Projectification: Midler's footprint in the project management field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to revisit Christophe Midler's contribution throughL'auto qui n'existait pas(The car that did not exist), first published in 1993. The paper summarizes and examines the main themes of the book based on current knowledge and ends with suggestions for future research opportunities. Design/methodology/approach The paper is grounded in an in‐depth analysis of Midler's book and a one‐hour interview with him. Findings Midler argues that projectification is not a temporary managerial fashion; quite the contrary. At Renault, he witnessed a profound industrial transformation founded on collective learning. Central to this transformation was the establishment of project management as an engine of renewal within the permanent organisation. Practical implications Revisiting Midler's work on projectification generates new insights into understanding the current situation confronting organisations in all industries as they evolve in their approach to creativity and innovation. Originality/value Two original facets of Midler's seminal work still influence the field of project management. First, he provided a global understanding of the creative organisation. He described, analysed and explained how an organisation reinvents itself, not only in terms of project management, but more globally, from a permanent organisation perspective. Recent research developments focus on project‐oriented organisations, program and portfolio management, organisational project management, and others. Midler's work should be more widely known and referenced for its capacity to conceptualise what simultaneously happens in multiple, concurrent, organisational terms as a project is carried out (e.g. financial, commercial, technological and career development). Second, Midler conducted a study from within an organisation for four years. In this respect, he could be seen as a precursor of recent project management research practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".