technology innovation project management- an exploratory study of what project managers do to...
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Technology Innovation Project Management: an exploratory study of what project managers do to increase the chance of success
By
Johnny Hedemann Gregersen Ryser Student ID: H00023498
Dissertation Advisor: Shane McMordie
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
The University of Liverpool
MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
13th of June 2015
Abstract: This dissertation researched what successful technology innovation project managers do.
Where research up to now has focused on leadership perspectives, tools and methods,
this study focus on what project managers actually do. The primary objective of this
research was to uncover insights on what the everyday look like for the project manager,
and to build knowledge on the future of project management training.
The research involved interviews and observations on twelve different project managers
both from within the media business, which was the main focus of the research, and from
outside in other innovation heavy industries (medico and green energy). The interviews
and observations where based on the ethnographic tools and methods of contextual
inquiry. The data collected has been analysed with different ethnographic data analysis
tools and methods, to extract insights both generic to every project manager, as well as
differences between industries.
The findings of this research indicate that there are few differences between working in
different industries, differences are more depended on different ways of organizing the
projects (core team versus network oriented project organization). Six roles did all the
observed project managers cover; sense maker; game master; web weaver; game master;
problem master; motion Master; knowledge master. An extra role was found among those
with some seniority in the organization, project managers who had accumulated expert
knowledge on the fields they have been working on, and thus also played the role of a
knowledge master.
This paper recommend a shift in the development of project managers from a strict tools
and methods paradigm or a strict leadership paradigm, towards a development paradigm,
where the six roles are developed simultaneously and in small steps, to make sure that no
roles get too much attention. The complexity of the everyday of project managers indicates
that even though prior research show little value of tools and methods, these may help
structuring the complexity of projects.
Acknowledgements: The completion of this paper would not have been possible without the assistance of the
following persons: Erik Ahrenkiel and Mikkel Müller who patiently listened to my
arguments, and made it possible to make the observations, Shane Mcmordie who patiently
has supported and directed me.
I will also like to thank all my peers at Denmarks Radio, who has been exposed to the
knowledge and insights revealed within this research.
A special thank must also be extended to the project managers, who led me follow them
through their everyday.
The final thank you is extended to my family, my children, and my beautiful wife, who has
been supporting med all the way through this MBA program. Thank you very much and
love you lots.
CERTIFICATION STATEMENT I hereby certify that this paper constitutes my own product, that where the
language of others is set forth, quotation marks so indicate, and that appropriate
credit is given where I have used the language, ideas, expressions or writings
of another.
Table of contents
ABSTRACT: ...................................................................................................................................... 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: ................................................................................................................ 3
CERTIFICATION STATEMENT ........................................................................................................ 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................................... 4
1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 6 1.1 BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................................... 6 1.2 AIM ........................................................................................................................................... 8 1.3 RESEARCH QUESTION ................................................................................................................ 9 1.4 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES ........................................................................................................... 10 1.5 STRUCTURE OF DISSERTATION ................................................................................................. 10 1.5 SUMMARY ............................................................................................................................... 10
2. LITERATURE REVIEW ............................................................................................................... 11 2.1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 11 2.2 WHAT IS INNOVATION? ............................................................................................................. 11 2.3 WHAT DO MANAGERS DO? ........................................................................................................ 14
2.3.1 Sense Maker .................................................................................................................. 15 2.3.2 Game master .................................................................................................................. 16 2.3.3 Web weaver .................................................................................................................... 17 2.3.4 Flow balancer ................................................................................................................. 19
2.4 DETERMINANTS OF PROJECT SUCCESS ..................................................................................... 23 2.5 INTERNAL DETERMINANTS OF PROJECT SUCCESS ...................................................................... 26 2.6 EXTERNAL DETERMINANTS OF PROJECT SUCCESS ..................................................................... 29 2.7 THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF THE RESEARCH ................................................................ 32
3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND METHODS ....................................................................... 33 3.1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 33 3.2 ETHNOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................ 35 3.3 CONTEXTUAL DESIGN .............................................................................................................. 36
3.3.1 Contextual Inquiry ........................................................................................................... 37 3.3.2 Data interpretation .......................................................................................................... 38 3.3.3 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 39
3.4 DATA COLLECTION ................................................................................................................... 39 3.5 DATA ANALYSIS ....................................................................................................................... 41 3.6 VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF THE RESEARCH ........................................................................... 41
3.7. ETHICS ................................................................................................................................... 42 3.8 CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................................... 42
4. RESULTS .................................................................................................................................... 43 4.1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................ 43 4.2 PATTERN RECOGNITION ........................................................................................................... 43 4.3 CONTEXTUAL INQUIRY INTERPRETATION MODELS ...................................................................... 46
4.3.1 The flow models. ............................................................................................................ 47 4.3.2 The cultural models ........................................................................................................ 51
4.4 CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................................... 55
5. CONLUSION ............................................................................................................................... 56 5.1 FINDINGS ................................................................................................................................ 56 5.2 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES ........................................................................................................... 56 5.3 LIMITATIONS OF THE RESEARCH ............................................................................................... 59 5.4 PERSPECTIVES ........................................................................................................................ 59
REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................ 62
1. Introduction
1.1 Background
Success in technology innovation has interested researchers and practitioners for
centuries, however through the last centuries the game has changed. The comfortable
protective barriers of creative destruction (Schumpeter ,1942) has evaporated, leaving all
the traditional industry giants exposed to intruders and omnivorous enemies, that they
don’t even have the capability to recognize. In this new reality, agility and success in
technology innovation projects becomes more than possible new profitable markets, or
simple restoring of old. It becomes a matter of life and death. The foundation under the
media industry is shaking and cracking, as if a universal earthquake is trying to wipe off
the old game pieces to make room for the new digital game of media business. A theater
that slowly has evolved since the breakthrough of the Internet around the millennium,
however the pace has gone from slow walk, to the speed of light. According to a study by
Bain (as cited by Rigby 2014) the media industry is by far the most exposed industry in
terms of digital/technological innovation, and thus success rates in development projects is
vital, at least for those who plan to stay in the business (as Deming famously said; “after all
survival is not mandatory” (Deming 1982 as cited by Frank, 1995, p.125)). The mass
media usage is disappearing from traditional medias to online medias and social medias at
a pace never seen before (Chyi, Lewis,& Zheng 2012). Gary Hamel (2007, 2009, 2011,
2012) says that change has changed, and that we are the first generation to experience
exponential acceleration in the rate of change, especially because of the interconnectivity
of almost all human beings. The mass media industry is placed right in the eye of this
perfect storm, where new initiatives like “The Huffington Post” established in may 2005 (T.,
2007), which isn´t burdened by their legacy, has managed to become one of the worlds
most important news media, bringing themselves in the same league as long time
established companies like 164 year old New York Times and 138 year old Washington
post. The Huffington Post started as an internet news service, relying heavily on bloggers,
but has successfully expanded into live web TV and live web radio, threatening not only
the newspapers, but all media companies. in the years from 2003 until 2013 the total
advertising revenue in the US has declined from more than $46 billion to $22 billion, but
whereas the printed adverts has experienced a dramatic fall by 57%, the online adverts
has tripled in size (Mitchell, Jurkowitz and Guskin, 2013). This erosion of traditional
business models, holds not only for commercial medias, the public service medias are also
struggling to stay relevant, as well as they are struggling with their traditional (expensive)
broadcast technology, as they try joining the new ways to be published on the Internet.
While all this is happening, the term “deadline” is dying, as we replace our daily news
update with a constant stream of news on Twitter, which also is an example of a new type
of innovation, Big Bang Disruption that overnight changes the game for everyone in a
given market place (Downes & Nunes, 2013). As the newcomers Twitter and Huffington
Post are disrupting the news media business, big players are disrupting the game in other
media spaces; Netflix is taking a huge bite as a content provider, Amazon Studios is a new
player in the fiction market, with a user-driven approach never seen before, and Youtube is
becoming the worlds largest TV Channel. In this fast changing landscape, Denmarks
Radio the big public service giant in Denmark has to innovate itself into a new tomorrow
every single day to come in the future. A task that according to Clayton Christensen is
almost doomed (1997), since an established organization perfectly fitted to the traditional
mass media landscape, will not be able to answer disrupters quickly and efficiently, most
traditional giants won´t even be able to understand they are getting disrupted before it is
too late.
To survive in this unforeseeable and fast changing market, success in technology projects
is important. The task spans from creation of the right winning strategy (Lafley and Martin,
2013), choosing the right projects, and running the chosen projects successfully. Some
say success in Innovation is a numbers game, however with diminishing time to do trial
and error, and an economy that is eroding, the number of chances to succeed are
dramatically reduced. But maybe it isn´t a numbers game at all. E.g. the average spending
in R&D in the IT industry in 2005 where around 7,6% of the total sales turnover, but
industry innovation leader Apple did spend only 5,6% of their sales turnover (Jaruzelski,
Dehoff and Bordia, 2006). This study becomes extra relevant since the history has told us,
that the smaller investments in R&D didn´t result in a weaker innovation status in the
following years. On the contrary, Apple managed to become the global innovation leader
for almost a decade, with innovations like the IPhone and the iPad. Some of the
explanation is of course the size of the organization, bigger organizations can afford to use
a smaller portion of their revenue on innovation, however there must also be learning in
terms of both how to choose the right projects, and how to drive these projects
successfully. Choosing the right projects is connected to the strategy of the organization
(Cooper, Edgett and Kleinschmidt, 1998, Crossan et al., 2011, Lafley and Martin, 2013), a
task that may be supported by a project management office, which provide clarity about
what projects and ideas are running, respectively in the pipeline and their individual impact
on the strategy. The perspective is well documented, and by the end of the day mostly a
matter for the top management. However, a focus on how to drive the individual project is
a matter for millions of project managers, but also opens up a whole multitude of
approaches ranging from the method sharks to leadership apostles.
