Supporting organizational adaptation through successful strategic and operational project portfolio management

A major challenge for organizations’ strategic management is to cope with uncertainty and constantly adapt to a turbulent environment. In organizations, project portfolios constitute the responsible entities to operationalize the adaptation by developing new opportunities and ensuring the implementation of an adapted organizational strategy. Thus, in this dissertation, I investigate how project portfolio and project management can strategically and operationally cope with uncertainty, increase portfolio and project success, and thereby support an organization’s successful adaptation. In regards to the strategic decision-making of portfolio management, I empirically reveal that decision-makers can effectively cope with projects’ and environment’s uncertainty through real options reasoning and thereby increase portfolio innovativeness and success. Furthermore, I show that portfolios consisting of agile projects benefit the valuable recognition of emergent strategies. In addition, I highlight the important role of entrepreneurial orientation and innovation climate as antecedents and moderators of portfolio management decisions. In regards to the operational implementation of a portfolio’s strategy, I investigate how portfolio and project managers can cope with projects’ uncertainty in their operational decisions. I show that project management effort causally increases projects’ profitability and that the marginal impact of project management effort increases for higher project complexity. Furthermore, I show that project managers’ reporting behavior is significantly associated with projects’ future performance. This dissertation contributes new insights on portfolio and project management in general and portfolio management’s strategic and operational decision-making under uncertainty in particular. Furthermore, it adds new aspects to the interaction between portfolio and project management and thereby opens up new perspectives on behavioral and contextual decision-making in portfolio and project management.