Decoupling and standardization in the projectification of a company
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
ISSN: 1753-8378
Article publication date: 18 January 2013
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse the change trajectory in a large, global, project‐oriented company, with focus on standardization of project work, and on how the company's structure, processes and employment‐base changed in line with the company's increasing volume of projects.
Design/methodology/approach
The stance taken is to define firm‐based projects as temporary organisations embedded in, and coupled to their parent company. Narratives of employees' working history were combined with historical company data. The outcome is a trajectory of the company's history from four different perspectives, shown in parallel with the development of the company's project operations.
Findings
The projectification history was found to be connected with two parallel movements: a push towards project decoupling countered by a pull towards standardization of project management practices to tighten the coupling. The direction of the movements was influenced from current project management trends.
Research limitations/implications
The model of a projectified company as a loosely‐coupled system provides a novel way of analysing an organisation and its interfaces to its projects. Even though the work focuses on a unique company's projectification history, the intention is to provide a means to better understand the forces impacting the transformation of organisations increasingly using projects as a work‐form.
Originality/value
Adding the notion of coupling gives a new dimension to the transformation of project‐oriented companies. The model for analysing projects by means of their patterns of loose and tight coupling provides arguments for the shift in focus from the individual project to the interplay between structure, people and processes in the project‐oriented company.
Keywords
Citation
Bergman, I., Gunnarson, S. and Räisänen, C. (2013), "Decoupling and standardization in the projectification of a company", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 6 No. 1, pp. 106-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538371311291053
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited