With this book, we intended to contribute to the development of organizational project management (OPM) as an ontology – a reality in its own right. This perspective extends earlier work on OPM, which merely looked at the concept’s individual constituting elements, such as project(s), programs, or portfolios and their management, but rarely took an integrated view toward the entirety of project-related work in an organization. To that end, the book aims to build an understanding that OPM is more than just the sum of its parts. It is a way of seeing the industry, public, and other sectors’ reality as inextricably linked with the integrated system of OPM elements described in this book. This integrated system exists to a smaller or larger extent in every company, institution, or public organization and is described in the book as a large, integrated organization.
We addressed the challenge of developing this view (i.e., the ontology of OPM) after experiencing a wide variety of opinions about the subject when talking to our academic colleagues, students, and representatives from many industries and the public sector. Some of them saw projects, programs, and portfolios as individual organizational entities that occupy different levels in corporate hierarchies but do not integrate to form a larger OPM organization. Others were attuned to the idea of an integrated OPM and said it is natural to view organizations in this way. Hence, we experienced an ontological clash between those who do and those who do not see OPM as an integrated organization in its own right. This book should help the latter group to develop such an ontology or perspective toward the project-related parts of the wider organization.
We addressed the task of writing a book about this integrated view of OPM by looking first at the three main functions that are impacted by an OPM thinking. These are: (a) strategy implementation, which is through projects, hence the need to understand the link between strategy and projects; (b) organizational design, which includes the structures and the governance of project-related work; and (c) the people, without whom no project would be possible and who are the ones to start, execute, and finish all project-related work. These three functions constitute the first three sections of this book. However, we then realized that the subject of OPM is much wider, going beyond the themes of the first three sections. Therefore, we included other, important aspects such as ethics, sustainability, innovation, value creation, complexity, marketing, and social media in the fourth section of the book. Again, this was done with the aim to help the reader to understand how intertwined these subjects are for executing projects in an organization and how necessary it is to look at these individual themes in a holistic way. In other words, the yin and yang of OPM.
Examples for this interrelatedness are numerous throughout the book, but to cite just one, Chapter 6 describes the governance of interfaces in projects, which include the investor, project, and contractor as separate organizational entities, each of which has the joint project as part of their particular portfolio of projects. This highlights the dependency of each project portfolio on the other organizational portfolios. This again, is complemented by the two-way dependency of each project with its portfolio, where portfolios depend on projects and vice versa for the execution of the projects on behalf of the wider organization. To that end, the dependencies between the OPM elements and the organization they stem from become stronger than the dependencies between the OPM part of the organization and the operational parts of it. This strengthens the argument for seeing OPM from a holistic perspective as a single organization.
By publishing this book, we are not claiming to be the first to expound on this subject. OPM has been around as a subject for a long time, such as in the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) OPM3 Maturity Model (PMI, 2003) for practitioners, Aubry, Sicotte, Drouin, Vidot-Delerue, and Besners (Reference Aubry, Sicotte, Drouin, Vidot-Delerue and Besner2012) conceptual work on OPM for academics, Vaskimo’s (Reference Vaskimo2016) study on methodologies used in OPM, and Drouin, Müller, and Sankaran’s (Reference Drouin, Müller and Sankaran2013) work on research methods for OPM. All these writers have moved the understanding of the concept forward and contributed to accomplish the current state of knowledge, which allows us to look at OPM as an organization in itself.
The natural question at this point is, ”What comes next?” We do not have a crystal ball to look into the future, but we see a few recent developments that look like a gestalt of what to expect. To benefit from the quality assurance through the academic peer review process, we concentrate only on academic literature here. We see the latest developments in four areas:
Organization theory: here Carvalho, Laurindo, & Pessôa (Reference Carvalho, Laurindo and Pessôa2009) describe the most popular OPM models in the Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology. More recently, Mossalam and Arafa (Reference Mossalam and Arafa2015) have developed a governance approach for the integration of OPM into the practices of the wider organization, and Wen and Qiang (Reference Wen and Qiang2016) used the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm to empirically develop ten organizational enablers for OPM.
Management theory: these studies focus mainly on top managers views’ on value creation through OPM, like Hyväri’s (Reference Hyväri2016) study on top management’s involvement in OPM for successful strategy implementation; and Oliveira and De Muylder’s (Reference Oliveira and De Muylder2012) investigation into managers’ recognition of value through OPM in government agencies.
Education: OPM has also entered postgraduate education in universities. Here, Bergman and Gunnarson (Reference Bergman and Gunnarson2014) report on the setup and experience of teaching OPM classes at university.
Research: here, Chia (Reference Chia, Drouin, Müller and Sankaran2013) makes specific suggestions for research paradigms for investigations into OPM.
This indicates the growing acceptance of OPM as a concept and a practice. In the near future, we foresee further developments in all four areas mentioned above. Management theorists will most likely be the first to address the relations and dependencies among the elements of OPM and the ways to economize on their context dependency. Developments by organizational theorists will probably follow the path we saw in research on temporary organizations, such as starting with categorizations of OPM approaches and their modeling, followed by attempts to understand these from different philosophical perspectives and then identify the role of OPM in corporations and the broader society, as well as the implications for people working therein, leading to theories on OPM organizing. The pace at which educational institutions take the concept of OPM into the classroom will be decisive for the speed of integrating practitioner approaches (the What) with academic theory building (the Why) for contextualizing and tailoring OPM in the most beneficial way for all stakeholders. Finally, for research methods, we foresee a slow development, similar to that of studies on agile, governance, sustainability or ethics, where academia still struggles to find suitable research approaches and hesitates to accept contemporary research methods for contemporary research questions. To that end, factor and regression analysis will continue to be around for a long time, while nontraditional methods will continue to struggle in getting accepted for publication by reviewers whose understanding of research methods is constrained by existing research paradigms.
Our personal opinion about OPM is that it is a necessary perspective to understand corporate and organizational reality. Optimization of economic and noneconomic benefits can only be accomplished through continuous efforts to understand the OPM-organization and tailor it for the achievement of the objectives of the variety of stakeholders and the organization itself.
