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The purpose is to explore how the process of action research (AR) can support building legitimacy and organizational learning in innovation project management and portfolio practices in merger contexts.

Meta-reflection on method issues in Action Research through an action research case study with an innovation group during an organizational change process. This case demonstrates an example of an action research cycle focused on building practitioner legitimacy rather than problem-solving.

Key findings include (1) demonstrating how AR can be used for building legitimacy through visualizing the innovation process, and embedding those visuals in top management practices of the organization; and (2) demonstrating how AR can work as an organizational learning tool in merger contexts.

This study focuses on an action research cooperation during a two-and-a-half-year period. Thus, findings offer the depth of a medium term case study. The processes of building legitimacy represent this particular case, and can be investigated in other organizational contexts to see the extent to which these issues can be generalized.

For researchers, this paper offers an additional type of AR cycle to consider in their research design which can be seen as demonstrating a form of interplay between practitioner action and organizational level legitimacy. For practitioners, this paper demonstrates a connection between legitimacy and organizational learning in innovation contexts. The discussion of how visuals were co-created and used for building legitimacy for an innovation process that differs from the standard stage gate model demonstrates how engaging in AR research can contribute to developing visuals as resources for building legitimacy and organizational learning based on connections between theory and practice.

This case rethinks AR practice for innovation project management contexts to include legitimacy and organizational learning. This focus on legitimacy building from organizational learning and knowledge conversion contributes to our understanding of the soft side of innovation project management. Legitimacy is demonstrated to be a key concern for innovation project management practices.

The building commissioning (BCx) phase is a critical stage in a building's lifecycle. It is also a complex process that involves a large number of actors and activities. While the use of building information modeling (BIM) in the commissioning phase of building equipment and systems could be beneficial, few studies have investigated the processes behind its implementation. The research presented in this paper aims to investigate the implementation of BIM for the commissioning phase within a general contracting company through action-research.

Through direct involvement with the research partner, a large general contractor, a diagnosis on the current limitations of the commissioning process was conducted. An action plan to implement BIM for commissioning was developed and implemented in two pilot projects. Evaluation was performed through on-site observations and informal discussions with field staff. Learning was specified through the development of a formal protocol for BIM-enabled BCx.

This action-research project helped the partner organization identify the challenges and a way forward to formalize its BIM-enabled BCx process. The action plan aimed at countering the lack of knowledge about the status of equipment and system commissioning as well as the lack of standardization. The research team co-developed and tested a formal protocol, including BIM-enabled processes and technologies to address these observed problems. A complete implementation ecosystem was structured and deployed. Preliminary feedback indicated that improvements were obtained using a BIM-enabled approach over a traditional approach.

While past studies have investigated the BCx process, this study identified current challenges considering recent advances in BIM and focused on a large general contractor. This work provides an in-depth account of a large general contractor attempting to streamline its BCx process. The results of the study could help guide practitioners in implementing more streamlined BIM-enabled BCx processes.

Discusses, from an information system perspective, the gradual negotiation process involved in the resolution of the initiative dilemma of action research. Posits that the initiative dilemma is characterized by the researcher facing the decision of taking the initiative of defining an opportunity for generating knowledge first then trying to find client organizations, or leaving this to client organizations and tackling problems proposed by them. The first option may lead to the definition of research projects that do not meet the interests of client organizations, while the second may lead to irrelevant research topics. Proposes a preliminary explanatory model of this negotiation process and highlights the differing and often conflicting views of researchers and organizations. Discusses failure types that may result from this negotiation process and how to avoid them.

The proliferation of customer-related data provides companies with numerous service opportunities to create customer value. The purpose of this study is to develop a framework to use this data to provide services.

This study conducted four action research projects on the use of customer-related data for service design with industry and government. Based on these projects, a practical framework was designed, applied, and validated, and was further refined by analyzing relevant service cases and incorporating the service and operations management literature.

The proposed customer process management (CPM) framework suggests steps a service provider can take when providing information to its customers to improve their processes and create more value-in-use by using data related to their processes. The applicability of this framework is illustrated using real examples from the action research projects and relevant literature.

“Using data to advance service” is a critical and timely research topic in the service literature. This study develops an original, specific framework for a company’s use of customer-related data to advance its services and create customer value. Moreover, the four projects with industry and government are early CPM case studies with real data.

The purpose of this article is to investigate collaboration in project management research. Although the literature shows an increase in collaboration between scientists and social scientists for various reasons, it is unclear how and why such collaboration takes place in project management research. The literature does show that co-authorship of articles published in project management journals is on the rise due to increased collaboration between researchers in developed countries and emerging economies as well as developing countries. However, no detailed study has been conducted to investigate how such collaboration occurs in practice in project management research. This article addresses this gap.

We use a multi-method approach (action research as a meta-methodology and surveys) using qualitative data to reflect on a successful collaborative externally funded research project. At the end of the study, a survey was used to investigate how collaboration occurred among the 26 researchers involved, who were spread over nine countries to collect data on a sponsored research project led by the authors who were the principal investigators. We also compare our findings from the original project with findings from a second survey of a purposeful sample of ten project management researchers who have conducted or are conducting collaborative research in order to validate our findings.

Through this study, we were able to compare the reasons for increased collaboration in scientific research reported in the literature with what we learnt from our own experience in collaborating on a large-scale project across geographical boundaries and cultures around the world. We were also able to get some insights on enablers and barriers to collaboration from peers who have collaborated on project management research from the second survey. We found that, although some of the reasons explained in the literature were confirmed in our study (e.g. the reputation of lead researchers), some other reasons (e.g. the prestige of institutions) were not that important. The conclusions section of this article provides a more detailed comparison. We also found that using a project management approach would deliver better outcomes. The literature on scientific collaboration was divided on the value of a project management approach and preferred a combination of firmness and flexibility. We found that using action research as a meta-methodology to reflect on our research gave us further insights into why we did what we did at certain critical points in our research that moved us forward.

