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This research aims to examine the challenges of recruiting participatory action research (PAR) in managing innovation projects. An enhanced methodology based on PAR was developed to mitigate the challenges related to recruiting PAR in managing innovation projects. The proposed methodology was evaluated by comparing it to established methodologies/frameworks such as Scrum, Design Thinking (DT) and The Lean Startup (TLS). The evaluation aimed to determine the advantages and limitations of the proposed methodology in managing innovation projects.

The proposed enhanced methodology consists of eight steps, ranging from developing an understanding of the industry and business structure to learning and knowledge management. In addition, the enhanced methodology uses other techniques, such as Force field analysis and 12 boundary questions.

The research findings indicate that using the proposed methodology can improve the formalization of collaboration in PAR, enabling the organization to respond better to market changes. It helps define the project scope more clearly, encouraging innovation, addressing communication barriers and considering different worldviews and practical issues. Based on the findings, the proposed enhanced methodology could complement other methodologies/frameworks such as Scrum, DT and TLS.

The current research adds to the existing literature by identifying the challenges of recruiting PAR in managing innovation projects. A deductive reasoning process was utilized because there is no comprehensive research concerning the challenges of recruiting PAR in managing innovation projects. On the other hand, the PAR 4-phase cycle has been reviewed and enhanced to manage innovation projects.

The proposed methodology was used in a new product development project. The case study was done on one of the payment service provider companies that design, develop and deploy a digital product for marketing, installation, repair and maintenance of electronic funds transfer at point of sale devices.

No research has yet sought to identify the challenges of using PAR in innovation project management (IPM). Identifying the challenges associated with applying PAR in the IPM and providing an enhanced methodology to mitigate the challenges could fill a gap in IPM studies.

This paper aims to provide architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management (AEC/FM) practitioners with a guiding tool for overcoming the challenges affecting their performance in adaptive reuse project.

Literature review was conducted to comprehend the challenges affecting the AEC/FM performance during the implementation of adaptive reuse projects. A case study was conducted on an adaptively reused building, located in Saudi Arabia. The case study building was converted from a bookstore into an amusement center. Document review of the as-built drawings, and a structured interview with the project manager were conducted. The study concluded with the development of AEC/FM practical guidelines, pertaining to the different involved domains.

This study indicated that the potential challenges are interrelated among the three domains. These challenges pertained to the spatial, legislative, technical, administrative and operational aspects. The findings emphasized the vital role of the integration among the AEC/FM domains, at the early project planning phases. Based on the findings, three sets of AEC/FM guidelines were developed.

Theoretically, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that provides a case-specific investigation of the challenges affecting the AEC/FM performance in adaptive reuse projects.

The developed practical guidelines could potentially enhance the AEC/FM performance in future adaptive reuse projects.

This study contributes to the practice of adaptive reuse projects through providing practical guidelines for mitigating the challenges that affect the AEC/FM performance in these projects.

In recent years, the robotic process automation (RPA) technology has increasingly been used to automate business processes. While a lot of research has been published on the potential and benefits of the technology, only a few studies have conducted research on challenges related to RPA adoption. Hence, this study aims to identify and discuss challenges related to RPA implementation projects.

Following an inductive methodology, interviews have been conducted with consultants who were involved in multiple RPA implementation projects. Hence, their extensive experience and views contribute to a detailed and in-depth understanding of the phenomena under research.

The results suggest that there are various process-related, technical, resource-related, psychological and coordinative challenges that must be considered when conducting an RPA implementation project.

This paper contributes to knowledge by presenting a new typology of challenges, as well as providing an in-depth discussion of the individual challenges that organizations face.

Megaprojects are financially large and complex in scope, which require engagement of stakeholders from various institution and communities. With increased concerns from stakeholders on sustainability related issues, from environmental to socio-economic perspective, managing megaprojects has become quite challenging. Hence, there should be proactive approaches in active engagement of stakeholders from the start of the projects to overcome such issues. Currently, there is a knowledge gap on stakeholder management strategies specific to megaprojects on managing sustainability issues.

