Mats Engwall’s often quoted insight that “no project is an island” has had important implications for researching projects, perhaps the most popular form of temporary organizing. Research has since then increasingly paid attention not only to the temporal and spatial, but also the relational and organizational context of projects. For very good reasons, this has caused more and more researchers to abstain from trying to unearth or formulate “general principles” for project management. Instead, much more contextual and processual approaches are preferred nowadays, reflecting significantly better reflexive project management practice. At the same time, the discipline of project management has profited a lot from management, organization, and network theory developed and advanced in other fields, even from more abstract and formal cultural and social theory. All these theories emphasize the importance of context and process.
This Cambridge Handbook of Organizational Project Management picks up these trends and even goes beyond capturing the organization as a relevant context for temporary organizing by investigating project management at the organizational level of analysis. Thereby, it nicely bridges micro-organizational behavior and more macro-organizational theory perspectives. As a consequence, the Handbook is a more than welcome basis for continuing the conversation among researchers in the fields of organizational behavior and theory, and project management – and also among managers and consultants – about sequences of projects, or even entire programs or project portfolios, as forms of temporary organizing embedded in more permanent structures, such as organization in the field of business, public administration, or non-for-profit organizations.
The authors of the Handbook, who come from eleven different countries, focus rather strictly on the organizational level of analysis in which projects, programs, and portfolios interact intricately with each other. More often than not, the required (multi-) project management is supported by specialized, permanent organizational units such as the project management office. The twenty-five contributions to the Handbook, many of which are based on literature reviews and illustrations with the help of case studies, deal with such formal organizational structures. But they also consider the often complementary and/or conflicting informal organizational networks around project teams for instance. Also at the organizational level of analysis, the contributions discuss frequently neglected strategic issues, business aspects of projects, project management as an organizational capability, project and program governance within and across organizations, as well as change management, human resources, extra-role behavior, distributed leadership and stakeholder networks. Considering the limitations of classical approaches to (project) risk management, one chapter deals with the increasing roles of Knightian uncertainties (unknown unknowns, possibly even unknowables). Interestingly also, one of the later chapters discusses regional clusters as an increasingly important context for project and multiproject management.
Overall, the three editors of the Handbook seem to have skillfully managed the project of “conceptualizing and compiling a handbook” and produced the desired outcome: a timely, well-structured publication with many insightful chapters providing a much needed organizational perspective on project management and offering manifold insights into this important field of temporary organizing.
