Abstract
What do the latest Pixar film and the Beijing Olympic Water Cube have in common? Automaker R&D labs and Not Impossible, the social venture that brought 3D prosthetic limb printing to war-torn Sudan? Open Source software and the Live Aid music festival? While they may differ in scale and scope, and span a diverse array of industries, each is an example of project-based organizing—a fundamental feature of work, careers, and enterprise in the 21st century and a primary vehicle for solving complex problems and advancing innovation. While a substantial body of research examines the possibilities and challenges of temporary organizations, our understanding of a project-based society remains fragmented and siloed. The authors of Managing and Working in Project Society: Institutional Challenges of Temporary Organizations address this gap—thoughtfully synthesizing a broad constellation of research streams and industry studies to offer readers an invaluable, comprehensive overview of how project-based organizing is transforming work and society.
The authors begin by addressing essential motivating questions, such as “What are the characteristics of project organizing and management? How does this organizational form differ from traditional industrial organization?” Project-based organizing, the authors suggest, has a long history—the organizational form can be found throughout agrarian, industrial, and knowledge economies. Nevertheless, the authors focus our attention on how project-based organizing is challenging those steeped in the hierarchical, industrial logic of the last century. How are existing dominant institutions, which have enjoyed success using the hierarchical model, adapting to the “projectification” of work and organizing? What are the managerial, human resource, and market implications of a project-based society? What capacities will leaders need to advance sustainable, long-term solutions through increasingly more complex, fluid, and multicultural projects?
Gaining traction on these questions has been difficult, given the wide variety of problems and ventures advanced through temporary projects and the diverse industries and organizational contexts in which they arise. To help gain clarity, the authors offer an invaluable typology of three project archetypes. First, the authors identify project-based organizations (PBOs), in which “the knowledge, capabilities, and resources of the firm are built up through the execution of projects, and most of their internal and external activities are organized in projects” (p. 23). Examples of PBOs include consulting, creative and design firms, architecture and civil engineering firms. Second, project-supported organizations (PSOs) primarily include organizations that rely on projects to drive innovation and competitive advantage for the firm. Examples include the R&D arm or product development labs of an automotive company, or other companies organized around the traditional, hierarchical industrial model. Third, the authors identify project networks (PNWs), which include projects that span organizational boundaries and harness the expertise and resources of a constellation of actors and organizations from across an industry, field, or cluster.
Utilizing this typology, the authors examine and compare how the nature of work and management is changing across the three archetypes. For example, within project-based organizing, individuals may develop greater identification with their occupation, profession, or project rather than their organization, making the ties between employer and expert employees more precarious. How can organizations capture learning at the firm level when individuals are project focused and develop deep subject- and project-related expertise for particular industries? In project-supported organizations, managers and project participants increasingly wrestle with blurred roles and task boundaries and the increased need to simultaneously navigate competing individual career, project, and organizational outcomes. There may be radical differences in organizational logics in PSOs—the “home” organization may be oriented toward efficiency, eliminating errors, and specialization of tasks, while projects within organizations may be emergent, bring together myriad disciplines and expertise, and embrace experimentation and discovery. As managers attempt to navigate both logics, how should they be compensated and evaluated?
Within project networks, managers attempt to balance tension between competitiveness and the need for cooperation, as roles of supplier and consumer, client and contributor, are blurred and negotiated over time. Across all three, the authors call attention to how careers and project capabilities may develop differently than in traditional organizations, how the rise of project work alters the power, influence, and responsibility of various stakeholders, and how project-based work, which can take place anywhere and anytime, is blurring work and personal life boundaries.
Importantly, the authors situate our understanding of project-based work within its larger context, considering how project-based organizing is shaped by and shapes institutions and societies in which it is embedded. The authors focus attention on the collective nature of project-based work, and the networks of individuals and institutions that make viable a project society. This includes the professional societies that provide standardized accreditation and training processes, and in turn, drive the “projectification” of society. This multi-level approach—examining micro-processes and practices, while also embracing a macro-perspective that examines projects within institutions and society, provides an invaluable integration of previously disparate research streams and methodological approaches.
The authors also provide a useful roadmap for future research. First, the authors encourage us to examine the role and purpose of projects—not only as vehicles for task completion but also as a driver of strategic innovation and competitive advantage. Whether inside an organization or as a network entrepreneur and integrator, how do we prepare project leaders to move beyond stewardship and management—to active engagement with inventing and imagining new possibilities? How do we prepare project leaders to deftly manage ambiguity and the paradoxes inherent to the innovation process? For example, how do project leaders foster experimentation and learning while also demonstrating success? How do they integrate short-term interests with long-term, sustainable outcomes and foster cooperation among experts competing for control and power? How can we foster project leaders’ resilience and capacity to handle exceptions to the projected process and pivot as needed, while still maintaining the commitment of those involved? Reconciling and holding paradoxes in tension as the project process unfolds will increasingly require improvisation and empathy, rapid cycles of experimentation and learning, and fluency in power and change leadership skills. These become ever more important for network entrepreneurs and brokers, who often lack authority over project contributors and stakeholders, even as they need to edit and synthesize ideas into a cohesive whole.
In their call to action, the authors encourage research that is practice and process oriented, that helps bring to life the work as it is experienced by project participants, and in the moment as they make sense of how to proceed. Beyond the studies and industries already addressed by the authors, what else can be learned from practice- and process-based studies of other industries? For example, what can we learn from examining the open source organizing that drove early years of the Internet browser wars, global project-based industries such as the gaming and app industry, or the project-based ecosystems undergirding Salesforce?
Research and practice focused on the ethics of project management is also needed. As project leaders take a more strategic role, they need a systems approach to evaluating unintended consequences and the impact on the wide array of stakeholders to their projects. As the projectification of society continues, we need to consider the challenges project leaders face as they “give voice to their values,” perhaps using Mary Gentile’s innovative practice-based approach. Embracing a human-centered, design thinking approach can also encourage project managers to empathically elicit and incorporate a range of stakeholder perspectives as they “define the problem” and develop long-term sustainable solutions. This strategic, ethical accountability provides an important complement to the professionalization of the project leader, and provides them the ability to wrestle with their short-term and long-term impact on the environment, neighborhoods, and communities.
The authors also call for us to examine the impact of projects on society. Especially in those countries lacking labor safeguards, what happens when cohorts of project workers assume the bulk of project risk, rather than firms and organizations that may be more equipped to weather project uncertainty? What are the implications when temporary workers lack access to healthcare and other benefits? How can temporary workers manage the intensity of project-based work and its deadlines? As projects increase, is there time for rejuvenation and reflection? Learning across projects? These questions beg for policy and research that focuses on the benefits and safeguards needed to support a project-based society over the long term.
Finally, the authors encourage researchers and educators to consider the role of higher education in preparing the next generation to survive and thrive in a project-based society. While project certification programs play an invaluable role, how could higher education be redesigned to systematically foster fluency in project-based capacities described above, or prepare graduates to more deftly manage project-based careers? In addition to encouraging students to catalyse their own project work, how could these capacities be more fully integrated in the higher education experience? Doing so might call for systematic changes in how higher education itself is organized. For example, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, requires its students to graduate with deep technical and disciplinary knowledge coupled with project leadership skills. WPI has redesigned its entire curriculum to enable students to consistently pursue project-based, experiential learning. Demand for project-based learning is high—WPI is now offering a summer institute for other higher education leaders on the practice and process of instituting project-based curricula. This example perhaps previews a long-term sea change in how project-based organizing will transform higher education and, in turn, society.