Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore a classic tool in project management, which for some has become almost synonymous with project management: the Gantt chart. The Gantt chart was developed in the early twentieth century, at the heart of Scientific Management; yet, the chart is used with very little adaptation across a wide range of types of projects. In this conceptual paper, the authors question its universal and unreflective use.

The authors analyse the conceptual roots of the Gantt chart, its historical development and use, derive its engrained principles, and analyse its implications to the management of projects.

While a Gantt chart can be useful to cope with some of the “complicatedness” of projects, and embraces the importance of time and timing, it is based on principles that are not valid to all projects. The consequence is a propagation of a management approach that does not explicitly cope with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and change. In that respect, the Gantt chart fails to acknowledge insights from years of organization theory research and project management research with a firm grounding in contingency theory.

While the majority of contemporary project management thinking already accepted that a normative use can be inappropriate, the practice is still pretty much embracing this approach. By showing the conceptual roots of the Gantt chart, the authors hope to make some of its limitations more evident to practitioners and academics, and encourage its use to be more reflective and contextualised.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the potential of data analytics to enhance project delivery. Yet many argue that its application in projects is still lagging behind other disciplines. This paper aims to provide a review of the current use of data analytics in project delivery encompassing both academic research and practice to accelerate current understanding and use this to formulate questions and goals for future research.

We propose to achieve the research aim through the creation of a systematic review of the status of data analytics in project delivery. Fusing the methodology of integrative literature review with a recently established practice to include both white and grey literature amounts to an approach tailored to the state of the domain. It serves to delineate a research agenda informed by current developments in both academic research and industrial practice.

The literature review reveals a dearth of work in both academic research and practice relating to data analytics in project delivery and characterises this situation as having “more gap than knowledge.” Some work does exist in the application of machine learning to predicting project delivery though this is restricted to disparate, single context studies that do not reach extendible findings on algorithm selection or key predictive characteristics. Grey literature addresses the potential benefits of data analytics in project delivery but in a manner reliant on “thought-experiments” and devoid of empirical examples.

Based on the review we articulate a research agenda to create knowledge fundamental to the effective use of data analytics in project delivery. This is structured around the functional framework devised by this investigation and highlights both organisational and data analytic challenges. Specifically, we express this structure in the form of an “onion-skin” model for conceptual structuring of data analytics in projects. We conclude with a discussion about if and how today’s project studies research community can respond to the totality of these challenges. This paper provides a blueprint for a bridge connecting data analytics and project management.

Project studies analyse either managing practices or the temporal nature of project management, which leaves open a research gap: the temporality of managing practice. The paper demonstrates that performativity theory with a temporal perspective helps us to understand how managing a project organises limited temporal resources by aligning activities, deadlines or milestones to reach a goal in a given time.

The article utilises empirical data and grounded theory methodology. Ten interviews with project managers from two companies support empirically guided theory building and conceptual reasoning.

The article extends John Law's “modes of ordering” to a project-specific mode of temporal ordering. This mode of temporal ordering describes the underlying rationale of project managers who assign, order and materialise time to generate the temporal structure of the project.

The conceptual nature of the paper and its limited empirical data restrict the generalisation of the findings. The article's goal is to initiate further research and to offer a set of tools for such research.

The contribution links managing practice and temporality in a performativity approach. This link focusses the actual actions of the managers and contextualises them in the temporal flow of the project. Managing projects as a mode of temporal ordering describes how project managers enact temporal structures and how they themselves and their activities are temporally embedded.

The purpose of this study set out to introduce an alternative framework for explaining the formation of the innovation ecosystem based on the systematic literature review (SLR) and ecosystemic approach.

This paper is an SLR of studies from the year 2008-2018 that investigating startups’ innovation. SLR approach being used exploration, interpretation and communication method, which composed of seven steps as follows exploring topics, searching, organizing, evaluating and expanding, integrating and communicating. The output of this process is 63 documents that applied to synthesize the formation framework.

The systematic review of literature has shown that researchers in recent years have considered some entities such as incubators, financials suppliers, accelerators, universities and companies in relation to the startup innovations, which are described in this paper as key actors. The study of the relationship between these actors in the documents led to the identification of interactional necessities, including structures, infrastructures and networks. Finally, the processes studied in the literature were classified into three types of mechanisms, namely, the genesis, growth and development of startups innovations.

The SLR approach is subject to limitations because some poor explanations amongst previous researchers may be repeated and reinforced. Also, in the protocol adopted in this paper, documents are limited in English.

The introduced frammework can be useful in identifying and understanding the requirements of startups and creating effective policies for their innovation development.

This paper reviews, summarizes and integrates the growing and scattered literature of the innovation ecosystem of the startups and delivers new facts for the future development of this field.