Are megaprojects ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

Complex projects and megaprojects are increasingly shaped by new enabling technologies and new demands from businesses, including how people are treated when working on these endeavours. This is often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Project leaders and practitioners are not fully leveraging the opportunities unlocked by the 4IR, and project performance shows little sign of improvement despite the highly innovative and collaborative environment that the 4IR stimulates. This paper discusses this challenge and concludes that a significant reason why these benefits are not being realised is because there is a competence gap in both the project leader and practitioner communities. These communities are attempting to deal with twenty-first-century issues using competences, toolsets and a mindset created 100 years ago. Significant developments in competences associated with the 4IR in general are required. In this paper, specific competences are proposed and justified: collaborative working including people, process and digital components; lean six sigma; and agile. Success will be to empower the people who deliver megaprojects such that they are able to deliver the planned social value to all stakeholders involved

The role of project portfolio management in fostering both deliberate and emergent strategy

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd and Association for Project Management and the International Project Management Association Formal strategy processes have been shown to be insufficient in shaping strategy, particularly in turbulent environments. Emerging strategies that constitute independently from deliberate top-down strategy processes are important for organizational adaptability. This study explores strategic control mechanisms at the project portfolio level and their influence on emergent and deliberate strategies. Based on a sample of 182 firms, we show that both deliberate and emerging strategies positively influence project portfolio success, complementing each other. In turbulent environments, the relevance of deliberate strategy implementation decreases. Strategic control activities not only foster the implementation of intended strategies, but also disclose strategic opportunities by unveiling emerging patterns. Furthermore, we find that deliberate strategy implementation and emerging strategy recognition mediate the performance impact of strategic control. Our findings suggest that strategic control at the project portfolio level has an important role to play in the purposeful management of emergent strategies

The use of effectuation in projects: The influence of business case control, portfolio monitoring intensity and project innovativeness

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd, APM and IPMA Project management approaches are evolving to be more flexible and adaptive to meet the challenges associated with an increasingly complex and dynamic environment. However, potential changes in the underpinning logic supporting project decision making have scarcely been considered. We investigate the role of effectuation, a decision logic most commonly associated with entrepreneurship, as an alternative decision-making approach to the rational ‘causation’ logic that has traditionally underpinned project management processes. We develop and test a model to explore the portfolio- and project-level influences on the application of effectuation in project management. We find that portfolio governance mechanisms related to business case use and portfolio monitoring inhibit the use of effectuation, while project innovativeness is associated with increased use of effectuation. The paper contributes to research and practice by empirically investigating the antecedents to the use of effectuation decision-making logic in project and portfolio management through a multi-level model