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Recent research has proposed the position of a project owner as the individual accountable for realizing target benefits. However, there is a lack of understanding in the literature of this role – in particular, the specific responsibilities of the project owner that can enhance benefits realization and operations performance. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The paper identifies these responsibilities in practice through two studies – a qualitative study, which includes interviews with senior executives who fund projects, and an in-depth longitudinal case study, which describes a company that continuously realizes the benefits from its projects.

The results suggest that a project owner should have 22 key responsibilities across four project phases and that an operations manager is often the most suitable candidate to fulfill this role in operations improvement projects. When performing these project responsibilities effectively, operations managers enhance benefits realization and operations improvement. Finally, the paper proposes five hypotheses for future research.

Based on agency theory, the paper increases our knowledge of the role of the project owner in practice. This new knowledge can enhance the realization of target benefits from projects and ensure a smooth transition from the project to the operations environment.

The purpose of this paper is to resolve a core issue in project management research and practice – inconsistent terminology of key project roles. This inconsistency has negative consequences on the quality and impact of research in this area.

The authors conducted an analysis of the literature and project management standards to identify both agreed-upon and inconsistent project role terms. Based on role and agency theories, the authors propose a consistent terminology.

The authors found consensus regarding four terms: project manager, project team, project management office, and program manager. However, the authors also found conflicting definitions and misuse concerning other terms, as well as use of the same title for different roles (e.g. customer, sponsor, champion). The authors define the ten core project roles and the two project entities with which they are associated.

The proposed role definitions and clear distinction between the two project entities offer clarity, reliance on existing consensus, avoidance of conflicts of interest, and clear separation of principal and agent roles. The implementation of these definitions will improve communications and enhance quality within and between both the research and the practice communities.

Although the literature is clear on what comprises effective project stakeholder management, communication between key stakeholders and project managers is often ineffective. Research is silent on stakeholders' insufficient knowledge of project management terminology, which is a barrier for such effective communication. This paper aims to identify the project management concepts that key stakeholders should understand to improve effective communication.

This paper employs a three-step research design. In the first step, based on threshold concept theory, the authors identify the key project management concepts through interviews with 20 project management practitioners, trainers and trainees. In the second step, the authors confirm the findings from the first step and identify effective approaches to enhance project stakeholders' communication through seven additional interviews with project stakeholders. In the third step, the authors construct a functional model of the research findings by employing a system-level modeling tool.

This research identifies five project management threshold concepts (TC) that are challenging for project stakeholders to understand (1) project benefits, (2) the iron triangle, (3) the critical path, (4) uncertainty and (5) project leadership. Following these knowledge barriers, the paper proposes unique approaches to develop effective project stakeholder communication.

This paper advances project stakeholder management research by identifying knowledge barriers and providing project managers with more effective approaches to better engage with their stakeholders.

As managing risks effectively is critical for successful projects, project managers regularly identify and prioritize the risks that apply to their projects. However, research argues that project managers struggle to identify effective risk mitigation approaches for the most critical risks, partly because they do not always have the required authority to act effectively. The authors argue that, particularly in high-risk projects, organizational support (OS) provided by senior executives to project managers can facilitate a practical approach to risk mitigation beyond traditional risk management practices.

The authors modeled the relationship between risk, organizational support and project success. Then, the authors conducted a structural equation modeling analysis on survey data obtained from 722 projects and tested for the impacts of OS practices in the presence of risk on projects' success.

Suppose done effectively, senior executives can provide more support to project managers and the teams in high-risk projects, resulting in higher project success. OS has a positive impact on project success in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Interestingly, the positive impact of OS on success is greater than the negative impact of the risk.

The paper further describes various effective OS practices to mitigate risks and explore opportunities when faced with high-risk projects.

Whereas it is known that risk has a negative impact on project success, this paper suggests that, in addition to that, OS is in between risk and success and has an impact on this relationship (mediation). Moreover, with OS, the total negative effect of risk on effectiveness turns into a positive impact.

The paper responds to calls in recent research for a model that shows how the business case should be used throughout the project's lifetime to achieve sound governance and thereby project success. The aim of the paper is to advance theory about the effective use of the business case.

Besides the processes and information required, the literature identified 43 organizational facilitating factors, structured into 5 categories, which are required for effective use of the business case. To offer a useful model, the authors' approach was to do a factor analysis, based on existing survey data, to reduce the number of facilitators and to validate their categorization.

