Design Methods and Practices for Research of Project Management

Beverly Pasian, Rodney Turner, Beverly Pasian, Rodney Turner, Beverly Pasian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409448808
• eBook ISBN: 9781351981330
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Design Methods and Practices for Research of Project Management is the most comprehensive guide on how to do research of and in project management. Project management as a discipline has experienced near-exponential growth in its application across the business and not-for-profit sectors. This second edition of the authoritative reference book offers a substantial update on the first edition with over 60% new content and so provides both practitioner and student researchers with a fully up-to-date and complete guide to research practice on project management.

In Design Methods and Practices for Research of Project Management, Beverly Pasian and Rodney Turner have brought together 27 original chapters from many of the leading international thinkers in project management research. The collection looks at each step in the research stages, including research strategy, management, methodology (quantitative and qualitative), techniques as well as how to share and publish research findings. The chapters offer an international perspective with examples from a wide range of project management applications; engineering, construction, mega-projects, high-risk environments and social transformation. Each chapter includes tips and exercises for the research student, as well as a complete set of further references.

The book is the go-to text for practitioners undertaking research in companies, and also doctoral and masters students and their supervisors who are involved in research projects in and for universities.

PART I
FOUNDATIONAL ISSUES

One of the challenges of research is the extent to which you must work in abstractions. You might have a general idea of your research interest, problem or phenomenon you want to explore or situation you want to explain, but positioning this work on the foundational issues of ontology, epistemology, axiology and praxeology won’t necessarily clarify things. Researching project management (PM) as a subject domain is difficult for several reasons, not the least of which is the struggle to position it within a specific context. It pushes boundaries because it can be positioned in multiple ways as its own field, within management studies and/or other applied sciences.

As a new or developing PM researcher, where does this leave you? How and where should you start positioning your research as a specific contribution on a foundation of abstractions? Answering these questions is difficult and necessary, but with the help of the following chapters, perhaps a little easier.

• Maylor and Söderlund share their thoughts on the importance of having a research strategy and to consider that PM theory, brought in from recognised disciplines, is essential in developing not only your research, but the field of as a whole.

• Young challenges current thinking about PM. He argues that researchers should broaden their perspectives from the reductionist, tools and techniques-based view of PM and explore other aspects of the domain – perhaps cultural dimensions?

• Biedenbach shows the value of utilising paradigms and articulating the research philosophy to effectively direct a new research endeavour. The benefits of doing this within the growing field of PM are discussed.

• Bredillet builds on the PM schools of thought and discusses the main aspects for research of paradigmatic PM science, ontological argument about the existence of projects and their management, and the relationship between theory and practice.

• Klakegg discusses how difficult it is to isolate the researcher from the research. This chapter identifies some of the most fundamental reasons for this within the context of PM research.

• Klein and Weiland look at research as both a process and a project with the experience of the Systems Excellence Group as a case study.

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1
Project Management Research: Addressing Integrative Challenges

Harvey Maylor and Jonas Söderlund

We wrote this chapter to improve both the relevance and impact of PM research in the future and avoid remaining ‘stuck in the middle’ by making little contribution to the broader academy or practice.

At one time, all that was needed to do ‘good research’ was something interesting to look into, and something interesting to say about it; and ‘interesting’ to anyone other than you was entirely optional. The requirements today for scholarship at all levels in business and management schools are entirely different. In this chapter, we provide a summary of a recently published article on research strategy, and focus on the implications for researchers. The main message is that theory, brought in from recognised disciplines, is essential in developing not only your research, but the field of PM as a whole. In addition, we underline the importance for researchers of developing perspective awareness alongside contextual awareness if your work is to meet the enduring requirements of relevance and impact.

At the end of this chapter, the reader can:

• recognise five integrative challenges for business and management research and researchers;

• demonstrate the centrality of developing perspective awareness and contextual awareness among scholars in PM;

• understand the implications for their own work in the context of a rapidly developing academy.

Keywords: research, relevance, impact, context, perspective, theory, integrative challenges

Introduction

Much has changed in the business and management academy in recent years. Business and management scholars struggle with a number of challenges. The challenges, initially set out in the article published in the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM), (Söderlund and Maylor, 2012), and now in short-form here, are not only strategic challenges for our field, but also for you as researchers. We wrote the original paper and this chapter, not to give answers, but to encourage debate.

Five Integrative Challenges

Our point of departure is a consideration of the pressures driving the intellectual activity of business and management schools today. Those most germane to our discussion are the need to improve both the relevance of research and the currently limited impact of research on management practice generally. For the PM field, these two terms – relevance and impact – would appear to be very straightforward at first – PM as a research field is highly relevant to business and management today, and impact means our ability to influence practice (Pettigrew, 2011).

Yet whilst projects are ubiquitous undertakings, the relevance of the academy to modern practice is limited. For instance, the main standards for PM practice (including those of the Project Management Institute (PMI), and the Association of Project Management (APM) in the UK) have no direct research evidence in them or for them. The notions of engaged scholarship (Van de Ven, 2007) and Evidence-based Management (Rousseau, 2012) are rare in our field today. Impact, according to many schools, is where work from one of the top journals is seen to be impacting practice in some demonstrable manner. PM journals do not count as ‘top journals’. On a 1–4 scale, where 1 is poor and 4 is the best, PM journals are all currently rated as 1 and 2 although their quality is improving steadily. There are few PM papers published in the better journals, and their impact on practice is at best minimal.

