The Frontiers of Project Management Research

Christophe Midler, de l' cole polytechnique

Overview

The issue of growth by innovation is central to current dynamics in the industrialized nations. As Navarre (1992) puts it, we have moved on from "the battle to produce better to the battle to design better." In markets which are saturated, as European markets typically are, gaining competitive edge means differentiating and focusing products with increasing precision ("niche" strategies) by means of more frequent product replacement to anticipate market trends, reacting before others to the often unpredictable signs given out by fluctuating markets, and integrating as quickly as possible technological innovations which make cost savings possible in order to better withstand price warfare in increasingly globalized markets.

Thus, during the '90s we have witnessed a number of changes in various sectors, some radical, in the processes whereby new products are designed. The concept of project management has deeply reshaped the inside organizations of firms with the overhaul of subcontracting systems. In our research we have analyzed how this "projectization" process (Midler 1995; Benghozi, Charue, and Midler 2000) developed in various industrial contexts: auto industry, construction, chemical, and pharmaceutical firms.

But, on the other side, such enlargements in project management application scope, combined with greater expectations for efficiency in projects results, call for deeply and rapidly revisiting the traditional project models. The objective of the present chapter is to characterize these dynamics during the '90s in the French context and point out the main challenges that need to be faced in the following century.

This chapter is based on a research program, which has been ongoing since the beginning of the '90s, conducted by a team at the Management Research Center of the Ecole Polytechnique. The approach adopted has been that of interactive research with manufacturing companies over a long period of time (usually three to five years), against the background of the problematics of contributions to experimentation and the acquisition of knowledge on the dynamics at work in French companies. This kind of in depth inquiry has been, or is currently being, conducted in the armaments, automotive, construction, chemical, electronics, power, pharmaceutical, and steel industries. A common theoretical matrix for analysis has been constructed and regular exchanges of views make it possible to compare the dynamics observed in these different cases.

The general hypothesis behind this research program is a contingency vision of project management models (Lundin 1998), due to the specificity of the activity (with variables such as risk, complexity, and size of the project) and of the social context where the project is embedded. In that perspective, the development of the project management field appears as a combination of contingent organizational and instrumental knowledge creation processes (for example, the program evaluation and review technique [PERT] method for the Polaris program for United States (US) Department of Defense in the beginning of the '60s) with formalization of de-contextualized bodies of knowledge (typically, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge [PMBOK Guide]), intersectorial dissemination via institutional processes (professional associations, education systems, normalization and regulatory authorities, and so on), and the hybridization of these outside contributions with the traditions already in place. The research program is designed to focus on emblematic cases, where the implementation of existing best practices is problematic because of the singularity and novelty of the situation.

After characterizing the projects context of intensive, innovation-based strategies in a first part, we will then analyze the consequences on project coordination processes.