The research will build upon the idea of innovation as defined by Baregheh, Rowley
and Sambrook (2009, p.1334): “Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby
organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order
to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace” . The
innovation project team itself is tasked with the objective to create and succeed with
innovation initiatives, some with a very sharp risk profile in terms of technology, business,
project environment. The research is based on ethnographic observations and interviews
both within the media business, as well as in other technology heavy industries. It is
deeply inspired by the work of Mintzberg (2007), who based on an ethnographic approach
has studied dozens of managers all over the world. It is especially the ethnographic
approach to understand a given person, user group, population, organization etc. (Glen,
Suciu,& Baughn 2014) that is useful in this context. There is a prerequisite in this step,
namely that the project manager and the team makes a significant difference, which is
supported in some literature (Ong et. al, 2009; Mishra, Dangayach & Mittal, 2011), but
neglected (Pinto & Slevin, 1987;1989) or even rejected in other (Gemuenden & Lechler,
1997).
1.2 Aim
The aim of the research is through exploratory research to get a deeper understanding of
what successful management of an innovation project is, and thus create useful insights
for project managers and project teams.
The research is based on Gareth Morgan’s (2006) original idea that an organization
cannot be described in an absolute way, but as images that only reflect the chosen
perspective. The idea has been further developed for Project Management by Winter &
Szczepanek (2009, p.8), who suggest that a project can be described by at least seven
different images; Social, Political, Intervention, Value Creation, Development,
Organizational and Change. This approach is a strong and significant step away from the
traditional very normative approaches to both innovation and project management that
dominates today. It acknowledges the complexity of development and that success
depends on something else than following a method like design thinking (Brown 2008), or
creating a certain organization like in PRINCE2 (Graham 2008). Plenty of research has
been conducted in the area of technology innovation as well as leadership of technology
innovation – however little has been done to understand what project managers and
project teams actually do, when it comes to the physical actions within a project. Moreover,
a broad study among 104 companies by Gemünden, Salomo and Krieger (2005) found
that most of the theoretical ideas proposed regarding what support the performance of
innovative teams could be rejected, leaving only co-location as a confirmed innovation
booster. They also called for more innovative approaches to research in the area, which
an explorative approach based on ethnographic methods would support.
1.3 Research question
The overall idea is to do an exploratory study of what project managers do to increase
success, within technology innovation. The research will be tailored around the
overarching question:
What do technology innovation project managers do, to increase the chance of
success?
Second-level level questions that the research try to answer are:
- Which cross industry insights could be useful for every technology project manager
?
- Which industry specific common insights within the media business could be useful
for every technology project manager?
- Are there any differences in running a physically dispersed team, compared to a
physically co-located team?
1.4 Research objectives
General objectives • To assess the work of technology innovation project managers
Specific objectives • To assess the work of technology innovation project managers
in the media industry, in terms of what they do to ensure
project success
• To assess the work of technology innovation project managers
in other technology heavy industries, in terms of what they do
to ensure project success
• To compare the work of technology innovation project
managers in the media industry, with other industries
• To evaluate what type of work the project managers do
Table 1 Research objectives
1.5 Structure of dissertation
Following this introduction and background, a thorough literature review is conducted, to
shed a light on innovation, what the work of a innovation project manager is and on
determinants of project success. The analysis assess and evaluate the results of the
research, and associate the results with the reviewed literature. Finally a chapter is
dedicated to conclusions and discussion of the findings of the research.
1.5 Summary
As an exploratory study of what innovation project managers do to increase the chances of
success in their projects, the research will attempt to create applicable knowledge for
technology project managers in industries that are challenged by fast and continuously
accelerating pace of innovation and development.
2. Literature review
2.1 Introduction
Inspired by Mintzbergs original work (1970, 1971) this research aims to look into what
project managers do, when they lead their technology innovation projects, and more
specifically what they do to create success in their projects. As regards to the literature
study there is plenty of research documented. A simple search on “Innovation”, “success”
and “project” reveal more than 7700 articles in the ezproxy library database
(Atoz.ebsco.com.ezproxy.liv.ac.uk, 2015), whereof more than 3100 are written within the
last five years. The literature spans from research on what innovation is, project
management tools and techniques, project portfolio management, idea management to
innovation culture, project leadership, and organizational leadership. However there
seems to have been done little research on what successful innovation project managers
actually do, and there seems to be a gap between what theories advice project managers
to do, and what they actually do. This creates a sound point of the literature study, which in
order to cover different perspectives of project management will dive from the outside and
in the following steps and categories:
1.) What is Innovation?
2.) The reference – what do managers do?
3.) Determinants of project success – what is project success, and what determines
success?
4.) Internal determinants of project success – which internal factors in a project team
determines success
5.) External determinants of success – maybe a strong innovation culture is more
important after all?
2.2 What is Innovation?
Though the study already relies on the definition of innovation by Baregheh, Rowley and
Sambrook (2009), it may be useful to look at some different definitions and perspectives
on innovation, as it may give an idea of why the concept still is a little difficult to grab:
• “Innovation is the generation, acceptance and implementation of new ideas,
processes products or services” (Thomson, 1969, p.2)
• “Innovation can be defined as the effective application of processes and products
new to the organization and designed to benefit it and its stakeholders” (West and
Anderson, 1996, p.681)
• “Innovation is conceived as a means of changing an organization, either as a
response to changes in the external environment or as a pre-emptive action to
influence the environment. Hence, innovation is here broadly defined to encompass
a range of types, including new product or service, new process technology, new
organization structure or administrative systems, or new plans or program
pertaining to organization members.“ (Damanpour, 1996, p.694)
• “Innovation as the creation of new knowledge and ideas to facilitate new business
outcomes, aimed at improving internal business processes and structures and to
create market driven products and services. Innovation encompasses both radical
and incremental innovation” (du Plessis, 2007, p.21)
• “Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good
or service), or process, new marketing method, or new organizational method in
business practices, workplace organization or external relations” (Comité Européen
de Normalisation and Danish Standards, 2013, p.6)
These definitions raises some questions:
• Can a non-successful implementation be considered as Innovation?
During the writing the European Standard, this was discussed intensively, as some
argued that something new that wasn´t a success, couldn´t be regarded as
innovation, whereas others argued that a new product should be regarded as
innovation, success or not. The story about video formats where the superior
standard from Sony, Betamax from 1975 was outperformed by the standard JVC-
VHS format from 1976 (Owen, 2005) is a good example of the dilemma of whether
a brilliant new product also needs to be a success to be considered as an
innovation. In terms of studying successful technology project management, it also
raises the question of when it is possible to measure if a given innovation is a
success or not.
• Are incremental improvements also innovation?
Is a small improvement of a product that makes it easier to produce and/or more
stable to be considered as an Innovation? In other words – are projects concerning
continuous improvements also innovation projects? If small improvements also are
regarded as innovation, the amount of innovation projects explodes compared to a
more narrow radical innovation approach, but the top management attention to a
given project, as well as overall project complexity in terms of interdependence and
contradictory expectations (Baccarini, 1996, p.202) will span much wider, as e.g.
production improvement project may be run isolated in the production, whereas the
development of a completely new product and product eco system will involve the
entire organization. A study by Tatikonda and Rosenthal (2000) found that both
technology novelty as well as project complexity contributed to task uncertainty, and
thus to project execution challenges. They also found that process technology
novelty was more critical than product technology novelty, which is supported by the
resource based view of strategic advantages (Barney, 1995), indicating that people,
processes, process equipment and knowledge is more valuable than the current
product portfolio, that is short lived (at least in some industries). What is however
more interesting is that they found that technology novelty was found to be much
more problematic than project complexity, and that these two dimensions doesn´t
interact with each other. In other words, an incremental innovation project where
certain production process technologies are replaced with others can be much more
demanding in terms of project execution challenges, than a radical innovation
project, where a new type of product is created.
• Is every technology innovation project a change project?
The change effect on every new idea on the organization is applied by Damanpour
(1996), who suggests it isn’t possible to develop a new process, a new product, a
new business model without making a change in the organization. Thus a
technological innovation project manager is not only directing a project, he/she is
directing organizational change. This adds a role to the project manager, who not
only has to lead the project development, but also has to “model” the organization
around the project and the project outcomes. There are several approaches to
change management, e.g. the 8 step model by Kotter (2007), which at least is being
taught in many project management courses, however the ideas on
transformational leadership embracing leadership as a way to changesand
transform people may be more useful from a project managers perspective (Bass,
1998, Northouse, 2004, Schaubroeck, Lam and Cha, 2007). It is a concept based
on intrinsic motivation which is a much stronger motivational paradigm than
traditional external motivation (Deci 1975, Pink, 2009). Armed with a strong vision,
the project manager guides the change through inspiration, and executes the
change in tandem with all parties. The concept also serves to enhance the
motivation, morale, and job performance of followers through a variety of
mechanisms; these include connecting the follower's sense of identity and self to
the project and the collective identity of the organization; being a role model for
followers in order to inspire them and raise their interest in the project; challenging
followers to take greater ownership for their work, and understanding the strengths
and weaknesses of followers, allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that
enhance their performance.
A project director of a large enterprise wrote as an answer to a blogpost “The four roles of
an Innovation project manager”, “it is interesting, and when the financial crisis we may be
able to look at innovation again”, but is it possible to consider project management without
considering innovation, given that “a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create
a unique product, service, or result" (Pmstudy.com, 2015).
