IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00557549.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Lost Roots: How Project Management Came to Emphasize Control Over Flexibility and Novelty

Author

Listed:
  • Sylvain Lenfle

    (CRG - Centre de recherche en gestion - X - École polytechnique - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Christoph Loch

    (INSEAD - Institut Européen d'administration des Affaires)

Abstract

The discipline of project management (PM) adheres to the dominant model of the project life cycle or phased stage-gate approach to executing projects. This implies a clear definition of mission and system are given at the outset (to reduce uncertainty), and subsequent execution in phases with decision gates. It contrasts with approach applied in the seminal projects that are credited with establishing the foundation of the discipline in the 1940s and 50s. Those projects started out with missions that were beyond the currently possible; any solutions had to emerge over time. They succeeded by a combination of parallel trials (from which the best would then be selected) and trial-and-error iteration (allowing for the modification of solutions pursued over a period of time). Although the success of these approaches was well documented and explained by scientific study in the 1950s, today they seem to fly in the face of accepted professional standards, making managers uncomfortable when they are encountered. The explanation for this contradiction has its roots in the 1960s, when the so-called McNamara revolution at the Department of Defense (DoD) gave a control orientation to the PM discipline. This shift was cemented by the codes and practices of the DoD and NASA, contemporary scientific writing, and the foundation of the Project Management Institute, a professional organization that translated the standard into the educational norm for a generation of project managers. The project management discipline was thus relegated to an "order taker niche" – the engineering execution of moderately novel projects with a clear mission. As a result, it has been prevented from taking center stage in the crucial strategic change initiatives facing many organizations today. This article describes the historical events at the origin of PM's reorientation, and argues that the discipline should be broadened in order to create greater value for organizations whose portfolios include novel and uncertain projects.

Suggested Citation

  • Sylvain Lenfle & Christoph Loch, 2010. "Lost Roots: How Project Management Came to Emphasize Control Over Flexibility and Novelty," Post-Print hal-00557549, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00557549
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bianchi, Mattia & Marzi, Giacomo & Guerini, Massimiliano, 2020. "Agile, Stage-Gate and their combination: Exploring how they relate to performance in software development," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 538-553.
    2. Christoph H. Loch, 2017. "Creativity and Risk Taking Aren't Rational: Behavioral Operations in MOT," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 26(4), pages 591-604, April.
    3. Thomas Gillier & Sylvain Lenfle, 2015. "Experimenting in the unknown : lessons from the Manhattan project," Working Papers hal-01483018, HAL.
    4. Pascal Le Masson & Armand Hatchuel & Mario Le Glatin & Benoit Weil, 2018. "Designing Decisions In The Unknown: Towards A Generative Decision Model For Management Science," Post-Print hal-01937103, HAL.
    5. Sylvain Lenfle & Pascal Le Masson & Benoit Weil, 2014. "Using design theory to characterize various forms of breakthrough R&D projects and their management: revisiting Manhattan & Polaris," Post-Print hal-01002713, HAL.
    6. Sophie Raedersdorf & Christian Martinez-Diaz, 2018. "Pilotage Des Processus D'Innovation : Etude Exploratoire Des Outils Et Pratiques," Post-Print hal-01907814, HAL.
    7. Thomas Gillier & Sylvain Lenfle, 2015. "Experimenting in the unknown : lessons from the Manhattan project," Working paper serie RMT - Grenoble Ecole de Management hal-01483018, HAL.
    8. Cheryl Gaimon & Janice Carrillo, 2022. "Successful innovation and the alignment of knowledge workers at the executive, management, and technical specialist levels," Production and Operations Management, Production and Operations Management Society, vol. 31(12), pages 4589-4598, December.
    9. Sylvain Lenfle & Christoph Loch, 2017. "Has Megaproject management lost its way ? Lessons from History," Post-Print hal-03640779, HAL.
    10. Stéphanie Tillement & Frédéric Garcias & Guy Minguet & Florence Charue Duboc, 2019. "Disentangling Exploitation and Exploration in Hybrid Projects: The Case of a New Nuclear Reactor Development," Post-Print halshs-02276378, HAL.
    11. Davies, Andrew & Manning, Stephan & Söderlund, Jonas, 2018. "When neighboring disciplines fail to learn from each other: The case of innovation and project management research," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(5), pages 965-979.
    12. Maria Kapsali, 2013. "Equifinality in Project Management Exploring Causal Complexity in Projects," Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(1), pages 2-14, January.
    13. Sylvain Lenfle, 2018. "Projects, Agency and the Multi-Level Perspective: Insights from Numerical Weather Prediction," Post-Print hal-03640771, HAL.
    14. Sylvain Lenfle, 2017. "Projects, Agency and the Multi-Level Perspective," Post-Print hal-01574741, HAL.
    15. Ergo Pikas & Lauri Koskela & Olli Seppänen, 2020. "Improving Building Design Processes and Design Management Practices: A Case Study," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(3), pages 1-18, January.
    16. Cezar-Petre SIMION & Stefan Catalin POPA, 2017. "Evolution Of Research In Project Management. An Analysis Of The Research Results Published In The Period 1999-2017," Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE, Faculty of Management, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania, vol. 11(1), pages 956-964, November.
    17. Lenfle, Sylvain & Söderlund, Jonas, 2022. "Project-oriented agency and regeneration in socio-technical transition: Insights from the case of numerical weather prediction (1978–2015)," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(3).
    18. Andreas Strobl & Jessica Niedermair & Kurt Matzler & Tobias Mussner, 2019. "Triggering Subordinate Innovation Behavior: The Influence Of Leaders’ Dark Personality Traits And Level 5 Leadership Behavior," International Journal of Innovation Management (ijim), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 23(05), pages 1-37, June.
    19. Kasper Edwards & Robert G. Cooper & Tomas Vedsmand & Giulia Nardelli, 2019. "Evaluating the Agile-Stage-Gate Hybrid Model: Experiences From Three SME Manufacturing Firms," International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management (IJITM), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 16(08), pages 1-32, December.
    20. Robert B. Handfield & James Aitken & Neil Turner & Tillmann Boehme & Cecil Bozarth, 2022. "Assessing Adoption Factors for Additive Manufacturing: Insights from Case Studies," Logistics, MDPI, vol. 6(2), pages 1-22, June.
    21. Rebecca Vine, 2020. "Riskwork in the construction of Heathrow Terminal 2," SPRU Working Paper Series 2020-20, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    22. Shankar Sankaran & Mattias Jacobsson & Tomas Blomquist, 2021. "The history and future of projects as a transition innovation: Towards a sustainable project management framework," Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(5), pages 696-714, October.
    23. Hala Alioua & Fanny Simon, 2017. "Managing time pacing in organizations transitioning to a project- based mode – 3 case studies of two multinational companies," Post-Print hal-01597589, HAL.
    24. Pascal Le Masson & Sylvain Lenfle & Benoit Weil, 2013. "Testing whether major innovation capabilities are systemic design capabilities: analyzing rule-renewal design capabilities in a case-control study of historical new business developments," Post-Print hal-00881700, HAL.
    25. Yanwei Li & Araz Taeihagh & Martin de Jong & Andreas Klinke, 2021. "Toward a Commonly Shared Public Policy Perspective for Analyzing Risk Coping Strategies," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(3), pages 519-532, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00557549. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.