Managing the Intangible Aspects of a Project: The Affect of Vision,Artifacts, and Leader Values on Project Spirit and Success in Technology‐Driven Projects

Successful projects are often characterized by a unique spirit. Phase one results, based on 193 employees partaking in 60 projects across organizations, support a model positing that leader building activities affect employees' emotions, attitudes, and behavioral norms that are focused on expected project outcomes, termed project spirit. Spirit affects employees' contextual performance behavior, which in turn affects success as proposed. Phase two cases, designed to ground these results in technology‐driven project contexts, highlight the value of managing the project's intangible aspects captured by spirit. Quantitative and qualitative findings imply that leaders can be coached to execute behaviors that generate a project's spirit, which boosts contextual performance behavior and increases project success.     

Autonomous Teams and New Product Development

An autonomous team is an emerging tool for new product development (NPD). With its high degree of autonomy, independence, leadership, dedication, and collocation, the team has more freedom and stronger capabilities to be innovative and entrepreneurial. Several anecdotal cases suggest that autonomous teams are best when applied to highly uncertain, complex, and innovative projects. However, there is no empirical study to test such a notion. Moreover, autonomous teams are not a panacea, and implementing them can be costly and disruptive to their parent organization. When should this powerful, yet costly tool, be pulled out of the new product professional's toolbox? This paper attempts to answer this question. The objective of this study is to explore under which circumstances an autonomous team is the best choice for NPD. Based on contingency and information‐processing theories, autonomous teams are hypothesized to be more effective to address projects with: (1) high technology novelty and (2) radical innovation. To test these hypotheses, the relative effectiveness of four types of team structures: autonomous, functional, lightweight, and heavyweight are compared. The effectiveness measures include development cost, development speed, and overall product success. Vision clarity, resource availability, and team experience are the controlled variables. The empirical results based on the data from 555 NPD projects generally support the research hypotheses. Relative to other team structures, autonomous teams are more effective in addressing projects with high technology novelty or radical innovation. The results also suggest that heavyweight teams perform better than other teams in developing incremental innovation. These results provide some evidence to support contingency and information‐processing theories at the project level. Given the importance of the development of novel technology and radical innovation in establishing new businesses and other strategic initiatives, the findings of this study may not only have some important implications for NPD practices but may also shed some light on other important topics such as disruptive innovation, strategic innovation, new venture, corporate entrepreneurship, and ambidextrous organization.     

What project strategy really is: The fundamental building block in strategic project management

Strategic project management is gradually becoming a popular and growing trend within the discipline of project management. The general idea is that project management teams must learn how to deal with the business aspects of their projects, as well as better support their company's business strategy and sustainability, rather than just focus on meeting traditional time, budget, and performance goals. Although this approach has been gaining popularity, strategic project management has not yet become an explicit and widely used approach in the practice of project implementation. One of the concepts mentioned as an important element is project strategy; however, no universal framework or even a clear definition of what project strategy is has so far emerged. The goal of this article is to fill in this gap and provide a useful definition and a framework for the further study and implementation of the project strategy concept. Specifically, to achieve this goal, we first look at the origins of strategy in military and business research to discuss the question of what, exactly, project strategy is; we follow this discussion with an explicit definition of a project strategy. We then outline a framework for building a dedicated project strategy document for an individual project, and show how this framework can guide the project planning and execution processes. Using a case study approach, which included an action research phase, we demonstrate how project teams can adopt the strategy concept in a natural way that would lead their project to better business results.