This is our challenge – our two strongest opportunities, relevance and impact, not being exploited. As a result PM research is often ‘caught in the middle’; to many in the academy, anything to do with PM is ‘too close to practice to be of academic interest’, whilst practitioners find our outputs, particularly those highly valued journal articles, ‘too abstract to be of value’. If we are to contribute to relevance and impact, our work has to be designed with our opportunities in mind.

We unpacked this situation further to identify five challenges. These are listed below, framed as a duality (interacting and reinforcing) between two aspects of that challenge:

• Challenge I: Strategy and execution. Strategy, as a discipline within management and business studies, has successfully demonstrated its value to the academy. However, much of what is published in the strategy field ignores any discussion of strategy implementation. Recent work has either called for (Whittington, 2006; Starkey and Madden, 2001) or contributed to dealing with this omission (Morgan, Levitt and Malek, 2007; Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). The opportunity is to pick up the approaches of strategy and to focus on aspects of execution. Impact and relevance are both possible from such work.

• Challenge II: Business and technology. Whilst some business and management schools have created significant competitive advantage by integrating business and technology (MIT Sloan is a good example), others today are contributing to the fragmentation of disciplines into increasingly trivial areas (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011). PM if viewed as an integrating function, rather than a functional discipline, has the opportunity to bring together domain knowledge from many areas, including that of technology, and to do so with benefit.

• Challenge III: Hard and soft skills. Hard skills include the administrative tasks of producing plans, creating reports and the use of PM toolsets. Soft skills enable working with and through other individuals and organisations. For PM research, a focus on ‘hard skills’ has limited both the relevance and impact of research. These are probably necessary, but certainly not sufficient for modern, complex projects. It is the integration of these subject areas that is a challenge and opportunity.

• Challenge IV: Research and practice. Rigour and relevance are the original ‘double hurdle’ of management research (Pettigrew, 1997). Rigour is a given requirement with all research, and will be explored further in the next section and in other chapters in this book. We have focused on the aspects of relevance and impact. However, ‘relevance’ has already been shown to be problematic. As researchers, we can do research on individuals and organisations, or with them. Co-production is one means to do research with individuals and organisations, but this is very involved, and many scholars rightly prefer to rely on numerical datasets as their route to publication. Relevance then, requires that the researcher is deeply committed to seeing beneficial change happen. However, it is worth noting that in other industries, research (basic research which provides the knowledge foundation) is explicitly separated from development which can lead to bridging that relevance gap. We will consider this further in the next challenge.

• Challenge V: Exploration and exploitation. Ideally, research should ‘build’ over time, with the findings from one study adding to those from others, and increasing our level of knowledge and insight. PM as a field is not unique in failing to do this (Barnett, 2007). Indeed, project risk management is a case in point. Over 100 articles on project risk management were published in the PM journals from 2000 to 2011. The majority of authors redefined concepts, built new models and didn’t question whether their work was contributing to anything. Indeed, this is a theme we will pick up below.

From Challenges to Research Choices

There are many themes above that we could develop further, but we have limited the discussion to issues that we believe are most relevant to those of a doctoral researcher.

The main issue is avoiding that situation of being ‘stuck in the middle’ – producing research that is not valued by the academy or practitioners. A doctoral thesis should make a contribution to the subject knowledge directly (a summary of the requirements for doctoral work at many of the institutions where we have examined), and that the thesis needs to stand on its academic qualities. The practitioner book or articles can follow afterwards, with more appropriate language and addressing integrative challenges IV and V. Therefore, it is essential for the progress of you as a researcher (and the field as a whole) that your research has a sound theoretical basis against which to define its contribution. This might be through extending, enhancing or adapting theory.

This immediately provides a challenge for PM researchers. PM research for many years has been a-theoretical; much of it doesn’t have a recognised basis (by this we mean ‘recognised by the academy more generally’). However, this is rarely understood and, as a result, in too many research proposals we see mistaken references to ‘the theory of PM’. Is there such a thing? If not, as we contend, how do you frame your research?

There are some good examples published in the PM literature, of work grounded in established theory. The application of the Resource Based View of the firm from the field of strategy (Jugdev, 2004), ambidexterity from organisational learning, (Liu and Leitner, 2012) and management innovation (Thomas, Cicmil and George, 2012) are all studies that have done just this. The literature they draw from is that of a home discipline (Economics and Strategy, for instance) and most importantly, they place projects as the context for their research. The research approach comes from that home discipline. The context is a special consideration that will draw from that theoretical perspective and then contribute to the enrichment of that perspective through the application in the context, as all of the above examples illustrate.

In contrast, project risk management is neither a discipline, nor a theory nor a context. It is an activity that takes place in projects. However, we could view this from many perspectives and use many alternative theorisations. For instance, we could consid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Foundational Issues
• Part II Focusing Your Research Effort
• Part III Specific Data Collection and Analysis Techniques
• Part IV Examples of Mixed Methods Strategies
• Part V Unique Environments for Project Management Research
• Part VI Writing as a Future Researcher
• Part VII Benefiting from Experience: Supervisors and Publications
• Index