2.3 What do managers do?
Mintzbergs original work (1971) is one of the important inspirations for this research, and
with a strict focus on line management the work is an interesting reference both in terms of
similarities and differences between line management and project management. Among
interesting findings was that managers have a much more fragmented working day than
previously anticipated. Moreover her found that the work of management can be divided
into 3 categories and 10 roles:
Category Roles
Interpersonal Figurehead
Leader
Liaison
Informational Monitor
Disseminator
Spokesperson
Decisional Entrepreneur
Disturbance Handler
Resource Allocator
Negotiator
Table 2 Mintzbergs original work (Mintzberg, 1971)
As an interesting follow up, Laurent Simon (2006) did follow creative project managers in 4
organizations (in Canada) for more than a year. He found that the tasks of a project
manager could be categorized in four different roles:
Role Task
Sense-maker Learns by doing
Interprets the situation
Translates the project into vision, goals, objectives, activities and tasks
Unveils assumptions and beliefs-in-action
Builds the shared meaning
Game-master Sets the rules
Acts as a goal-bearer
Defines and guards the playground
Animates the team
Records scores, allocates sanctions/rewards
Fosters gamesmanship
Web-weaver Identifies the individuals skills
“Cuts and pastes” individuals talents
Defines communication channels
Connects conflicting workviews
Networks with resource person
Institutes knowledge-sharing contexts
Flow-balancer Aims at intrinsic motivation
Sets challenges
Balances constraints and freedom
Believes in fun
Table 3 Laurent Simons role model (Simon, 2006)
2.3.1 Sense Maker
Sense making is a relatively new concept, based on the idea that human beings construct
their reality through communication, or sense making (Dervin, 1983). Following that all
projects are change projects, the project manager has to create a common sense of why
the change is necessary, and why the given approach is chosen. This sense making is
applied both inside and outside the project. Weick (1995, p.17) defined seven
characteristics of organizational sense making in organizations, which may inspire in terms
of what sense making is from a project managers perspective:
1. Grounded in identity construction, who am I in the given context?
2. Retrospective – how does something makes sense in the light of my personal
history?
3. Enactive sensible environments – as people enact and communicate, they
construct their narrative, positive or negative. Narratives also serves to
reduce/explain experienced complexit, that’s why simple statements may stand in
the way for a deeper understanding of the context.
4. Sensemaking is a social activity in that plausible stories are preserved, retained or
shared.
5. Sensemaking is ongoing, so Individuals simultaneously and continuously shape
and react to the environments they face. As they project themselves onto this
environment and observe the consequences they learn about their identities and
the accuracy of their accounts of the world.
6. People extract cues from the context to help them decide on what information is
relevant and what explanations are acceptable. As some research suggest that
human beings only have a conscious awareness of about 14 bit/second, while the
total band with of sensory impulses is around 14 million bit/second, people are
capable of creating almost any sense based on the cues the brain process (Bake,
2008)
7. Driven by plausibility rather than accuracy – so if something sounds plausible it
doesn’t have to be accurate.
In other words – the project manager has a very difficult task, controlling how the team
makes sense of themselves, the project and what happens around them.
2.3.2 Game master
Game mastering is a play inspired version of modern organizational performance
management, used to imply organizational goals (Houldsworth, Jirasinghe and Everall,
2005), where the goals in this context are the project goals. It involves a process of setting
goals, and following up on these goals, which has to have a close relation to the overall
project goals. This involves performance appraisal; objective or target setting, review
meetings to asses progress; development opportunity discussions; 360 degree feedback
and performance related pay (CIPD, 2009). In the context of agile practices like e.g. Scrum
(Schwaber and Sutherland, 2013) or DSDM Atern (DSDM.ORG, 2015) these practices are
more or less a part of the process. The process principles of these agile frameworks are:
a.) The overall project vision/goals are defined by the customer of the project
b.) The customer defines what he/she wants the deliverables of the project should do
(usually not how these deliverables should look like)
c.) The project team where the customer is represented, defines a roadmap of sprints
(typically 2-4 weeks duration), where the development of the deliverables are going
to be delivered
d.) The project team defines the overall vision of the current sprint, and defines in detail
what and how they will work. The size of all tasks is estimated, to make progress
measurement possible, and to make sure that the team is capable of delivering the
defined tasks within the sprint.
e.) Every day the team meets to align on what they have delivered since yesterday,
and what they are going to deliver tomorrow. A burn down chart which is a metric
that show progress.
f.) By the end of a sprint the deliverables are shown to and discussed with the
customer, to make sure that the customer gets exactly what he/she would like.
g.) By the end of a sprint, the project team will make an retrospective on how they work
together, and define possible refinements to the method for the coming sprint.
In the agile world, the facilitator of these processes is defined as an agile coach or a scrum
coach. In other words – the work of an agile coach is to be a game master, where as this
is only one of 4 important roles of a project manager according to Simon (2014). DSDM
Atern makes the remark that the agile coach could also be the project manager, whereas
Scrum doesn´t work with this term at all.
2.3.3 Web weaver
As a web-weaver the project manager make sure that the project doesn´t end up as a
closed island within the organization, with all the challenges it brings with it:
• Endangering the overall project success, with too little communication with the
project customer. This may cause the team to take decisions that should have been
taken in consultancy with the customer.
• Overlooking inspiration/easy ways to solve difficult problems, problems that may
have been solved by other projects within or outside the organization
• Ignoring of new processes, concepts, frameworks, knowledge that could have been
helpful to the project
Tim Brown (2008) celebrates the idea that successful innovation teams consisting of T-
shaped people (Hansen, 2010), in addition to their own core competencies – has an
interest in and is able to communicate with specialists in other topics than their own. In the
context of the web-weaving project manager these type of people creates a healthy base
for web weaving. In his definition of management 2.0 Paul McDonald (2011) emphasises
the values of the world wide web, which has taught a whole new generation to network
from dust to dawn, networking both in the physical world as well as in the virtual world.
Values as sharing information, and networking is baked deeply into the genes of the
millenium generation, which is a huge benefit for modern organizations (McAfee and
Bleier, 2010). But the project manager has to deal with more than just millenniers, the
competitive and not so collaborative baby-boomer generation is still high in numbers in the
working place, as well as the slackers (my own generation), who can be difficult to ignite
and make work highly engaged, since they by and large prioritize other values than work
higher (Mellan and Christie, 2013).
Web-weaving does also take an important role in the modern strategic framework of
Dynamic Capabilities (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000), which unlike some of the traditional
schools, for example Porters Five Forces (Porter, 2008) and the resource based view
(Barney, 1995) says that there is no such thing as continuing strategic advantages. But
there may be some process-related strategic benefits an organization can benefit from
pursuing:
- The ability to understand what is going on in the marketplace
- The ability to use this knowledge to create new offers for the marketplace
- The ability to continuously improve the core processes of an organization
In the context of the web-weaving project manager, this means that he/she makes sure
that the project team is well connected to the surrounding world, to understand the
marketplace, to create great new offers and to continuously improve the way the team
work. This work is easier in physically dispersed team, than in a physically co-located team
(Siebdrat, Hoegl and Ernst, 2009), since the nature of the collaboration is networking
(Edmondson, 2012). In other words, in a physically dispersed team, it may be easier to
weave threads into the surrounding world, however the team processes themselves may
be more difficult to handle.
2.3.4 Flow balancer
As a flow balancer, the project manager works strongly inspired by the theories of intrinsic
motivation (Deci 1975, Pink, 2009) and the theories of play and flow by Csikszentmihalyi
(1988, 1990, 1996). Intrinsic motivation driven by autonomy, mastery and a higher purpose
in the work is a strong motivational force, so strong that open source initiatives like
Wikipedia and Linux has become a determinative force by people who deliver their
strongest passion without even getting paid. Csikszentmihalyi found that if a task is
appropriate challenging and interesting; a person can get fully immersed in a feeling of
energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. The
concept of play is important both in the theories of flow, and in the theories of intrinsic
motivation. Gary Hamel (2009) advice organizations to “take the work out of work”. The
idea is that human beings are most productive when work feels like play. Enthusiasm,
imagination and resourcefulness—the critical ingredients for success in the creative
economy - get unleashed when people are having fun. Simon (2014) do also emphazise
the Y Generations expectations at work. ‘‘Those guys are not excited about money. They
donÕt fit in hierarchical relationships and they dont think in terms of career track. They
want to do something interesting. They want to learn. They want stimulation through
challenges, teamwork and fun. “ (p.123). Helle Hein (2012) who researched on motivators
in highly skilled disciplines like medicine, engineering and acting found not surprisingly that
we are motivated by different factors – and that these factors were strongly related to 5
different categories of people in the working place; The Prima Donnas; The Extrovert
Performance Workers; The Introvert Performance Workers; The Pragmatic Worker and the
Salary Worker.
The Prima Donnas work for the highest possible standards. They get their kick by
reaching these standards. A kick will last for months and will still have an effect years after
if the Prima Donna is asked about the situation. A prima donna get only few kicks, but
these are long lasting. They will only follow leaders who work for the highest possible
standards, and set the bar high. Helle gives an example – she spoke with a violinist in the
Wiener Philharmonics, and asked what the famous leader of Symphony would lead, and
she answered “I don´t know, but we will play Mahlers 5th” – meaning that he could do
whatever he liked, but these fantastic musicians would play what they thought was the
right music. A Prima Donna (only) works for a higher purpose
The extrovert performance worker work for the kick he/she gets when a certain
performance is reached. The acknowledgement in terms of visuals (e.g. a gold medal, a
nice car, a huge boat etc) counts – and the worker becomes the higher purpose
himself/herself. These workers are driven by visual acknowledgement – and the kick will
only last for short, before he/she needs a new kick.
The introvert performance worker, who work for the kick that he/she get when a
complex task is solved, preferable continuously more complex tasks. So to motivate these
people you need to supply them with complex tasks. By the way this type he/herself will
not be a good leader, since the ability to solve difficult tasks on their own is the driving
force.
The pragmatic worker, who needs a good life/work balance. This worker will be stressed
if it is necessary to carry work with them when they go home, or if they have to leave
unfinished work at the office. They also seek flow and kick, but this is primary found
outside the work. Most modern leadership tools and techniques are developed to suit the
pragmatic worker – e.g. the yearly employee development interview, which for a Prima
Donna probably would be more of a provocation. After all – who would be able to develop
the Prima Donna who on his/her own is seeking the highest possible standards.
The salary worker – who doesn´t like to work, but need the money and therefore work as
much as it is needed, but not a second more, preferable less. This worker is not motivated
at all.
