parent organization and its external environment”. The linkage between these tasks can be explained with a distinction of three levels of managing projects (1) project management, (2) project portfolio management and (3) values, which govern the project-oriented organization. All three tasks have to be managed well, and they need to be aligned and integrated. Thus, the new model of project-oriented organization is developed, presented in table 1

Table 1 - The new model of the project-oriented organization

As we can see, the concept of the project-oriented organization consists of the three segments. For each segment three important areas are described, which characterize a project-oriented organization.

(1) Structures. A major reason for the emerging project-oriented organization is the fact that firms nowadays run many projects simultaneously. Thus, there is an increasing need to coordinate and control complex project landscapes, in order to align projects to the strategic goals, to pick the winners, to avoid an accumulation of risk, to manage synergies between projects, to adapt to changes, and to provide project teams with sufficient resources and to avoid work overload. This is usually done in project portfolio management, which contains three components: a) Organization of structures and processes. An organization may have different kinds of portfolios, and establish a portfolio board for each kind, or for different organizational parts, it may also establish higher order boards governing the decisions, which portfolio boards make. (b) Planning and controlling. A project-oriented organization is a future-oriented organization, because projects are intended to improve our future. Such a future-oriented organization requires that the organization develops a well-founded viable strategy, which is broken down to the project portfolio level, because a company's strategy is realized by the entirety of its projects (c) ICT systems to support decision-making. Tools like CPM or PERT, developed in the 1950ies helped to plan and schedule complex projects more efficiently and contributed much to the diffusion of project management tools and practices.

(2) People. This model of the learning project-oriented organizations starts with the informal knowledge exchange in project teams, which is triggered by leadership, team composition, and autonomy. Then we add the contributions of HR management, ideally acting in an alliance with project management and top management, in order to systematically develop competences and career systems. Finally, looks at specific structures and processes of knowledge management. This segment contains three components: (a) Leadership and teamwork. Teamwork quality positively influences learning and innovation within cross-functional project teams. Schools of leadership have shown that leadership positively influences group performance. (b) Competence development and career systems. Learning is also improved by activities of human resource management (HRM) in contributing to attracting, selecting, assigning, developing, recognizing, and retaining the right team members and project leaders. These activities may contribute to higher emotional, managerial, intellectual, and problem specific skills, and a better matching of project demands and personal competences. (c) Knowledge management. Capturing and sharing lessons learned from projects has been discussed as appropriate practice to enable the continuous creation of organizational capabilities and to realize increased average project performance in the future.

(3) Values. This model of an innovating project-oriented organization contains three core values, which foster project management and innovation: (a) Future orientation means that future success is prioritized above current success. An innovative organization wants to create more value with future products and services than other organizations, it wants to improve the efficiency of its processes through superior solutions more quickly than other organizations. Thus, an innovating organization should profit from a prioritization of the future. (b) Entrepreneurial orientation concept is rooted in the strategy-making literature and can be described as “the entrepreneurial strategy-making processes that key decision makers use to enact their firm's organizational purpose, sustain its vision, and create competitive advantage” characterized entrepreneurial firms as those that pursue innovation, aggressively enter new markets, and accept a measure of strategic risk. (c) Stakeholder orientation. A core idea of projects is to bundle competences from different functions and disciplines in order to frame and solve problems better and more quickly. Thus, the idea of knowledge combination and cooperation is central to project management. This should be reflected in the corporate culture. A cooperation between functions, between hierarchical levels, and with external partners should be a central value. This idea is also central to stakeholder management.It has been shown that such cultures positively influence project portfolio success

This model shows a clear linkage to these theories and gives special consideration to empirical studies in the realm of projects, programs, project portfolios, and project-based or project-oriented organizations. Thus, this model offers a coherent view, which elements of project orientation innovating organizations can exploit in addition to their other instruments, which foster creativity and commercialization of innovations.

References

1. H.G. Gemünden et al. / International Journal of Project Management 36 (2018) p. 147

2.Artto, K., Gemünden, H.G., Walker, D., Peippo-Lavikka, P., 2016. Is there only one way of project management theorizing, or are there multiple sectorspecific project management domains? Int. J. Manag. Proj. Bus. in print

3. Huemann, M., 2014. Managing the project-oriented organization. In: Turner, R. (Ed.), Gower Handbook of Project Management, 5th. Edition, pp. 435–448 Surrey, England.

4.Schoper, Y., Gemünden, H.G., Nguyen, N.N., 2016. Fifteen future trends for project management in 2025. In: Knöpfel, Hans, Martinez-Almela, Jesus (Eds.), Future Trends in Project, Programme and Portfolio Management 2016. Proceedings of the International IPMA Expert Seminar in Zurich in February 18–19, 2016, pp. 23–43.