This research has adopted review of secondary data from case studies to identify stakeholder management challenges and strategies in megaprojects around Sydney area. The documents related to three different projects were reviewed and data were collected through qualitative content analysis and coding with use of NVivo software for within case analysis and was followed by thematic approach for cross case analysis.

Every case study project's sustainability-related stakeholder issues are more similar than different to others. Differences are mostly in terms of intensity of impact of any issue in a particular project, and/or intensity of impact at certain phase of any project. Moreover, significant sectors and strategies have been identified for key focus to manage environment and socioeconomic issues. Whatever be the strategies, in case of megaprojects, they need to be mostly proactive.

This research has extended the knowledge on stakeholder management, in relation to managing sustainability-related issues of megaprojects during their design, construction and operation phases. This research offers useful strategies for project teams of megaprojects to develop a proactive stakeholder management plan, addressing unavoidable sustainability challenges.

This article aims to address the confusion related to the meanings of interorganisational cooperation, control, coordination and collaboration in collaborative projects by developing a conceptual framework. From this, the authors aim to describe the links among these concepts in terms of development levels of stakeholder relationships. In addition, the authors aim to identify challenges and preconditions in relation to developing relationships at different levels.

The authors have adopted the directed approach of qualitative content analysis method to validate and extend the conceptual framework of this study. The context of this study is a large hospital construction project located in northern Finland.

The findings of this study suggest that collaboration is a multilevel process of active engagement of multiple stakeholders. These stakeholders must have a high degree of shared understanding in terms of cooperation, control and coordination to achieve the mutually desired outcomes. This study also identifies the challenges that project stakeholders could face in developing collaborative relationships and propose preconditions for the same.

This study provides a better understanding for project managers to manage interorganisational collaborative construction projects successfully. The outcome of this research would be beneficial to project management team to deliver dispute-free construction projects.

Existing practical research on the development of relationships at different levels in collaborative construction projects is limited. This study offers a framework for the same which is validated in a real-life project.

Governments in developing countries seeking to meet their infrastructure backlog are increasingly turning to public–private partnerships (PPP) due to a lack of public funds. However, while there are factors which drive the current uptake of projects, there are challenges with attracting private finance, and it is not clear what incentives can be used to attract more private participation, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Therefore, this study aims to examine challenges, drivers and incentives that affect private participation in PPP projects in Zambia.

The study used a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews with participants who had first-hand experience working on the administration of PPP projects. The participants were predominantly from the public sector, and so the results are largely a public sector perspective on the matter.

The findings show that bureaucracy and a poor business environment emanating from poor policies, long procedures and a poor economic environment are the main challenges affecting PPP projects. The current demand for the projects is being driven by a stable business and economic environment while incentives include enhancing the business environment by improving procedures and policies.

The study contributes to extant literature by proposing an overarching theory about the challenges affecting the implementation of PPP projects in Zambia, in particular, and in SSA, in general. The results show areas where governments and government agencies responsible for PPP projects can focus attention to promote private participation.

By adopting the “hard” and “soft” project management (PM) approaches from the PM-literature, this paper aims to problematize the expected role of client organizations in driving innovation in the transport infrastructure sector.

Addressing a large public client in Sweden, a case study design was initially applied to provide in-depth insights and perspectives of client project managers’ views and experiences of managing projects expected to drive innovation. In this paper, the concepts of “hard” and “soft” are used to discuss empirical findings on challenges associated with adopting a PM-approach for driving innovation in projects. The empirical material consists of interview data, complemented with observations and archival data.

Findings reveal challenges associated with combining hard and soft approaches, frequently demonstrating difficulties in balancing short-term project expectations with the promotion of innovation. In line with the literature, project managers note that there is a need for soft approaches to promote development and drive innovation. Yet, findings reflect a situation in which operational success criteria predominate, whereas soft approaches are not sufficiently used to create the grounds required for fostering innovation.