An important note is the idea that if we have unsatisfied needs we will regrediate to a lower
level, and that a leader who will motivate such a worker should spend less energy to
satisfy these needs, and more energy to get the worker back in the personal preferred
style. Another note is that we all have certain preferences – primary between the P´s
(Prima Donna, Performance and Pragmatic), which we cannot change, and therefore need
to understand, rather than violate. E.g. some people are motivated by the visual
acknowledgement this will help them in their work as e.g. top athletes and sales people.
Thus the flow balancing project manager is good at recognizing what motivates every
single individual in the team, and is capable of cultivating intrinsic motivation and flow
through a playful approach to work.
What strikes in the comparison between the two studies is the huge differences in the
roles. These differences may be caused by differences in management paradigm,
whereas the mainstream management paradigm in the 1960´s where Mintzberg did his
study, probably where coloured by the fact that most value of work were created by hands
(and machines), as opposed to the paradigm of modern media giants, where most value is
created inside peoples heads (Handy, 1984). However some of the differences may also
be caused be the different natures of respectively operations and new product
development.
In a recent research Laufer et. al. (2015) studied what characterized the work of
successful project managers. The research where conducted in three stages; field studies
of project management work; reflective dialogues with project managers and consulting
engagements with four project-based organizations. They collected data from more than
150 successful project managers affiliated with more than 20 organizations, but primary
large scale expensive and long lasting projects, e.g. three Mars exploration missions. They
found four distinctive work categories (roles) that describe the work of successful project
managers:
Role Driven by Timing Key activities
Develop collaboration Intention Initially Select the right people
Develop mutual
interdependence and trust
Integrate planning and
review with learning
Intention Periodically Develop stable short-term plans
and flexible long-term plans
Conduct learning-based project
reviews
Prevent major disruptions Events Occasionally Anticipate and cope proactively
with a few major problems
Maintain a forward
momentum
Events Continuously Resolve problems by hands-on
engagement
Update and connect through
frequent face to face
communication
Move about (walk the floor)
frequently
Table 4 The work of succesful project managers by Laufer et. al (2015)
It is maybe a little confusing to call it roles, however the work itself makes sense. The
authors conclude that successful project managers do not adhere to either an agile or an
plandriven methodology, they combine the methodologies. Planning-wise they combine
them by a black-box planning approach, where they do only schedule future stages, while
they plan the current in detail. They do emphazise a learning-based approach to planning,
meaning that as the project develops they collect the learnings and “build” them into the
project. They conclude the article by citing Mintzberg that todays managers must be
people-oriented, information-oriented and action-oriented and that only by combining
plandriven approaches with agile approaches all three orientations are covered. An
interesting conclusion, however more interestingly may be the 8 key activities revealed in
the study, giving inspiration to project managers who wants to know exactly how they can
become more successful. On the other hand the researchers seems to focus on large and
expensive projects – e.g. problem solving by hands-on engagement may be less useful in
smaller IT-projects. It may even cause a “learned helplessness” effect (Seligmann, 1975) if
the project manager over and over again takes over when there are problems in sight.
Black box planning on the other hand is close to traditional agile methodologies, where a
current sprint is planned in detail, whereas the coming sprints are only planned by
name/vision and size of effort. Trust-development, project retrospectives, disruption
prevention are disciplines that are found both in plan-driven and agile approaches, but
maybe not taken seriously enough since it is important to stress in this research?
The two recent researches by Simon (2006) and Laufer et. al (2015) overlaps a little, but
can be merged in a strong model with six different role models that a technological
innovation project manager has to master:
Figure 1 The six roles of a Technology Innovation Project Manager
Technology Innovation
Project Manager
Sense maker
Web Weaver
Flow Master
Game Master
Motion master
Problem master
2.4 Determinants of project success
Three different studies shed their different light on the overall determinants of project
success. Based on a constructionist approach Andersen et al. (2006) did an explorative
study into the relationship between project success factors and actual project success.
They defined project success as a combination of:
1.) Project management success, which can be measured by the end of the project.
Did the project deliver the defined results?
2.) Overall project success, which typically cannot be measured before some time after
the end of the project. Did the project succeed to deliver the anticipated impact?
Or another simple way to determine the overall success of an innovation project as
defined by Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1995, p.320); “was the project a financial and
a commercial success or not?”
The most important factors to deliver results are strong project commitment, early
stakeholder influence, stakeholder endorsement of project plans and rich communications.
The most important factors to deliver impact are strong communications and strong
commitment. It is interesting that strong communication and deep understanding of “the
why of the project” are the most important success factors both in terms of project results
as well in terms of project impact.
Another study by Mir & Pinnington (2014) notes that “there is an insufficient understanding
of the relationships between Project Management Performance and Project Success” (p.
203). They use a definition of project success established by Shenhar et. al (2001, as cited
by Mir and Pinnington, 2014) – a framework that links project success with competitive
advantage. It measures project success in the following areas:
- Project efficiency (meeting schedule and budget goals)
- Impact on customers (customer benefits in performance of end products and
meeting customer needs)
- Business success (project benefits in commercial value and market share)
- Preparing for the future (creating new technological and operational infrastructure
and market opportunities)
Like the definition of Andersen et. al (2006) it distinguishes between internal success
(project efficiency/project results) and external success. Based on 154 usable responses
to their questionnaire, Mir and Pinnington (2014) surprisingly found that the most
significant success factor were use of strong project KPI´s. Second in the list is the project
team that is the next most important variable contributing towards project success. They
could also confirm the importance of project leadership and project lifecycle management
processes.
Mishra, Dangayach and Mittal (2011) did also distinguish between internal success and
external success in their survey of critical success and failure factors in modern project
based organizations. They found that the critical success factors of modern projects are in
prioritized order:
1.) The project Manager
Effective leadership, situational leadership, efficient control of resources
2.) The project team
Proper communication, commitment and collaboration
3.) Project tools and techniques
Control of resources, monitoring/control, estimates and budgets
4.) Project organization
Clear project scope, support from top management
5.) External factors
Project maturity at the customer, customer type and size
Interestingly they found that the internal factors (inside the project team) does matter more
than external, and that the project manager holds the most important role in terms of
project success. If this is true, it makes good sense to try to understand what the project
manager actually do.
A fourth study made by Ong et al. (2009) takes a clear starting point when they conclude
that there is a strong correlation between project success and project leadership (p. 157),
they takes it a little further as they note that “Regardless of the increasing availability of
numerous tools and techniques in project management, a project’s success remains
dependent on leadership “, which if its right is interesting when looking at the aim of this
study. The researchers explored the roles of leadership in effective project management
with a qualitative study of both project teams and project managers. They found that the
project manager and project leadership is by far the most important success factor in
projects.
However, what is more interesting, is that they were able to identify some key roles and
strategies for successful project leadership:
1.) Create an appropriate culture for effective project management
2.) Forming a holistic governance structure for project stakeholders
3.) Managing the dynamics of change
4.) Enforcing and encouraging effective communication.
Summarizing these articles, the overall scope of the project and project success can be
illustrated as follows:
Figure 2 Project Scope Model
The different success factors from the three articles are as follows: Andersen
et. al 2006
Mir &
Pinnington
2014
Mishra,
Dangayach
and Mittal
2011
Ong. et. al.
2009
Strong commitment X X
Rich communication X X
Early stakeholder influence X X
Stakeholder endorsement of plans X X
Strong Project KPI´s X
The project team X 2
Project leadership/the project X 1
manager
Project lifecycle management X
Project tools and techniques 3
Project organization 4
External factors 5
Create an appropriate culture for PM X
Managing the dynamics of change X
Table 5 Critical Succes factors of projects
A note here is that the 4 success factors found by Andersen et. al. are strongly connected
to the project manager/project leadership and human factors of projects. Moreover it is
worth to note the similarity between Andersen et. al (2006) and Ong. et. al. (2009).
2.5 Internal determinants of project success
When looking for the human factors in innovation success, there seems to be little
literature supporting this approach, while plenty is written on processes, culture, strategy
etc. Zooming in on innovation projects, where the team operates in non-routinized,
ambiguous, resource constrained and cross-functional environments, tasked with creating
something that the organization has never done before, there is very little literature
supporting these extreme conditions, while most project management literature seem to
assume that it is exactly the same measures that makes project teams succeed as
ordinary production teams. However this assumption miss that while the relationship
between desired effect and deliveries a is virtually clear in an operation team, while this
connection can be nearly impossible to see in an innovation project. In other words; an
operational team can focus on how to optimize productivity, while a project team has to
focus on both productivity and efficiency, whereas the latter is connected to strategy and
tactics, and the first is connected to operations. However a very useful meta-analytic
research were conducted by Sivasubramaniam, Liebowitz and Lackman (2012), who did
look into determinants of new product development team performance. Based on an
aggregation of 38 studies, they found eight key determinants within three categories:
Team determinants Leader determinants Project determinants
o Team leadership
o Team ability
o Transformational
leadership
o Effective boundary
spanning
o External communication
o Goal clarity
o Group cohesiveness
o Shared understanding of
project objectives
Table 6 Determinants of Project success
The transformal leadership determant seemed to have a significant influence on the other
determinants, which is an interesting finding since important research like that of Pinto and
Slevin (1987, 1989) and Gemuenden and Lechler (1997) did either neglect or reject the
importance of the project manager's leadership, in favor to top management support.
Other studies however support the idea that the most important critical success factor of a
project is the project manager (Ong et al., 2009; Mishra, Dangayach and Mittal, 2011)
An interesting finding was that they could not confirm that functional diverseness did have
any influence at all, while this is some of the bearing principles in e.g. design thinking
(Brown, 2008, p.87).
Where the study was looking at how the team is working together, they haven´t covered
what they actually do – which is where I hope I will be able to close the cap between
theories of what project teams should do, and knowledge about what makes project teams
perform well.
