About this issue

Citation

Walker, D.H.T. (2011), "About this issue", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijmpb.2011.35304aaa.002

About this issue

Article Type: From the Editor From: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Volume 4, Issue 1

This issue begins with a paper “A project manager’s optimism and stress management and IT project success” authored by information technology (IT) project management (PM) researchers D.C. Smith, M. Bruyns, and S. Evans from Cape Town in the Republic of South Africa. The paper addresses important PM issues relating to how IT project managers handle their emotions of optimism and stress, and how this impacts upon project success within a South African perspective. Project managers were requested to relate a “structured” story regarding a significant, personal experience relating to optimism or stress and how this affected the project outcome. Eight stories were captured on the optimism theme and five on stress. A qualitative analysis approach was used to unearthed rich data about the lived experience of project managers and through analysis of this data several optimism themes that strongly influenced IT project success were identified. This paper advances our understanding of emotions and the way that they can be managed to improve project success, it also has implications for leadership of projects.

The second paper written by Kasim Randeree and Mathews Ninan entitled “Leadership and teams in business: a study of IT projects in the United Arab Emirates” offers another view, from a team and leadership perspective, on leading IT projects. This paper is anchored in the UAE context; it provides another example of global IT project case studies that advances our understanding of identified relevant team processes. These include team cohesion, team trust and team empowerment. The findings also promote a further insight into the current maturity of IT projects in a region of the world that continues to grow in importance.

The third paper by Stephen Fox in Finland with Patrick Ehlen and Matthew Purver from Stanford University in the USA is focussed on project-internal teams and is entitled “Enabling distributed communication of manual skills”. This paper informs the development of mixed initiative systems for distributed digital communication of manual skills in an engineer-to-order production context. The value of this paper is that it introduces a framework for enabling distributed communication of manual skills. In addition, a preliminary ontology for distributed communication of manual skills is introduced, together with recommendations for implementation. The authors clearly suggest that skill shortages for people who perform skilled manual tasks in project work presents a serious emerging problem and that distributed digital communication has offered some hope in providing necessary training and development (T&D). However, these T&D projects and what they seek to achieve to address a serious skills shortage is not particularly well understood so this paper makes an important contribution to our body of knowledge of these types of project.

Mattias Jacobsson, from Sweden, provides the fourth paper entitled “On the importance of liaisons for coordination of projects”. This paper deals with collaborative aspects of communication practice and illustrates the importance of role related liaison devices for coordination in a project setting. It highlights some useful Swedish case studies and focuses on the coordinative and communicative activities carried out within the projects. Drawing upon organisation theory, and thus enriching this aspect of PM theory, it suggests from a PM perspective that it is beneficial to identify, acknowledge, and create legitimacy for project liaisons in order to facilitate the coordination of the project. Jacobsson suggests that there is a need to further study the existence and role of liaisons within project organisations because the project liaison is shown to be of major importance.

The fifth paper by Thomas Biedenbach and Ralf Müller, also from Sweden, provides an important retrospective entitled “Paradigms in project management research: examples from 15 years of IRNOP conferences”. It investigates the philosophical stances and related methodologies used within the last 15 years of PM research using The International Research Network on Organizing by Projects (IRNOP) conference papers. This was based on a paper presented at IRNOP in October 2009 in Berlin. It was well received and amended to suit publication in IJMPB. It provides a useful resource in the journey of discovery that PM has been embarking on for over half a century first as an emergent and now as a well-recognised profession. Results show a dominance of ontological subjectivism and epistemological interpretivism, with a preference for case studies and qualitative methods. Trends indicate a growth of positivist studies and, at the same time, an increase in multi-case studies. The value of the paper lies in the identified trends, preferences, and potential differences between published research and conference papers.

The sixth paper “Profiling the context and opportunities for Australian project management research” by Andrew John Sense, Jill Owen, and Chivonne Watt from Australia was also adapted from a paper originally presented at IRNOP in October 2009 in Berlin. This paper presents and analyses the context, the current issues and the opportunities for PM research within Australia. It contributes to researcher and industry practitioner knowledge; and, it debates on supporting and promoting the development of national PM research agendas. The paper identifies the importance for disciplines to not only take stock from time to time on what academic and thought leadership direction provided to both PM academics and practitioners; but also to provide a record of the history of evolution of interest and development of that discipline. This paper provides an Australian context and first profiles the current landscape of Australian PM research and then explores the future opportunities/risks for PM research in Australia, as perceived by the researcher community.