Our study used two surveys with a limited number of researchers to compare what was found in the literature on reasons for collaboration in scientific research and how research outcomes were measured using citation rates. Conducting interviews or focused groups could have provided more nuanced findings. However, our findings did show that collaboration is beneficial to both experienced and early career researchers and helps them to publish in higher-ranked journals resulting in better visibility for the research. This is an interesting observation and merits further investigation. Theoretical implications: Findings from this research contribute to the broad literature on collaborative research in science and social science with a focus on practice-based fields such as project management where collaboration between academics and practitioners is becoming important.

The study provides some insights into the reasons for processes used and benefits from collaboration in project management research. Our findings have also been validated with our peers. Thus, this study will be useful for setting up and managing collaborative research in project management.

Effective collaboration in research can provide social value through mentoring of early career researchers.

This is the first detailed study of collaborative research in project management. It also proposes an action research model that can be used to retrospectively analyse long-term research projects to reflect upon and improve.

Health-care systems currently face great challenges, including an increasing elderly population. To respond to this problem, a hospital emergency department, three municipalities, and self-employed general practitioners in Denmark decided to collaborate with the aim of reorganizing treatment of elderly acute ill patients. By establishing a small-scale collaborative community and through an action research process, we show, how to jointly explore and develop a new organization design for in-home hospital treatment that enables the health professionals to collaborate in new ways, and at the same time to investigate and improve this cocreation process and codesign of knowledge among multiple different stakeholders.

This chapter addresses the common assumption that research questions are fixed at the outset of a study and should remain stable thereafter. We consider field-based organizational research and ask whether and when research questions can legitimately change. We suggest that change can, does, and indeed should occur in response to changes in the context within which the research is being conducted. Using an illustrative example, we identify refinement and reframing as two distinct types of research question development. We conclude that greater transparency over research question evolution would be a healthy development for the field.

This paper reports on an action research study based optimization project related to healthcare IT implemented on the Faroe Islands. The aims were to study what constitutes value in the public healthcare setting by applying and activating existing resources in the organization, hence answering the overall research question: How can a resource-based view (RBV) improve benefits management (BM) practices?

By applying a RBV to findings from an action research study of an optimization project of an integrated health information system (HIS), a framework of capabilities needed in a public HIS setting to create value was developed.

The theoretical contribution is a framework explaining how BM practices and, hence, value can be interrelated in a public healthcare IT system.

The study shows the need for academic IT professionals to structure and facilitate value generation, especially in the form of creating an innovative and learning environment in the form of an action research based project.

This study suggests which actors should be motivated and developed in order to ensure value in healthcare IT projects. Having value creation in mind, the model could have potentially broad applicability in a variety of healthcare IT settings.

The findings leads to better usage of public healthcare resources.

The present research studies real problems in a real setting, thus providing distinct ideas on how to improve public value creation by direct engagement of researchers.

Knowledge is supposedly a good ally of the future. Postproject reviews aim to create knowledge and improvements based on the past, but what happens when those observations are ambiguous? Based on intriguing observations on developing structured postproject reviews, implications of the ambiguities of the past are analyzed and discussed.

The present research departed from an interactive clinical action research approach (Schein, 1987), employing several rounds of interaction over 11 months. The studied company had a clear objective to improve its project evaluations and learn from three past projects to improve future ones by developing a framework to facilitate project evaluation.

Despite top management support and a benevolent organizational climate, the development process encountered problems. The list of issues to consider grew ever more extensive, and the expected data refinement and accompanying insights did not happen. Participants debated what to observe, and there was uncertainty about how to link the elements and confusion and disagreement about what was learned.

Learning from past projects was more problematic and difficult than predicted based on the postproject review literature. The past did purvey multiple interpretations.

Learning from the past is not effective if the goal is generating causal knowledge, scoring forms and checklists for future use. Postproject reviews provide an opportunity to decide what the past should be about rather than identifying what it was about.

The past might appear stable, but, when examined, ambiguity emerges. Research on knowledge generation from postproject reviews assumes that a project’s past is more or less stable and agreed upon. However, this study addresses the critical role of ambiguity about the past and the challenges when organizations try to learn from history through project reviews and evaluation processes.

The purpose of this paper is to provide academic researchers and reflective practitioners of project management with an example of how a dual cycle action research (AR) model can be used to both conduct research and solve a real‐life problem situation.

Provides a brief introduction to the research idea and question and the research strategy defined to address them, including the review of a small number of AR models, which resulted in the choice of a dual cycle AR model that addresses problem solving and research in parallel. The remainder of the paper describes how the selected AR model was applied to a series of five AR cycles to satisfy both the problem solving and research interests.

A dual cycle AR model provides academic researchers and reflective practitioners of project management with an effective and efficient means of addressing the dual imperatives of research and problem solving.

All five problem‐solving projects were from the public sector and of similar complexity and pace, with a focus on expected positive intangible outcomes during the planning stage only, with the groups of problem solving project stakeholders comprising only people responsible for delivering outcomes, not receiving them.

Based on a doctoral research study, the paper provides both academic researchers and reflective practitioners of project management with a practical guide to applying dual cycle AR to both conduct research and solve a real‐life problem situation.

The paper demonstrates how a dual cycle AR model led to the development of an original and highly practical method for defining and aligning project outcomes and associated benefits and outputs; in particular the alignment of intangible outcomes with tangible outputs – helping to make the intangible tangible.