Another important study was made by Hoegl and Gemuenden (2001), who did study how
six specific determinants constitutes team work quality, and how teamwork quality did
relate directly to both project success and personal success for the individual participant,
which has huge implications as regards to motivation and satisfaction. The study were
conducted as structured interviews with impressive 575 team members, team leaders and
managers in 145 German software teams from four German software development
laboratories. The applicability outside the IT industry may be questioned, however their
findings did correlate nicely with those of Sivasubramaniam, Liebowitz and Lackman
(2012), and thus it may be assumed that the six determinants of teamwork quality and
project success can be used across industries:
• communication
• coordination
• balance of member contributions
• mutual support
• effort
• cohesion
It is of course a slightly different perspective, but the work is very useful for my research.
Furthermore it reinforces my idea that an ethnographic approach will be a valuable new
perspective into this field, as it didn´t look into when the team communicates, what they
do, how they balance member contributions, how effort is aligned etc. In interesting finding
in Hoegl and Gemüendens work was that they found stronger correlations in the
perception of both effectiveness (quality) and efficiency (schedule and budget) between
team leader/team members and team leader/manager, than between manager and team
members. It is a somewhat intuitive deduction, but now it is somewhat proved in research.
Another completely different but very useful perspective is introduced by Abele (2011),
who has looked into what collaboration/interaction between minds means to innovation. He
has been working in the hospital technology sector and looked into where the real
innovations happen. The idea is that the more collaboration between specialists and users
the more likely it is to create innovation break troughs. This is well in line with the work of
von Hippel who found that 77% of all innovation within the field of hospital technology was
created by the user, and refined for reselling in collaboration with companies (von Hippel,
1981). However this is useful because it adds an extra dimension to the two studies that I
have decided to use – it takes a constructionist approach to innovation, as it acknowledges
that innovation is not something that happen inside the head, or inside a project team. It is
possible of course, but if minds are brought together, problems and possible solutions will
meet, creating a valuable source for innovation.
The three articles different perspectives and contributions are described as follows:
Team determinants Leader determinants Project determinants
Sivasubramaniam,
Liebowitz and
Lackman
o Team leadership o Team ability o External
communication o Goal clarity o Group
cohesiveness
o Transformational leadership
o Effective boundary spanning
o Shared understanding of project objectives
Hoegl and
Gemuenden
o Communication o Coordination o Balance of
member contributions
o Mutual support o Effort o Cohesion
Abele o Internal Collaboration
o External collaboration
Table 7 Summary on determinants of project success
2.6 External determinants of project success
“No project is an island” (Engwall, 2003 as cited by Unger, Rank and Gemünden, 2014), a
quote that reminds us to look at other success factors than just those inside the project.
Unger, Rank and Gemünden (2014) took a combination of a micro and macro cultural
perspective to successful innovation projects, in their cross country study. Their findings
were that both national as well as corporate culture did have a significant impact on project
success, especially when corporate culture is direct compatible with the national culture.
This study will be useful to shed a critical perspective to the determinants found both
internal and in general. Another approach focus on the organization and processes of
technical innovation projects. This is the approach of the Innovation Management
Standard of Danish Standard/CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation and Danish
Standards, 2013), which propose a management system as follows:
Figure 3 Innovation Management System (Comité Européen de Normalisation and Danish
Standards, 2013, p.5)
The standard is meant to help organizations create processes and an organization that
enhance chance of innovation success. The standard is strongly inspired by the Seven
Circles of Innovation (Lindholm and Holmgren, 2005), which is based on a survey on 449
organizations primary in Denmark and Austria. This study also suggest that a strong
innovation culture is based on strong processes, and that culture comes before the
individual (project manager):
Figure 4 Seven Circles of Innovation (Lindholm and Holmgren, 2005, p.11)
Whirlpool is a good case to support the validity of this approach as this company has
created an innovation machine of internal competencies, organization and processes
(Ross, 2004, Snyder, 2006). J.D. Rapp from Whirlpool (2013) starts his post on
Management Innovation Exchange as follows: ”The currency of Innovation is ideas” –
emphazising the need for enough ideas, as only a few ideas of thousands will survive all
the into the marketplace, so the primary purpose of a well trained staff and well oiled
innovation processes is to create enough ideas.
Another perspective that may be important to consider is the importance of a well
committed project sponsor. Pinto & Slevin (1989) pointed the project sponsor out as the
most important success factor of innovation projects, followed up by several studies, and
in a recent study Kloppenborg and Tesch (2015) found that besides the importance of
strong sponsor commitment, the following sponsor behavior is advisable:
Project Stage Key Sponsor behavior
Initiating Set performance goals
Select and mentor project manager
Establish priotities
Planning Ensure planning
Develop relationships with stakeholders
Executing Ensure adequate and effective communication
Maintain relationsships with stakeholders
Ensure quality
Closing Identify and capture lessons learned
Ensure capabilitites and benefits are realized
Figure 5 Key Sponsor behaviour (Kloppenborg & Tesch, 2015, p.29)
Summing up, looking at external factors influencing on the success of innovation project
managers, there are
• The culture of the organization
• The processes of the organization
• The sponsors (which the project manager can help succeed in the way he/she does
the job of project management).
2.7 The conceptual framework of the research
Summing up the literature a framework emerges, consisting of:
• Six roles of an innovation project manager
• A framework for project success
• 13 critical success factors for projects
• A three determinant category framework for team success
• The external influence on project success; culture; processes and the sponsors.
Figure 6 Theoretical framework of the research
Armed with this theoretical framework the research will explore what technical innovation
project managers really do, to understand the work of project management and the nature
of project success.
3. Research methodology and methods
3.1 Introduction
The research aims to understand what successful project management looks like, armed
with the theoretical framework, but first and foremost armed with curiosity looking for both
traces validating the framework, but also traces of tasks, roles and actions not covered
previously. The research is based on case studies from both within and outside the media
industry, which makes it possible to trace both similarities and differences between the
media industry with its fast paced innovation, and other industries, though the other
industries chosen for this study are still characterized of fast paced innovation. Using
Saunders et. al. (2007) research onion, the research approach can be visualized briefly as
follows:
Figure 7 The research modelled in the research onion (Saunders et. al. 2007)
Building on an epistemological constructionist approach, the research methodology is a
qualitative research, using ethnographic methods (Leedshurwitz, 1994). It is the aim to
reveal new insights and concrete knowledge about what innovation project managers do in
terms of work activities, among others inspired by Gemüenden, Salomo and Krieger
(2005), who called for more innovative approaches into research. Moreover it is inspired
by Mintzberg (1970,1971), who almost revolutionized our perception of what managers do,
and later on how a strategy is realized by both intentions and something that emerges
(Mintzberg 1978). Mintzberg both showed how qualitative research through ethnography
can work when revealing new paradigms, as well as developing the methodology itself
(Yanow, Ybema and van Hulst, 2012). And the need for developing new paradigms and
new understandings is exactly what Gemünden, Salomo and Krieger (2005) call for.
Therefore, the research is based on ethnographic observations of the work of project
managers. Project managers from five different technology heavy industries has been
observed performing their respective jobs, five project managers has been interviewed,
and a virtual project team followed for 6 weeks.
3.2 Ethnography
Ethnography is the systematic study of people and culture, a study where the researcher
“immerse” into the setting that is observed, essentially a form of scientific fieldwork in
which an observer makes first hand observations and taking notes about a participant or
participants (Nicholas, 2008, Easterby-Smith et al., 2012). It is originally based on
anthropology (Simmons, 2007), the science of mankind in general. A distinction is often
made between anthropology, studying culture, social structures, etc. Whereas
anthropological methods typically involves the observer to immerse into a setting for years,
e.g. living with distant tribes in the jungle, to understand their culture, social structures and
life in general, ethnographic methods aims to reveal the necessary insights much faster,
and investigation may be limited to only a few cases (O'Reilly, 2005). Therefor it has
become popular in user driven innovation approaches like Design Thinking, where
different kinds of ethnographic tools and methods are used to understand the user and
possible pains (Brown, 2008). A famous example of the use of ethnography has been
described by Christensen et. al (2007); a chain of fast food restaurants were looking to
improve the sales of their milkshake. They had every kind of data on the product and sales
of it, but no matter what they did in terms of changing the recipy and marketing nothing
helped. It wasn´t until a researcher did observe people buying milkshakes primary in the
drive in, supplemented with some questions for the buyers, they figured out that what they
had to understand was what job the product were hired for. With this knowledge in they
found that the job it was hired to do, was to make the buyer feel satiated all the morning
without feeling guilty for eating junk food, and to kill time while struggling with the morning
traffic they could find the right improvements of the product (making the milkshake
healthier and thicker (making it lasting longer). Often the approach involves working with
primarily unconstructed data, that hasn´t been coded at the point of data collection in
terms of a closed set of analytic categories. The emphasis is on exploring social
phenomenon rather than testing hypotheses, as opposed to traditional positivistic research
methods. Data analysis involves interpretation of the functions and meanings of human
actions and the product of this is mainly verbal explanations, where statistical analysis and
quantification play a subordinate role. It involves engaging in extensive field work where
data collection is mainly by interviews, symbols, artefacts, observations, and many other
sources of data. The researcher in ethnography type of research, looks for patterns of the
groups mental activities, that is their ideas and beliefs expressed through language or
other activities, and how they behave in their groups as expressed through their actions
that the researcher observed.
Mintzberg used a structured observation method (1970, 1971) to conduct his research in
management tasks and roles. He organized the observations in three types of records:
a.) Chronology record – which were activity patterns throughout the working day
b.) Mail record – in total 890 pieces of mail
c.) A contact record – in total 368 verbal interactions
It is of course important to consider what the “Hawthorne effect” may mean to the
observations. Mintzberg did have his considerations regarding this topic, when he
designed his methodology (Mintzberg, 1970). He acknowledged that there probably were
some Hawthorne effects, but that they did not affect his results or conclusions (p.103). He
reminds us that he did not research leadership styles, but management activities, so while
the style may have been affected, the activities (categories, types, content) did probably
not get affected by his presence. After all scheduled meetings were probably setup in
advance, incoming telephone calls, mails etc. would probably also not be affected by his
presence.
