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It is often stated by trainers that projects are a means to an end, a learning vehicle. This only holds true, however, where the project is primarily or solely for learning. Where the project and project groups are part of a strategy for loosening up the structure of an organisation, generating structural flex, and moving towards a situation of greater involvement and participation at all levels in an organisation, then the project group is a key element in a change strategy.

Recently I was involved in an assignment which worked out so beautifully in practice that I am encouraged to pass on the experience to others so that they may, if appropriate, use some of the ideas and build upon success.

Forming a project organization is, in our opinion, the most essential characteristic of the project-working mode. A project task calls for contribution from several parties, e.g., user representatives with knowledge of the application situation, specialists with professional knowledge and experience, and management that can provide the overall support and position the project strategically. Cooperation across professional areas and organizational units is required.

A project organization should be designed in view of the project task. In this chapter, we present and discuss a basic pattern of a project organization consisting of three generic parts: a decision, a management, and a working part. The specific appointments to these parts will depend on questions and issues related to four aspects: professional contribution, management contribution, anchoring of the project results, and influence (where should stakeholders’ influence and involvement be dealt with).

The chapter discusses adjustment of the project organization as the project comes along. We also discuss organizational issues when there are several independent partners, e.g., joint ventures and partnering.

When a large number of project proposals are evaluated to allocate available funds, grouping them based on their similarities is beneficial. Current approaches to group proposals are primarily based on manual matching of similar topics, discipline areas and keywords declared by project applicants. When the number of proposals increases, this task becomes complex and requires excessive time. This paper aims to demonstrate how to effectively use the rich information in the titles and abstracts of Turkish project proposals to group them automatically.

This study proposes a model that effectively groups Turkish project proposals by combining word embedding, clustering and classification techniques. The proposed model uses FastText, BERT and term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF/IDF) word-embedding techniques to extract terms from the titles and abstracts of project proposals in Turkish. The extracted terms were grouped using both the clustering and classification techniques. Natural groups contained within the corpus were discovered using k-means, k-means++, k-medoids and agglomerative clustering algorithms. Additionally, this study employs classification approaches to predict the target class for each document in the corpus. To classify project proposals, various classifiers, including k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), artificial neural networks (ANN), classification and regression trees (CART) and random forest (RF), are used. Empirical experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method by using real data from the Istanbul Development Agency.

The results show that the generated word embeddings can effectively represent proposal texts as vectors, and can be used as inputs for clustering or classification algorithms. Using clustering algorithms, the document corpus is divided into five groups. In addition, the results demonstrate that the proposals can easily be categorized into predefined categories using classification algorithms. SVM-Linear achieved the highest prediction accuracy (89.2%) with the FastText word embedding method. A comparison of manual grouping with automatic classification and clustering results revealed that both classification and clustering techniques have a high success rate.

The proposed model automatically benefits from the rich information in project proposals and significantly reduces numerous time-consuming tasks that managers must perform manually. Thus, it eliminates the drawbacks of the current manual methods and yields significantly more accurate results. In the future, additional experiments should be conducted to validate the proposed method using data from other funding organizations.

This study presents the application of word embedding methods to effectively use the rich information in the titles and abstracts of Turkish project proposals. Existing research studies focus on the automatic grouping of proposals; traditional frequency-based word embedding methods are used for feature extraction methods to represent project proposals. Unlike previous research, this study employs two outperforming neural network-based textual feature extraction techniques to obtain terms representing the proposals: BERT as a contextual word embedding method and FastText as a static word embedding method. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no research conducted on the grouping of project proposals in Turkish.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the understanding of projects in permanent organizations. Previous research has captured organizational contexts where either a project logic dominates or projects support recurrent, ongoing operations. Through a case study, the author shows how projects and non-projects coexist over time in the core of the organization in a balanced manner, addressing the specific tensions in such an organization.

The author has undertaken a case study of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate. The analysis is based on several types of data: internal reports, descriptions of structure and roles, internal handbooks and other documents from the period 1998–2018; interviews with ten persons in different roles in the organization; and a survey of 190 employees and middle managers (response rate: 84 percent).

The author finds that the balance of projects and non-project work, work units and rationale has been an institutional and stabile characteristic, rather than a transitory state of a Norwegian state directorate. It is also found that two types of products or set of tasks are reflected in two types of work groups: long-term work groups and project work groups. There is a subjective element regarding whether a new task should be integrated into an existing long-term unit or serve as the basis of creating a new project. The analysis of work organization, leadership and employee perceptions has revealed a number of similarities and differences between the two work contexts: the long-term work groups and the projects. The balance of projects and non-projects is maintained through shared beliefs and the process of allocation of personnel. This balance is threatened through actual practice in the organization.

A case study does not allow for statistical generalizations. The implication of the study is the revelation of a potential research gap “between” a project-based organization (PBO), on the one hand, and a project-supported organization (PSO), on the other hand.

For organizations that combine projects and non-projects in the core, the paper could contribute to the understanding of tensions and the way to handle them, and provide inspiration regarding mechanisms for resource allocation.