The findings of the paper were as follows: (1) the classification of the proposed facilitating factors was validated; (2) the number of facilitators needed to ensure that the business case is used effectively was substantially reduced and (3) a “business case effectiveness model” is proposed to clarify the relationship between the organizational facilitating factors, the business case processes and the information required to effectively use the business case.

This is the first time that a business case effectiveness model has been proposed. Besides consolidating business case theory, it can be used to guide people and organizations on simple, affordable ways to improve their use of the business case to achieve sound governance and hence business/information technology project success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the research knowledge in OM has been obtained and distributed since the first journals in OM began publication in 1980, changes in the interests of OM over the decades and where they are heading in the future; and to explore the changing roles of individual journals in the development of OM.

A two-stage bibliometric study was employed, first using citation analysis to examine the changing research interests in OM through an analysis of the OM journals. Then the top journals of most importance to OM were analyzed to determine the role that each one played in the knowledge distribution network and how that changed over the decades.

OM’s journal base consists of 7 research knowledge sources, 12 transmitters linking different journal groups, and 11 sinks with limited input. Research attention changed from practice, engineering, and OR to general management, strategy, and production management in the 2000s, with strategy, organizational issues, and logistics surfacing in the 2010s. OM features increasingly academic research with less interest in practice. OM journals’ network importance has increased substantially, with JOM now a bridge between the quantitative and management journals.

Both researchers and managers gain in understanding the history and identifying the future direction of OM, as well as which journals will have the most relevant papers to their interests.

This research identifies the history of the OM field in terms of its constituents and where it is going in the future. This history is related to the role OM plays among the knowledge network of top journals and presents a novel way of classifying and labeling journals based on their contribution.

Project goal setting, led by a project proposal development team, is an important operations process because effective goal setting aligned with the operations strategy can enhance project investment decision making, project success and thereby operations performance. The purpose of this paper is to argue that because of the strategic nature of this task, the organizational climate (OC) that the proposal development team works in is critical for the effectiveness of their goal setting.

The authors raise hypotheses regarding the role OC plays in enhancing the effectiveness of the support senior executives provide to project proposal teams. The authors test the hypotheses in a longitudinal survey of 200 managers in the USA.

Results show that a formal organizational process used by proposal development teams for setting project goals is highly effective and that an appropriate OC further intensifies the positive effect of such a process. However, a formal organizational process has no positive effect on effective goal setting if implemented in an environment with a poor OC.

The paper contributes to the literature by finding that a positive OC intensifies the already positive effect of organizational support. In practice, the creation of such a climate can enhance project goal setting, project success, and as a result, operations performance.

Literature indicates that the business case for projects is difficult to use and suggests that there are organizational factors that can facilitate effective use of the business case. This paper aims to identify such facilitators, measure their presence and importance, and relate them to the actual practice of business case processes.

A cross sectional quantitative method was used, with data on facilitators and business case process usage gathered through an online questionnaire.

The findings for the 43 organizational facilitators are that each one is considered more important than its presence in the respondents' organizations. High correlations emerge between the presence of the facilitators and the use of business case processes, indicating the pivotal role of the facilitators.

The research was conducted for business IT projects implemented by organizations based in South Africa. It furthers our understanding of project business cases and suggests additional research avenues in this area.

The findings indicate that organizations could improve key facilitators at an affordable cost. Such improvement would enable more effective use of the business case throughout the project's lifetime – from initial concept until planned benefits have been substantially realized. Better use of the business case would also support governance and increase the success rate of business IT projects.

Organizational facilitators of business case processes are identified and categorized for the first time, leading to measurements of their perceived importance and presence in organizations. Hence, the relationship between these facilitators and actual business case usage is determined, suggesting areas of optimum impact.

Justifying new manufacturing technology is usually very difficult since the most important benefits are often strategic and difficult to quantify. Traditional capital budgeting procedures that rely on return measures based on direct cost savings and incremental future cash flows do not normally capture the strategic benefits of higher quality, faster responses to wider ranges of customer needs, and the options for future growth made available by flexible manufacturing technology. Adding to these limitations is the difficulty of using traditional cost accounting systems to generate the information necessary for justifying new manufacturing investments. This paper reviews these problems and recommends procedures useful for assessing investments in flexible manufacturing technology.