As the objective is to create possible new insights, the ethnographic approach is
considered a useful approach, to open up experiences during research where other
research methods fail to cover. Moreover it helps in vast varied understanding about the
depth of knowledge.
3.3 Contextual Design
Contextual Design (CD) is a structured user-centred design process based on
ethnography (Holtzblatt, 2014). The strength of CD is that it provides a well structured
process and well defined methods to collect data about people in the field, interpret and
consolidate the data in a structured way. Originally the method were designed to be used
in human-computer-interaction studies (Curtis et al., 1999), and software development
(Rockwell, 1999). However it has also been used in process reegineering, device design
etc (Holtzblatt, 2014). The key principle is that people are experts in their own lives, but
are unable to articulate their knowledge explicitly. Therefor it is important to observe and
interview people where they live and where they do their work. The process is based on
two main phases; collection and concept development, each with 4 subproceses
(Holzblatt, 2014):
1. Collection
a. Contextual Inquiry – field work
b. Interpretation session
c. Work models and affinity diagramming – data consolidation
d. Visioning – redesign peoples work with new technology ideas
2. Concept development
a. Story boarding – work out the details of particular tasks and roles
b. User Environment Design – design system to support the new work
c. Paper Mock-up Interviews – low resolution prototypes are tested with the
customer
d. Interaction and Visual Design – design and test the final look and user
experience
In this research the first two steps of CD involves useful methods; the CI and the
interpretation through models of the data collected.
3.3.1 Contextual Inquiry
Contextual Inquiry (CI) is an explicit step for understanding who the customers really are
and how they work on a day-to-day basis (Holzblatt, 1998). The difficulty is that, as
described above, work becomes so habitual to people that they often have difficulty
articulating exactly what they do and why they do it. So the researcher conducts one-on-
one field interviews with users in their workplace to discover what matters in the work.
These are not traditional question and answer interviews. Instead, a contextual interviewer
observes people as they work and inquires into the peoples´ actions as they unfold to
understand their motivations and strategy. Four principles guides the contextual
interviews (Holsblatt, 1998 p. 41-66):
Context Interviews are conducted in the user’s actual workplace. The
researcher watches users do their own work tasks and
discusses any artefacts they generate or use with them. In
addition, the researcher gathers detailed re-tellings of specific
past events when they are relevant to the project focus.
Partnership User and researcher collaborate to understand the user’s
work. The interview alternates between observing the user as
they work and discussing what the user did and why.
Interpretation The researcher shares their interpretations and insights with
the user during the interview. The user may expand or correct
the researcher’s understanding.
Focus The researcher steers the interaction towards topics which
are relevant to the team’s scope
Table 8 Four guiding principles of contextual interviews
3.3.2 Data interpretation
Based on the data collected in the CI, the CIinterpretation session is centred around five
models:
1.) The flow model, which captures communication and coordination between people
to accomplish work. It reveals the formal and informal workgroups and
communication patterns critical to doing the work. It shows how work is divided into
formal and informal roles and responsibilities
2.) The Cultural model, that captures culture and policy that constrain how work is
done. It shows how people are constrained and how they work around those
constraints to make sure the work is done.
3.) The Sequence model, that shows the detailed steps performed to accomplish each
task important to the work. It shows the different strategies people use, the intents
or goals that their task steps are trying to accomplish, and the problems getting in
their way.
4.) The Physical model, that shows the physical environment as it supports or gets in
the way of the work. It shows how people organize their environments to make their
work easier.
5.) The Artifact model, that shows the artifacts that are created and used in doing the
work. Artifacts reveal how people think about their work - the concepts they use and
how they organize them to get the work done.
In this dissertation the flow model and the cultural model has been picked to help the
interpretation of the data.
3.3.3 Conclusion
The use of CI and the corresponding interpretation methods creates a skeleton and
process of the ethnographic observations and interviews in this research, it has however to
be tailored against the objectives. There are also risks embedded in the fact that the
observed are only observed in a very limited fraction of their time, and thus only limited
fragments of their work may be discovered. Therefor the interviews has to have some
exploratory approach, e.g. asking the project manager to open his electronic calendar and
tell about the work of every single day the last week, and e.g. to ask him to show around in
the project room, and tell about what and when they use every single artefact. As the
research is conducted as both daylong observations, and shorter interview sessions, it is
important to bear in mind, that in interview settings, people may think they help saving time
by pointing out something they think is important. This behaviour may reduce the quality of
the data that is collected. Therefor the immediate interpretation with the interviewee is
crucial to quality of the data, as well as the possibility to cross check findings across
several interviews.
3.4 Data collection
The research covered data collected through both daylong observations and shorter semi-
structured interviews. The people observed have been chosen based on the level of
technology innovation forces within the industries observed, bearing in mind the strong
forces of digitalization and disruption in the media industry (Rigby, 2014). As medico,
greentech and IT are all three industries where industry leaders can be found in Denmark,
project managers has been found within these categories, as well as project managers at
Denmarks Radio. In total 11 project managers is included in the ethnographic research,
divided into five categories of data collection:
1. Following a working innovation project team in an industry leader within bio-
chemical products for two days
2. Day long following of two individual technology development project managers at
Denmarks Radio
3. Day long following and interviewing two individual technology development project
managers in a technology leading company within the wind energy sector
4. Following a virtual team for 6 weeks working on a e-business solution for two world
leading brands
5. CI interviews of 6 project managers leading technology projects within Denmarks
Radio
Across the five categories of data collection, the common denominator is the CI focus,
which has been on the tasks that the project manager does, how he/she fulfill the tasks
and which supporting tools and artifacts he/she uses. The focus has directed the data
collection, and no predetermined categories of data has been created, to avoid biased
data collection. In terms of the interviews, however a simple guide has been developed to
ensure the focus of the CI, however it has only been used as an inspiration:
Opening remarks
- I am curious to understand the work of a project manager, and more precisely what
You do during a day, and a week.
- Could you describe the project(s) You are assigned to?
About the work
- How does Your calendar look like today ?
- What was/is Your role in the specific meeting/task/etc?
- Show me the tools You use to communicate?
- What kind of rules do You have within Your project(s) (and how are they enforced)?
- What kind of tasks do You appreciate in Your job?
- What kind of tasks do You prefer not to do in Your job?
- How do You celebrate (if You do)?
- Could You describe how You keep track of the tasks within the project?
- Could You describe how You keep track of the competences within the project
- Could You describe Yourself?
- If You should create a project management education, what kind of competencies
would You then emphazise?
Data are collected as:
- Notes taken directly into Evernote, which makes it easier to sort and categorize
notes
- Photos of people and artefacts
- Reflections after each observation are recorded immediately after the observation,
to capture possible useful perspectives and angles, but also to capture critical
reflections on the observations
All people observed and interviewees has been supplied with a list of observations that I
have been doing, and why, to make them feel comfortable with the research.
Primary data are validated against secondary data from the studies present in the
literature review where it is possible, keeping in mind that the chosen case study model is
limited to a few organizations and people, and thus the insights created may not be
replicable in other studies.
3.5 Data analysis
The data has been interpreted and analysed by the use of different ethnographic
approaches:
a.) A simple pattern recognition exercise where all individual observations are written
on post its. These post its have been sorted by category and different insights and
patterns are formulated and retested against all the present observations
b.) The five interpretation models supplied by the contextual design toolbox.
c.) Creation of different personas. Personas are fictional named archetypes of users
encompassing generalizations of their key characteristics and goals that emerge
from interviews. This method is especially powerful because personas succinctly
package information into the form of a person, who is easily understood and
reasoned about (Madsen et al., 2014)
All insights and conclusions are derived from the models created by the interpretation
session and retested against the original observations.
3.6 Validity and reliability of the research
Validity is “is concerned with the idea that the research design fully addresses the
research questions and objectives” (White, 2000, p.25). The focus of the CI is concerned
about this issue, making sure that the light is shed in the direction of what project
managers do in terms of the tasks, not in terms of how they do it. Making interpretation
sessions and data analysis during the data collection stage, makes sure that sufficient
information is collected, and that useful insights can be established based on the data.
White, B. (2000, p.25) suggests that ”reliability is about consistency and research, and
whether another researcher could use your design and obtain similar findings”. Since the
epistemological stand point is of an constructionist, and thus the researchers own history,
the specific context of the observations, the prior events etc. all influences what is
observed, the reliability in terms of Whites definition is impossible to fulfil. However since
the observations are all conducted in the context where the project manager works, the
gathered information is tangible and reproducible. As insights are tested against data
across all the observations, insights are also reliable and reproduceable in terms of Whites
definition.
3.7. Ethics
Conducting ethnographic inquiry do also mean to get very close to people, and very close
to what they do. The researcher will both build knowledge about the topic in focus, but also
on the actual projects that the observants are running. Researching very important
innovation projects in different organizations has made it necessary to create and sign
non-disclosure agreements with the teams and companies observed. However it has also
been necessary to spend extra time to create the necessary trust. To protect both the
companies and the people, all projects and people are figuring anonymous in this
dissertation.
3.8 Conclusions
Using an ethnographical approach to study the phenomenon’s of what project managers
do, is well suited for the purpose of exploration and in depth knowledge creation. However
the approach do also contain risks in terms of only fragmented data are collected, biased
data and results that are difficult to reproduce. Therefor all results have to be validated
against the original data as well as against the chosen literature.
4. Results
4.1 Introduction
In this chapter the results of the ethnographic research are presented after two processing
models:
a.) A simple pattern recognition (Bridgeman, 2014)
b.) Contextual inquiry interpretation models (Holzblatt, 1998)
Aiming to discover what innovation project managers do, it has been important to meet the
people followed and interviewed with an open mind, and keep curious throughout every
observation. As the study both aimed to understand the generic work of technology
innovation project mangers, as well as to understand differences between industries, it has
been a difficult journey. In other words, how is it possible to compare two industries, if
there is no common understanding of what generic project management work is?