This paper identifies and empirically describes an organization where both projects and non-projects are of great importance in the core activities of the firm, thus filling a “gap” between the PBO and PSO. A number of aspects of this organization are analyzed, including how the balance of the two logics has been maintained over the two decades. The study could provide the basis for a number of research questions on the coexistence of and tensions between projects and non-projects in the core of an organization.

This study reports on the evaluation of a youth‐led initiative on the promotion of emotional well‐being among young people aged 16‐25 years. Over a six month period, the Getting it Together project worked with a group of 12 young people from both the Republic and Northern Ireland in building their understanding of emotional well‐being and developing a youth friendly, needs‐led resource. Employing a mix of research methods, including participatory methods, this evaluation documents the process of actual project development, partnership working and overall experience and the impact of project participation for the young people. Following the development of the resource, its pilot implementation by the peer educators with 58 young people in the region was also evaluated. The evaluation findings indicate that the key objectives of the project were achieved and that it resulted in an intense, positive and productive experience for the participating young people, which enhanced their understanding of emotional well‐being. A resource package was successfully developed and designed with direct input from the young people, and was assessed by their peers to be youth friendly. The young people were successfully trained to deliver the resource to their peers, who assessed very positively both the resource and their experience of the training. The implications of the evaluation findings for developing this peer‐led initiative are discussed.

This study examines emotionologies (Stearns & Stearns, 1985), that is, attitudes that members of an inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) project hold toward emotions and their appropriate expression and regulation in this project. In order to understand attitudes toward emotions and emotion regulation, we suggest the adoption of the concept of emotion structure, consisting of emotion rules and resources (Callahan, 2004).

To investigate the kinds of emotionologies present in this IOIS development project, we have chosen a qualitative case study approach. Our data consists of 41 qualitative interviews, collected in two phases.

We trace how emotion rules and corresponding emotion regulation strategies change among the sub-groups working in the project throughout their first year of collaborating. We show that organizational actors are skilled emotion managers, whose behavior is guided not only by many collective emotion rules (professional, organizational, social) but also by personal emotion rules. Our findings also suggest the need to critically reflect on certain emotion rules, such as those pertaining to the expression of fear and anger, and their potential positive and negative implications on project work.

We argue that group emotionologies with their professional, organizational, and social emotion rules interact with personal emotion rules, resulting in interesting emotion regulation strategies that often try to minimize emotional dissonance, sometimes at the expense of risking open conflict among project members. With this in mind, one theoretical and practical suggestion is to further explore the potential constructive implications of experiencing and expressing fear in projects.

Online learning continues to grow year after year and majority of the growth is seen in public institutions of higher education. The purpose of this book chapter is to acquaint the readers to group-based learning in an online environment as an innovative practice for engaged learning. Diverse facets of group-based learning are discussed such as role of instructors, role of learners, challenges of group-based learning and finally role of social media in designing such group-based learning projects. A comprehensive prototype application of a group-based learning project walks the readers through applying group-based learning in their respective courses at the undergraduate and/or graduate level. Finally some instructor designed rubrics for assessing group-based learning are shared for effective assessment of a group-based learning project.

One thing is to get a project organization in place. Another thing is to bring it alive. This is the subject of this chapter. Most project work is teamwork, in the core teams and work groups, and also in the steering committee, reference groups, and focus groups.

Because projects are temporary, it is a challenge quickly to establish effective cooperation in the groups and teams of the project organization, internal as well as external with surrounding organizations. Five elements of cooperation in the project team will be presented, including collaboration, coordination, communication, coalition, and control. Different work patterns will be discussed, and methods for carrying out project work will be presented, e.g., coping with limited rationality and handling project complexity.

A section will deal with work patterns in the steering committee, and a section will discuss cooperation with interested parties (stakeholders). Also, the maturity of the project organization will be treated.

A final section will discuss learning in the project organization.

The paper aims to investigate the communication of uncertainty information and knowledge between the project manager, owner and steering group. The purpose of the project is to identify the effects of project owner and steering group involvement in the process of uncertainty management.

The empirical data are based on a qualitative case study with in‐depth interviews following a semi‐structured approach. The building of new frigates, a project in the Royal Norwegian Navy, is studied. This is a large public technology project, with a great deal of media and public attention from Norwegian society.

The project owner and steering group involvement in the project's uncertainty management process were identified. The interviews revealed that uncertainty information and knowledge have frequently been communicated and shared. The results indicate that this has reduced the asymmetric information problem between the parties. This involvement has also contributed to building a collaborative, respectful, professional and trusting relationship between the parties. Another effect that was found is that the project owner has learned about uncertainty management and developed uncertainty consciousness. Moreover, the data indicate that the uncertainty information has helped the project owner develop a holistic view for improved decisions.

Future research should investigate other scenarios, types of projects, cultures and countries, so that these findings may be generalized.

The paper concludes that project owner involvement and communicating uncertainty information are important for the effective management of uncertainties and achieving project success.

The involvement of the project owner and the communication of uncertainty information between the project manager and the owner are studied in this research paper.