“An idea can only become a reality once it is broken down into organized, actionable elements.”
The idea to develop the concept of Organizational Project Management (OPM) from an organization theory perspective started six years ago when the three editors met at the Umeå School of Business and Economics in the winter of 2011. First, we collaborated on a research book on project management (Drouin, Müller & Sankaran, 2013), the aim of which was to urge project management researchers to adopt novel transformational and translational methods in their research to contribute to the development of OPM research methods. This book was successfully published in 2013 and was received favorably by international scholars. We then decided it was time to revisit the latest developments in the growing field of OPM, and Cambridge University Press enthusiastically agreed to publish this book. After looking at the list of authors submitting chapters to the book, CUP suggested that the book be titled the Cambridge Handbook on Organizational Project Management. As far as the authors are aware, this is the first such handbook to promote the concept of OPM. In line with Belsky’s quote, the idea of developing the concept of OPM became a reality as soon as we started to assemble this handbook in an “actionable” manner, with the support and collaboration of eminent scholars and colleagues in the field of project management.
Why This Handbook Now?
Over the past two decades, OPM has emerged as an academic field focused on how project, program, and portfolio management practices help firms strategically to realize organizational goals (Chia, 2013, p. 37). In 2012, Drouin and Besner edited a Special Issue on Projects and Organizations in the International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, which included several papers explaining project management’s relationship to organizations. While Cooke-Davies et al. (2001) acknowledged that “there is a growing recognition that project management involves more than the skillful and competent management of individual projects” (p.1), Drouin and Besner (2012, p.176) noted that “projects are seen as venues for mastering business, implementing changes, innovating and developing competitive advantage.” This means project management transcends the management of single projects by establishing relationships between individual projects and the wider organization through the management of multiple projects (Drouin, Müller & Sankaran, 2013). Aubry, Hobbs, and Thuillier (2007) used the term OPM to describe such an approach, where project-based organizations integrate multiproject management activities to deal with strategic alignment, portfolio and program management, and governance (Aubry, Sicotte, Drouin, Vidot-Delerue & Besner, 2012).
But what is OPM? What is the relationship between OPM and the organization? These are the questions that will be addressed in this handbook.
The editors felt that there is a compelling need in the market for an organization-level book that addresses the totality of project-related work in organizations and not just in individual projects for which there are many existing publications. Such a text should address projects from an organizational level by providing a view of organizations as a network of projects (or temporary organizations), which need to be coordinated among themselves and with the more permanent organization, but away from the focus on individual projects.
This handbook is intended to fill this need by (1) clarifying what OPM is, and (2) covering and clearly defining its importance to the organization. It includes concepts and theories from various disciplines allied to project management, such as strategic management, organization science, and behavioral science, to enrich our understanding of OPM. We hope that this multidisciplinary approach will provide guidance to academics to further investigate this new phenomenon. The book also includes a few case studies to aid practitioners in understanding the importance of OPM.
The Sections of This Handbook
The handbook has four parts: Strategy, Organizations, People, and New Directions. Each section plays a key role to guide the reader through the journey of understanding and appreciating OPM.
Part I fulfils the need for OPM to be considered as a strategic asset for the organization. Part II raises the need to reflect on organizational structure, and Part III highlights the important role of people in organizations. Part IV introduces some emerging concepts that we think will add to adoption of OPM by expanding its reach beyond our current understanding of OPM. The OPM concept seems obvious and quite simple but it is not so easy to achieve in practice. Do not expect the chapters to be in a perfect logical order as the evolution of the OPM concept is certainly not linear. However, to clarify our thoughts, we propose each section to be organized along the following lines:
Part I covers Strategy, with an intent to explore the `foundations underlying strategic issues faced by organizations and the role of OPM in order to derive a well-grounded definition of the concept of OPM, and its scope, and contents. By doing this, OPM is positioned as a venue for developing sustainable competitive advantage for firms.
Part II covers Organizations, reflecting on and broadening the current set of theories, concepts, and knowledge discussed in recent years in the literature, with regard to organizational structure and design, and their links to OPM. OPM requires a set of systems, processes, and structures that enable an organization to undertake the right projects and to support them organizationally. This means going beyond the management of single projects to consider the management of networks of internal and external projects and the relationships between the company and the management of multiple projects (Andersen & Jessen, 2003).
Part III covers People, as the management of people is recognized to be a key success factor in project management. This part will include research from areas that are allied to OPM, such as sociology, psychology, and human resource management. It will use multidisciplinary approaches to provide guidance on integrating theories, concepts, and approaches from allied fields to complement, expand, and enrich the OPM concept.
Part IV includes chapters that we hope will take OPM research to new avenues that are not often addressed in the field of project management but which are essential to increase research quality and generate novel insights. We believe that these chapters cover areas of increasing importance for the future development of OPM.
Why Is It Different?
While there are several noteworthy handbooks on project management by prominent scholars, this book takes a new direction by drawing the focus away from individual projects and their management. It has been conceived as an organizational-level handbook that addresses the totality of project-related work in organizations. Thus it has shifted the focus from individual projects, through the structuring of project management and its projectification, toward the integration of all project management-related activities and dynamic processes in complex environments.
Target Audience
The book is positioned as an academic handbook with the aim to highlight and build on the current state of knowledge in the field and to identify future research directions in OPM. OPM has been discussed and used in the literature but it is time to clarify its meaning and related concepts in order to expand and enrich OPM research. The chapters are expected to be prescribed as supplementary readings at postgraduate courses in universities. Case studies in the book would be useful to practitioners.
In sum, the idea of OPM that we started with has taken a shape through concrete action as the Handbook of Organizational Project Management with the help of all the contributors to this handbook, who overcame obstacles to turn a vision into reality.
The editors have a number of people to thank for helping us to get this book ready.
First we would like to thank all the authors from across the world who devoted their time to contribute chapters to the book.
We would like to thank Dr. Gita Sankaran for the initial copyediting of chapters and making useful suggestions to improve the content and assisting in the final checking of the chapters during proof reading. Thanks are due to Karyne Ang who helped us to project manage the book and to compile the index.
We thank Professor Jörg Sydow for writing the foreword. We also thank Professor Stewart Clegg from the University of Technology Sydney for supporting us to write and promoting the idea at the Academy of Management Meeting at Anaheim in 2016.
The people at Cambridge University Press deserve our special thanks for working with us closely to release the book as expected, in particular Paula Parish, who was our original contact at CUP, Valerie Appleby, who took over from Paula, Emma Collison, and James Gregory. We would also like to thank Karthik Orukaimani of Integra and his team for project managing the final production and Brian Black for his excellent final copyediting that was appreciated by several of the authors. We would also like to thank many others who have worked in the background at CUP and Integra to get this book ready on time.
Thank you to our families for bearing with us when we spent time having late-night Skype meetings to get the handbook ready on time.
Finally, we would like to thank our institutions, the University of Technology Sydney, University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM), and BI Norwegian Business School for their support in providing us with valuable time to edit and write chapters for the handbook.
