Revolutionizing product development

In May 2013, Wiley-Blackwell published Reconstructing Project Management (Morris, 2013), a book I had been working on, I suppose, for over 40 years, about the knowledge needed to manage projects and programs effi ciently and effectively. I was invited to summarize the main points in the book in an article for Project Management Journal (PMJ)®, which is what this is. Many academic researchers are primarily interested in projects as examples of temporary organizations, rather than in questions about building a discipline for the delivery of goals. Indeed, they may well be skeptical about our ability to define the kind of normative or prescriptive nature of the knowledge that would be required for such a discipline, or the value of such guidance should it be available. Having spent many years in the ‘real’ world of delivering projects, I believe that there does need to be, and that there is, a discipline for managing projects; and further, that this discipline needs to be enlarged from how many perceive it today. Doing this will not be easy, but the result will be an enormously more useful and relevant body of knowledge. This thesis is explored in the book’s three parts. Part 1 traces how our knowledge of the field developed, and how the subject has come to be constructed in the way we think of it today. Part 2 takes this construct apart— deconstructs it—describing the range of functions and skills that collectively constitute the latest thinking on the discipline. Part 3 then looks at how these elements of project management may need to be recombined— reconstructed—to meet today’s needs and tomorrow’s challenges. We need, I argue, to focus more on enhancing value and influencing context, while making an effective impact and addressing the major issues facing society today. Except for Part 2, which is not reprised here, this paper more or less follows this structure but does so from the perspective of investigating what knowledge we need, as a discipline, to manage projects and programs, efficiently and effectively. Specifically, it investigates: • How our knowledge of managing projects (which, for brevity is often, but not always, taken also to cover programs) was ‘invented.’ (It was not ‘found’); • How robust that knowledge is, in the sense of being reliable and true; and • In what way and to what ends we should be using that knowledge, and why.

Reconstructing Project Management Reprised: A Knowledge Perspective

In Project Society, organizing by projects plays a prominent role. This type of society is already here, but projectification continues to lead developments and transformations along a set of paths ...

Project Society : Paths and challenges

The current study explores the curiously not much studied in management problem of innovation of contemporary Web-based applications. Starting from the distinction between user (U) and manufacturer/entrepreneur (E) innovation and using a phenomenon-based research approach, it identifies a third actor, the developer (D), whose action is found to lie in-between the two. Three actor figures are proposed for his description: user-developer (UD), user-developer-entrepreneur (UDE) and developer- entrepreneur (DE).This interpretative framework (U, D, E) is tested in the second part on the cases of three industries, where it enables a tracing of their history, from their birth to their maturity: radio industry, PC industry and enterprise computer industry. The important role of D actor is identified in all three settings. Their development phases can be read as a sequence of innovations related to different actors, UDs, UDEs and DEs successively, until the proposition of a rationalisation by enterprises (Es) and leading to the independence of the three actors, U, D, E.During the intermediate maturity phase of the Web, where expert enterprises Es have appeared, yet the de- velopers Ds remain under the forms of DEs or UDEs, the question posed for enterprises is how to harness their activity for innovation. Three management modes are identified in the third part. The first method consists in fostering the self-revelation of these actors. The second consists in harnessing their action using ephemeral settings for the exploration of the potential of a given service. The last consists in animating a community of developers already using the enterprise's technology to encourage them in developing applications on the basis of this technology.

https://pastel.archives-ouvertes.fr/pastel-00959272/document

When users create industries: the case of Web-based applications

/pdf/project-and-innovation-management-bridging-contemporary-r7g6nq1a4f.pdf

Project and Innovation Management: Bridging Contemporary Trends in Theory and Practice.

Summary From the postwar period until the present time, the development of project managementhas radically changed structures and processes within car manufacturing companies. But onthe reverse, we can say that project management had been changed by its implementationwithin the automotive context: from technique and tool orientation to more strategic andorganizational approaches, from highly precise contractualized relation patterns to proce-dural open learning ‘‘meta-rules.’’ The auto industry was a latecomer to project manage-ment, compared to military equipment or construction business. But these sectors are nowtrying to transform there project management tradition and adopt the project managementpractices that were developed in the late 1980s and 1990s in the auto sector. We can seevarious reasons behind such a dragging effect: the economic importance and symbolic no-toriety of the auto sector, of course, but also the importance of researches in managementscience and economics in the ﬁeld, that happened to evaluate the performances of variousproject patters and to trace the transformations round the world.This process is not yet complete, since performance limits are constantly increasing.

Christian Navarre

Papers

Project management in the automotive industry

Project management in Automotive Industry