The social reality of organisational project management at the interface between networks and hierarchy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Today's organisations still face the duality of organising for both innovation and projects through organic structures while at the same time maintaining stability within their hierarchical structures. Issues, tensions and conflicts arise at the interfaces between these two/competing modes of organising. The purpose of this paper is to explore what really happens at the interfaces between the structures and governance modes that result from the prevalence of project‐oriented organisations. The theoretical framework is based upon the actor‐network theory (ANT) in order to capture networks construction around project management offices (PMO) deliverables that cross multiple organisational boundaries. Design/methodology/approach This research is of explorative nature. Even though the number of cases is limited to two, a strong research design was obtained through maximizing together their homogeneity and heterogeneity. Data were primarily collected from semi‐directed interviews with 29 individuals. Data analysis were done within a grounded theory approach. This study focus on one particular PMO deliverable: the project status report. The itinerary of the project status report was followed within each organisation. Findings What this study shows is the complexity of the translation process followed by a project status report. It highlighted specifically the existence of multiple arenas for negotiation. Interfaces can then be seen as translation centers where multiple perspectives on the project are discussed. Issues, tensions and conflicts are to be resolved when converging towards an irreversible unique point of control. Translations are not free. They incurred significant transaction costs which are invisible to the management team. Research limitations/implications While many other perspectives would permit a better understanding of what happens at the interface between hierarchy and projects, this research focused on networks constructlon within the ANT framework. This research is exploratory and as such there are certain inherent limitations. First, it was limited to two case studies only. Second, only one deliverable was scrutinised through ANT. Further research should also be undertaken to link project monitoring and control functions to project governance. Practical implications Practical implications relate to the capability of anticipating the consequences of organising within dual structures. This research leads to three major conclusions: PMO is part of the power system and politics; there are costs to hyper‐control; and interfaces could be seen as learning opportunities. Originality/value This originality of this paper is twofold: the research subject and the theoretical framework. First, the research subject looked at politics and power systems within the organisational project management. While previous researches have identified issues, tensions and conflicts surrounding the management of multiple projects, none has clearly focused on this subject. Second, this research adopted asocial approach based on an ANT framework. This approach focuses on the networks construction where issues, tensions and conflicts can be observed while they unfold.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it