This journal offers a seventh paper in this issue written by Paul A. Fuller, Andrew R.J. Dainty and Tony Thorpe from the UK. Their paper entitled “Improving project learning – a new approach to lessons learnt” reports on research which has developed a new approach to capturing project-based learning using an action research approach as part of a longitudinal single organization case study. The paper finds that the event and the outputs, in effect, take the form of “boundary objects” which act as a bridge or means of translation between the participants, as well as to those who will use the learning to improve their own project practice on other projects. Viewing learning events as boundary objects sees them as mediating information across project boundaries, between project practitioners and across business units. The event process can be adapted for a variety of scenarios and used by an organisation or group of organisations to improve and apply learning more successfully.

This issue also contains two research notes. The first by Stephen Fox from Finland entitled “Factors in ontological uncertainty related to ICT innovations”; this paper provides an overview of factors in ontological uncertainty, differentiating it from truth uncertainty. This paper provides descriptions of factors in ontological uncertainty through an example that is relevant to project business. The value of this paper is that it provides a starting point for the reduction of ontological uncertainty in practice. The study of uncertainty is becoming a leading edge topic that extends our knowledge in PM beyond risk management.

The second research note “Ethical considerations in doing and disseminating project management research” which is quite different in style, content and purpose is written by Rolf A. Lundin from Sweden. This paper arose out of a series of special interest group conversations undertaken at the European Academy of Management (EURAM) conference in Rome in May 2010 relating to what is ethical in research and what is ethical in terms of submitting papers to conferences and journals such as IJMPB. This paper provides valuable guidance on the ethical issues surrounding submitting academic papers for publication. Its value is that it adds clarity to the “rules of the game” in academic publishing especially where authors are concerned about the acceptable degree of content overlap and specialisation to meet specific themes between similar papers they submit for publication for different audiences.

I must present here my own view. It is not at all uncommon to present papers at conferences where they may be published in proceedings with limited access to those who did not participate in the conference. Two instances of papers, papers five and six in this issue were initially presented at conferences where they were thoroughly double blind reviewed and, following feedback at the conference and substantial changes made after further peer review took place, they are published as journal papers. This conduct is seen as a natural progression of development of papers through extended peer review and personally, as the editor of this journal, I feel that such papers gain added scrutiny and are often more rigorously reviewed through this process than may otherwise be the case. While we certainly do not expect contributors to be sending us papers that are not original work, but we do recognise that the journey from presenting conference papers to final journal papers results in substantial refinement, often some re-framing of focus and content and substantial updating based on broad feedback from peers. Conferences such as IRNOP, the PMI Research Conference, EURAM and other equally prestigious forums for discussion and debate by PM scholars provide a rich vein of PM learning that many of our readers would like to access in their original conference paper form but are unable to do so for a variety of valid reasons. The practice of improving and refining these works for later journal publication is widely accepted and welcomed and result in special journal issues of selected papers and publication of others such as papers five and six in this issue.

Two doctoral thesis research report notes are also presented in this issue. The first entitled “Governance of major public investment projects: in pursuit of relevance and sustainability” is written by Ole Jonny Klakegg and Tore Haavaldsen from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. This doctoral thesis note reports on Dr Ole Jonny Klakegg’s PhD which has resulted in a number of well received publications. It illustrates, as has many of these doctoral thesis research report notes, that there is wide choice of universities offering opportunities to undertake a doctorate in a PM-related area and that those taking part in these studies are seasoned PM professionals with much industry expertise and insight to provide scholarly work that is useful, relevant and pragmatic. The second doctoral thesis research report notes written by Dr Eric Chan and Anthony Mills from RMIT University in Australia is entitled “Implementation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in a major construction contracting organization in Hong Kong”. This doctor of project management thesis was centred on a study of how an ERP system was implemented by a major construction contractor that is based in Hong Kong and operates throughout China, its adjacent region. It is another example of a reflective practice study that allows us to gain insight into the lived experience of PM staff first hand from an active participant in the process. It has as its particular focus, an emphasis of how the ERP system facilitated knowledge management and how culture impacted upon that process.

This issue also contains two book reviews. The first by Tayyab Maqsood is on the book by Hillson, D. (2009) entitled “Managing Risk in Projects” published by Gower. The second book review is written by Derek H.T. Walker on the book by Bradley, G. (2010) entitled “Benefit Realisation Management”, 2nd edition’ also published by Gower. Both books would be of interest to academics and practitioners.

We also provide a call for papers for a special issue to be presented in 2012. An update on forthcoming events, conferences and useful PM links is, as usual, provided.

Finally, I would like to thank contributors and reviewers who have generously given time and energy to make this first issue possible for 2011. I trust that IJMPB will continue to deliver ideas that will stimulate debate, discussion and controversy. In this first issue of 2011 we hope that the research note papers will spark some follow up research note papers.

Derek H.T. Walker