And how is it possible to maintain an open mind, balancing common understandings as
well? In this study this has been addressed by creating a common pattern recognition
across all interviews and observations, to look for common patterns, followed by creation
of interpretation models for different approaches of project organization. The industrial
specific patterns has been derived at the very end of the data processing.
To make sure that all impressions where gathered and documented, the notes of every
interview/visit where wrapped up in an interview/visit report immediately (same day). Some
of the many photographs that were taken during the study, where put into the reports,
where they support the data collected. These reports are enclosed in the appendix.
4.2 Pattern recognition
To create data for the pattern recognition, all data where put in and coded in a database.
The coding table where based on the roles defined in the literature study, extended by one
extra role found especially among project managers with some seniority within the same
organization. The total of 6+1 role was able to explain the data of the observations carried
out. These where (in prioritized order):
Sense maker This role is about creating sense about the project and what
happens inside and outside the project. The clever project
managers that I followed and interviewed did spend incredible
much time on sense making both with their teams (within the
project), and with external stakeholders (outside the project).
Game master Setting and mastering the rules of the game was done by all the
project managers, but in different ways. Some did have a team
running scrum, and the project manager facilitated this process. I
also watched processes like retrospective workshops, project
meetings and steering committee meetings, which also had to be
mastered. Some where good at fostering gamesmanship,
whereas others didn´t consider this at all. It seems to have
something to do with the culture of the organization, more than
the tasks of the project team.
Motion master Making sure that the project keep running, and never come to a
stop, was something that every project manager I was in touch
with, did all the time. One of the project managers described his
role as similar to the role of a factory worker, who has to make
sure that the conveyor belt never stops.
Web Weaver Fostering network inside, outside and across the borders
between the project and the surrounding world, the project
manager makes sure that the project not ends up as an isolated
island. It seems as a key skill of the project manager is the ability
to create useful relations, not only between himself/herself and
other people, but also between both internal and external
stakeholders.
Problem master The problem master makes sure that obstacles are identified
and removed, so that the project can keep moving. It is a role
that is very explicit in e.g. scrum, where the scrum coach is
supposed to remove obstacles, but it is also very present in
other types of projects. At least all the project managers I
followed and interviewed did spend much time on this role.
However there was a remarkable difference in the way they
performed the role. Whereas some did use their network to help
removing the problems, others with more technical skills (e.g.
engineers) engaged themselves in the problem solving.
Flow master The flow master aims at intrinsic motivation, and thus needs to
have some kind of a close relation both to the individual of the
project team, as well as to the tasks to be performed by the
project team. The project managers leading network organized
projects, with no real full time allocated resources, did not seem
to spend much time on this role. They were all aware of how
they could foster intrinsic motivation, but didn´t use it in practice
during the days I followed thm. The project managers leading
project teams did spend some time considering how they could
find a perfect match between challenge and competencies of the
individual.
Knowledge master As a seasoned project manager and knowledge resource within
the organization, people both from within the project as well as
outside will ask for all types of answer, since they know that this
person bears the wisdom of experience. E.g. a technical
manager calls one of the project managers to get a quick answer
on the design specifications on a given topic.
Table 9 Six plus one roles technology innovation project managers act
This correlates well with the project manager roles found in the literature study. However a
new role was added to the role model, the knowledge master. This role is acted by
seasoned project managers who has developed a strong knowledge base from previous
projects and work in the organization, which they offer to their network.
An interesting role were found among some of the very technical focused project
managers who did act as result masters, focusing on the results they were able to create
on their own. It is a little similar to the problem master and the motion master, however it
does seem to become a role of its own, e.g. with one technical project manager, who
appreciated to work on his own in the test labs, at least half of his time. These project
managers all appreciated good results, and when asked for the best experiences of their
job, they answered “when good results are created”; “when we succeed in something
nobody else thought were possible”.
Figure 8 Pattern recognition analysis
There was an interesting difference between project managers leading core project teams,
and project managers working with a network of suppliers, namely that the role of flow
mastering did not seem important in the latter types of projects, though the project
managers in these projects did have their considerations regarding the topic.
4.3 Contextual Inquiry interpretation models
To create another perspective on the data collected, two interpretation models were
created:
a.) The flow model
b.) The cultural model
These are presented in the following.
0204060
4.3.1 The flow models.
Working with the data, it was found reasonable to create three different flow models:
A. One where the project managers worked primary with network organized project
team, and with a strong customer.
B. One where the project managers worked in a combination of a core project team
with network connected suppliers to the core team
C. One where the project team (core team) works closely together with one or more
suppliers to deliver the desired outcome of the project.
Figure 9 CI Flow model A
ProjectManager
Steering CommitteeCustomer
User
Project team
Supplier
Project information
Task information
Knowledge sharingKnowledge sharing
Decisions
Informal information
Project information
Task information
Knowledge sharing
Decisions
Informal information
Project information
Task information
Project information
Project informationTask information
Formal reports
Figure 10 CI Flow model B
ProjectManager
Steering Committee
Customer
Project team
(Incl. user)
Supplier
Task information
Knowledge sharing
Formal reports
Informal information
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing
Decisions
Orders
InformationConfirmations
Project information
Project information
Informal information
Project information
Informal information
Decisions
Decisions
Task informationKnowledge sharing
Project information
Decisions
Task informationKnowledge sharing
Project information
Figure 11 CI Flow model C
The CI Flow models show the complexity of projects across different organizations and
project types. Information and decisions flow in infinite loops around, and thus the models
show the necessity for someone (the project manager) to orchestrate the information, and
to orchestrate the creation of smooth communication channels (the web weaver role,
validated during the pattern recognition exercise. People involved in model A, did talk
about frustrations regarding confusing roles and responsibilities and decisions that were
changing continually.
The flow models may support those who call for strong tools and methods that can help
orchestrating the complexity and that can help create clear roles and responsibilities.
Mishra, Dangayach and Mittal (2011) found that tools and methods were if not top priority,
then of significant priority – the CI flow models may visualize why. The complexity and
looping of processes visualized in the flow models, does also help to understand the
difference between a linear transaction based production system and a non linear project
system, and especially why project systems are much more complex, than traditional
production chain systems.
ProjectManager
Steering CommitteeCustomer
Project team
Supplier
Project information
Task information
Project information
Task information
Knowledge sharing
Formal reports
Informal information
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing
Decisions
Knowledge sharing
Informal information
Information
Orders
Confirmations
Informal information
Informal information
Project information
Project information
The flow models may also play as an important support for Winter and Szczepaneks
(2009) idea that projects may be viewed through images that depends on the perspective
of the viewer, just as Morgan (2006) suggest that we perceive our view on an
organizations as one out of several images (2006).
4.3.2 The cultural models
The same three scenarios that were used to consolidate the flow models have been found
useful to consolidate the cultural models:
A. One where the project managers worked primary with network organized project
team, and with a strong customer.
B. One where the project managers worked in a combination of a core project team
with network connected suppliers to the core team
C. One where the project team (core team) works closely together with one or more
suppliers to deliver the desired outcome of the project.
Figure 12 CI Cultural Model A
Steering CommitteeCustomer
Project teamSupplier
Project Manager
Corporate governanceGovernance models
Bureaucracy
Low trust, need to control what and how it is
delivered
Traditional buyer/supplierrelation
Collaboration governed by rules
Dont know the customerTransaction based
management
Figure 13 CI Cultural model B
Knowledge
Steering CommitteeCustomer
Project teamSupplier
Project Manager
Same organizationHigh trust
Share/Open Innovation
High trustTell the project manager
what they wantOpen for discussion
High trustShare/Open Innovation to
some degree
High trustShare/Open InnovationSomewhat empowered
Figure 14 CI Cultural model C
The three different cultural models show three different levels of trust, from the
bureaucratic and low trust in model A, to a high degree of trust in model C. In the last
model the companies observed did emphasize collaborative innovation (Faludi, 2014),
where customers in one end of the value chain are connected to suppliers in the other,
sharing information, patents and ideas to create a strong environment for innovation. E.g.
Tesla and Toyota has opened up their portfolio of patents to support the growth of an
industry, and of course to support the growth of their own companies (Lindegaard, 2015).
The last model describe two organizations that both have been capable of producing more
patents than their number of employees – not that it may be the only KPI for innovation
capacity, however it is some sort of useful indication that their Innovation systems are
powerful.
Steering CommitteeCustomer
Project teamSupplier
Project Manager
Same organizationHigh trust
Share/Open Innovation
High trustShare/Open Innovation
High trustShare/Open InnovationCollaborative innovation
High trustShare/Open Innovation
Empowered
As regards to the performance of the teams, the organizations visualized in scenario C, did
seem to be more supportive to high performance of the teams working on their innovation
projects – as they fulfilled most of the team success determinants, that I described in
Table 6 Determinants of Project success. At least I was able to detect that the following
determinants were supported (colored green):
Team determinants Leader determinants Project determinants
Sivasubramaniam,
Liebowitz and
Lackman
o Team leadership o Team ability o External
communication o Goal clarity o Group
cohesiveness
o Transformational leadership
o Effective boundary spanning
o Shared understanding of project objectives
Hoegl and
Gemuenden
o Communication o Coordination o Balance of
member contributions
o Mutual support o Effort o Cohesion
Abele o Internal Collaboration
o External collaboration
Table 10 Results, determinants of project success
In one of the teams in model B it was possible to find signs of similar coverage of project
success, and across all the supportive cases both the customer and the supplier worked
together in the project team, that worked as a work force. Moreover, they were able to
deliver all necessary work, knowledge and product specific decisions within the team. This
is congruent with the advice within agile methodologies like e.g. Scrum (Schwaber, K. and
Sutherland, 2013) and DSDM Atern (DSDM.ORG, 2015), and thus this work support the
advice from these practice based methodologies.
The greatest difference between model A and the other two models where perhaps the
differences within their coverage of the determinants of project success. Looking at the
success rate in terms of the project efficiency and productivity there was no doubt that
model B and C project did perform substantially better than A, at least measured by the
answers of the interviews.