Insights are provided into how PM-approaches may impact construction innovation in the infrastructure sector, demonstrating a need for further research on the challenges and implications of applying and combining hard and soft PM-approaches.

This paper aims to understand the challenges of managing projects in hybrid organizations. The authors explore how organizations with persistent competing institutional logics strive to balance competing priorities, and the authors craft a research agenda to examine the capabilities to manage projects in hybrid organizations.

The authors focus on the social enterprise hybrid organizational form to study how such organizations manage persistent competing social and economic logics. The authors review the project management and social enterprise literature to generate new insights and suggest future research directions for theory development for project management.

The understanding of the influences of the institutional context on the management of projects is still quite limited. The authors propose that project managers need adaptive capabilities to address how the dual logics, and their corresponding different expectations, can be flexibly combined. The objective is not to reduce the complexity due to the different logics, which is the focus of much of the literature on institutional complexity. Instead, the focus is on how to incorporate dual logics into a successfully blended hybrid organization.

There is a dearth of literature about how projects are successfully managed in hybrid organizations with persistent competing institutional logics, like social enterprises, and important questions remain to be answered. This paper offers new insights on the capabilities required to flexibly combine dual logics that would generally compete and create conflict on projects in hybrid organizations.

The aim of this research was to understand how governmental stakeholder engagement facilitates the sustainability of industrial engineering (IE) projects. A model for governmental stakeholder engagement activities is presented.

The authors relied on a single-case study of a mining project in Northern Europe, where a novel collaboration and engagement approach with governmental stakeholders was piloted in the project's front-end phase. The analysis focused on the collaborative practices through which the IE project investor engaged governmental stakeholders during the project's front-end phase and how the engagement contributed to solving challenges in the early planning and permitting process and achieving project plans that balanced economic, social and environmental aspects.

The findings show how four collaborative engagement practices reduced uncertainty and equivocality related to the legal sustainability requirements, enabled the development of sustainable design solutions and overall accelerated the permitting process without compromising the quality of final project plans.

The findings can be used to plan governmental stakeholder engagement and understand related challenges that need to be overcome. The study highlights the need to develop established practices and guidelines for governmental stakeholder engagement.

This study complements prior research on stakeholder engagement and project sustainability by developing an understanding of how governmental stakeholder engagement can be a key mechanism enabling the sustainability of IE project's end product. This research contributes to stakeholder theory by elaborating on a new stakeholder role, intermediary stakeholder.

The delay in real estate projects in India is pervasive. Organization and management (O&M) and project management (PM)-related challenges are argued to contribute to project delays. This study examined the O&M and PM factors that cause delays, the level of implementation of various O&M and PM aspects in real estate projects and how the challenges can be alleviated.

Perception surveys among the consumers and relevant stakeholders engaged in real estate projects in the Bhubaneswar and Cuttack regions of India were conducted to collect data on the factors of delay and implementation of the O&M and PM aspects. Relevant statistical methods and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used for data analysis.

Findings suggest that from the O&M point of view, poor decision-making, mishandling of finance, concurrent execution of many projects, diversion and misuse of finance for unrelated activities, lack of PM personnel and poor management contribute to the delay. Further, although the project initiation is satisfactorily done, most of the PM principles are not largely used, thus leading to delay.

The study does have limitations, including its reliance on a perception survey of consumers and stakeholders, a limited sample size and a restricted number of projects. Nevertheless, the study highlights the need to address poor O&M and the insufficient application of PM principles to combat project delays in the Indian real estate sector.

Proper O&M and adequate application of PM will enable professional management of the projects and avoid delay.

Proper O&M and the application of adequate PM would reduce delays in real estate projects. Consequently, conflicts between the companies and consumers might be reduced and housing and infrastructure demands might be met.

The study manifested that the lack of adequate implementation of O&M and PM aspects leads to delays. So, it is theorized that O&M and PM play critical roles in the success of real estate projects. Appropriate implementation of the principles and best practices linked to these aspects might alleviate the challenges of delay in real estate projects in India.