4.4 Conclusions
The role model (figure 1, six roles of a project manager) were validated, however
motivating people differs between project types, cultures and project managers. A seventh
fairly interesting role was added to the list, the knowledge master, an invaluable resource
at least in the cases that I observed. Interestingly some of the same organizations did work
professionally with outsourcing of the project manager, at the cost of future efficiency of
the organization.
A strong environment for innovation were especially found among the teams working
open, trustful and collaborative. The finding may seem somewhat trivial, but the fact is that
organizations still struggle creating the open, trustful and collaborative environments,
which in some industries may be of less importance, but in the highly disruption threaded
media industry (Rigby, 2014) it is a real and very tangible problem.
It was possible to validate most of the determinants of project success with the data
created during the observations, findings that are well in line with the advice of practice
based agile methodologies.
The research did not find any evidence of significant differences between projects run
colocated and projects driven virtual, albeit appearance of communication channels and
cooperative looks different.
Regarding the process the ethnographic approach made it possible to reveal new insights,
and the combination of traditional pattern recognition combined with CI interpretation
models worked very well in this study.
5. Conlusion
5.1 Findings
This study has validated the idea that innovation project managers advantageously should
consider mastery of the 6 primary innovation project manager roles; sense maker; game
master; flow master; web weaver; problem master; motion master, but it did also reveal
great differences on the coverage of the roles between project organization types (core
team versus network oriented projects), organizational cultures (high trust versus low trust)
and motivation of the project manager (personal results versus team results).
While this study only covers four organizations, a bigger scale research should be
conducted to validate the insights created by this smaller scale ethnographic research.
However the findings are well in line with the literature, as well as practice based agile
methodologies, and thus it is reasonable to assume the findings are valid. The validation of
the determinants of project success did also give some sort of validation of the practice
based agile methodologies, though this was not the aim of the research.
Covering a complex area like managing innovation projects, is difficult talks, since
innovation projects may cover a very broad range of areas, like innovation in organization,
innovation in marketing, digital product development, engineering of wind turbines,
engineering of space rockets, engineering of enzymes for wash powder etc. This study
covered a few areas (the media business, e-business, windturbines and enzymes), which
however had little in common in terms of products developed, but which had much in
common in terms of what the project managers actually did.
The different perspectives of projects, or different images that one would get depending on
what perspective that is chosen towards a project (Winter and Szczepanek, 2009), is also
useful while considering the results of this limited research. While Winter & Szeczepanek
were able to find at least eight very different perspectives of the same project, this
research has covered more than 30 different projects and thus possibly more than 240
different images, which probably would look slightly different from another observers
perspective.
5.2 Research objectives
The covering research objective of this research were:
What do technology innovation project managers do, to increase the chance of success? This were specified in the following second level questions:
Which cross industry insights could be useful for every technology project manager ?
The cross industry insights were that though there were great differences between the
tasks of the project manager, these were more a matter of project organization, than a
matter of industry. Not that a great IT-project manager would be a succesful innovation
project manager within enzyme development, since the need for domain knowledge were
found as an important determinant of success well in line with the research by Lefebvre et
al. (2005). Seasoned project managers even became an important source of knowledge.
The level of trust plays a significant role in terms of how the role model is played by the project
managers, as well as how successful the project team is in terms of project efficiency and
productivity.
An interesting insight was that though tools and methods do not seem to be important according to
the literature, the complexity of projects may need strong tools and methods to help both
clarification on roles and responsibilities (e.g. Prince2 (Graham, 2008)), and support by easy to
understand processes (e.g. Scrum (Schwaber and Sutherland, 2013) and DSDM Atern
(DSDM.ORG, 2015)). It may be interesting to look deeper into this question for future research,
trying to understand what job tools and methods does, rather than asking stakeholders on their
attitude towards the importance of strong tools and methods.
Which industry specific common insights within the media business could be useful for
every technology project manager?
There were not found any obvious specific insights regarding project management within
the media business. However a great difference in the trust level were found among the
projects observed within the media business. One explanation may be the clash between
two strong employer cultures within this business, or at least within the organization
observed:
- journalists who think from an idea that they serve a higher purpose. They serve an
ideal
- officials who thinks out from the system. The system is necessary to maintain order
To add complexity a third important group of highly giftet introvert software developers, is
an important part of the system, since they develop the solution. Their introversion may
cause them to down prioritize communication with their direct customers, and thus develop
solutions that may differ from the expectations of the customer.
Different working patterns of the different groups do also play an important role. Hartmann
(2014) distinguishes between four different approaches to development work:
1. The scientific approach is characterized by the continuous development of explicit
methods and a common process language. Processes start with information
gathering and analysis before identifying the problems which need to be solved.
2. The artful approach, which is characterized by implicit and intuitive methods based
on experience and individual talent. Processes start with information gathering –
working for big ideas, which help reframe and reposition the concepts.
3. The experience-based approach, which is characterized by implicit and intuitive
methods based on evidence and individual talent. Processes start with information
and inspiration gathering with the goal of identifying solutions. Frequently ideas pop
up early in the process.
4. The research based approach, which is characterized by explicit methods for
gathering information and learning about the situation. Processes start with
information gathering and analysis before gathering ideas for how to solve the
problem.
Where the journalist (typically the customer in the case of projects within the organization
observed) work experience based, the developer will typically work scientifically. These to
approaches will inevitably clash, as they might be able to have the same starting point, but
then the developer narrows the solution with the scientific approach, whereas as the
journalist keep getting new ideas and thus enhancing the solution. The officials, taking the
standpoint of the system, will then use bureaucratic methods to make sure that all
procedures are followed.
This becomes a toxic mix for trust, and innovation – especially in the cases where the
project is not run with a core team with both developers and the customer present. In one
of the projects observed, a core team were able to use the differences to a somewhat
creative and innovative but also volatile environment. In another very similar project where
the customer were presented by scientific thinking archivists these tensions were not
present, and the team did work extremely productive.
So the conclusion may be that the primary differences will be found in the participants
approach to designing solutions, where big differences are found between journalists and
developers, but similar differences may be found in other industries, e.g. when sales
people work together with engineers.
Are there any differences in running a physically dispersed team, compared to a physically
co-located team?
There were not found significant differences in the work of the project manager between
physically dispersed and physically co-located teams. The communication channels may
differ a little, especially between Denmarks Radio, where there is a culture of prescense
and the other organizations which of practical reasons already worked in a dispersed
environment, and thus had the tools and methods for virtual work in place. This is well in
line with the study by Siebdrat, Hoegl and Ernst (2009), who found that even small
distances (different offices in the same building) are significant, and that virtual teams
seemed to significantly outperform physically co-located teams. Their advice did look very
similar to traditional cultivation of team performance:
- Emphazise teamwork skills
- Promote self-leadership acroos the team
- Provide for face-to-face meetings
- Foster a global culture
The conclusion is therefor that the work of a project manager does not differ between
managing co-located and dispersed teams.
5.3 Limitations of the research
The limited number of observations, that it is possible to conduct due to the time
consuming ethnographic approach, limits the findings to a small subset of all industries. In
terms of use in the media industry, the study would indisputable benefit from more
observations, however the limitations of the use the findings are more concerned about
other industries, not covered by any observations. While the data validation of the six plus
one roles are made across industries, it is more a matter of validation of cross industrial
industries, where no significant differences were found. The more the industry diverges
from the media industry, the more likely differences in core project management work may
occur. A mixed methods approach (Plano Clark, Garrett and Leslie-Pelecky, 2009)
combining the open ended ethnographic approach with a closed positivistic approach
could help creating a considerable broader and larger amount of data to validate or reject
the findings of this study.
5.4 Perspectives
Developing high performance project managers is important for most organizations,
especially in business where innovation success is equal to survival, like in the media
business. This research could help reframing the development, from traditional tools and
methods trainings, or traditional leadership courses – to a much more focused effort,
focusing on understanding and development of the ability to play the different roles:
Sense maker Understanding of how how we construct our sense of what we
experience (Pye, 2005).
Understanding of how the manager can affect sense making
Understanding of how to create/develop useful project objectives
and how to communicate them
Understanding how to respond to negative stories, and how to
handle crisis communication
Game master Understanding of basic methodologies like Scrum, DSDM Atern,
Prince2 or whatever methodologies are used in the organization
Understanding of how to merge/tailor methods, so they fit the current
project (Boehm and Turner, 2004)
Understanding of KPI development and tracking
Flow master Understanding the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation
Understanding the drivers of intrinsic motivation and how to apply
them in daily practice
Understanding how to create an engaging environment
Understanding of flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 1996)
Understanding Your own motivational paradigm (Hein, 2012)
Web Weaver Training in relational competencies
Understanding the dynamics of creating communication channels
Effective meetings
Understanding that every meet (even in the elevator) is an occasion
for web weaving
Motion master Understanding why a project needs to keep rolling
Understanding of critical path
Understanding of risk assessment and management
Training in negotiation techniques
Problem master Understanding of different problem mastering techniques (e.g. fish
bone diagrams, 8D techniques etc).
Training in negotiation techniques
Training in conflict mastering
Table 11 Development of the technology innovation project manager roles
Some of the training is similar to what is found in traditional trainings, but the mix is
different. Furthermore it may be wise to tone down the traditional heavy focus on tools and
methods, to make room for a deeper understanding of the other skills added. As the
individual project manager grows his/her skills and is managing increasing challenging
projects, more complex tools and methods can be acquired. This is perhaps a showdown
with traditional project management courses and certifications, but in a world where
success is critical and resources are fewer and fewer, it becomes critical to use the limited
resources correctly.
Future research could look into a broader range og industries to investigate whether this
studies findings can be validated in a broader perspective. Another interesting case could
be to try understand what jobs the heavy tools and methods present in modern project
management are meant to do, to get a broader understanding of the topic, rather than if
tools and methods are useful or not. The complexity found in the flow models indicate that
there might be a value of well thought tools and methods, which an anthropological study
might be able to reveal more perspectives on.
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