OctoberNovember 2016Volume 47, Number 5 3 From the .docx

October/November 2016
Volume 47, Number 5
3 From the Editor
Hans Georg Gemünden, Dr. rer. oec. habil., Dr. h.c. rer. oec.
et soc., Professor of Project
Management, BI – Norwegian Business School Department of
Leadership & Organization,
Oslo, Norway
PAPERS
6 Project Networks: Governance Choices and Paradoxical
Tensions
Robert DeFillippi and Jörg Sydow
18 Disassembling and Reassembling Project Management
Maturity
Jan Christoph Albrecht and Konrad Spang
36 Practical Application and Empirical Evaluation of Reference
Class Forecasting for
Project Management
Jordy Batselier and Mario Vanhoucke
52 Antecedents of Relationship Conflict in Cross-Functional
Project Teams
Xiaoyan Huo, Lianying Zhang, and Haiyan Guo

70 Closing the Stakeholder Expectation Gap: Managing
Customer Expectations
Toward the Process of Developing Information Systems
Dirk Basten, Georgios Stavrou, and Oleg Pankratz
89 Lessons for IT Project Manager Efficacy: A Review of the
Literature
Associated with Project Success
Chuck Millhollan and Michelle Kaarst-Brown
107 Organizational Design in Public Administration:
Categorization of
Project Management Offices
Monique Aubry and Maude Brunet
130 Calendar of Events
132 Project Management Journal ® Author Guidelines
The Book Review Section can be found online.
Cover to Cover—Book Reviews
Kenneth H. Rose, PMP
T h e P r o f e s s i o n a l R e s e a r c h J o u r n a l o f t h e
P r o j e c t M a n a g e m e n t I n s t i t u t e
101278_PMJ_00_001-001.indd 1 9/8/16 2:07 AM
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101278_PMJ_00_002-002.indd 2 9/7/16 9:52 PM
October/November 2016 ■ Project Management Journal 3
Project Management Journal, Vol. 47, No. 5, 3–5
© 2016 by the Project Management Institute
Published online at www.pmi.org/PMJ
From the Editor
Hans Georg Gemünden, Dr. rer. oec. habil., Dr. h.c. rer. oec. et
soc.,
Professor of Project Management, BI – Norwegian Business
School Department of Leadership & Organization, Oslo,
Norway
Project Networks—An Important—But Still Under-Researched
Topic in
Project Management Research
We are living in an interconnected world and this has clear
implications for project management. A recent trend study
from Schoper, Gemünden, and Nguyen (2016) showed that
experienced practitioners and academic researchers par-
ticipating in this survey expected an increase in globally
dispersed project teams until 2025, using new means for

their virtual communication, and requiring a higher level
of interpersonal and intercultural skills. According to this
study, projects will become even more complex, leading
to a higher level of professionalization of project manage-
ment, an increasing need for better governance of publicly
financed projects, and more project-oriented organizations
with higher levels of individual and organizational project
management competences. The study also indicates that
projects will be assessed as project businesses, which are
done together with other partners in complex business ecol-
ogies, in order to develop and deliver innovative complex
integrated solutions. This means that in an interconnected
world of open innovation, an increasing share of value
creation will be organized in the form of a project network.
Project management research does not yet reflect this
increasing importance of value creation by project networks.
An analysis of the unit of analysis used in project manage-
ment research articles published in the years 2000 through
2011 in the International Journal of Project Management ®
and Project Management Journal ®, by former PhD students
at TU Berlin, Drs. Ekrot, Kock, and Kopmann, and myself
show that there is a trend to analyze project networks more
often. Compared with single projects or the project-oriented
organization, however, the overall share is still very small (see
Table 1). I searched the home pages of both journals for the
years following 2011 and found only eight articles on project
networks in the Project Management Journal ® and 16 in the
International Journal of Project Management ®. This indicates
a further increasing trend, but projects are still seldom con-
ceptualized as networks—despite the fact that not only mega-
projects are offered by large inter-organizational networks.
Rather, the development of mass-customized products and
services occurs also very often in globally cooperating inter-
organizational networks.

These findings indicate a gap between theory and prac-
tice, which leads to a call for a special issue on projects as
networks. This special issue is edited by Robert DeFillippi,
Stephen Pryke, Jörg Sydow, and John Steen. I have also
invited Robert DeFillippi and Jörg Sydow to write an invited
article as a guiding contribution for this special issue.
The article from Robert DeFillippi and Jörg Sydow on
“Project Networks: Governance Choices and Paradoxi-
cal Tensions” is the first article in this issue. It examines
project networks as either a single inter-organizational
project or as a series of projects interconnected by inter-
organizational relationships. In the first case, such a proj-
ect is clearly a temporary organization. In the second case,
which occurs very often in practice, the project is tempo-
rary, but the context of the project is characterized by the
long-term stable business relationships of partners, who
repeatedly do business together, have invested in their
relationships, and have adapted to each other. Therefore,
the authors conceptualize project networks as more than
temporary systems. In the following chapter, the authors
elaborate on some core theoretic assumptions about proj-
ect networks compared with the extant empirical research:
1. No single actor may act as a legitimate authority for the
network as a whole.
2. There are no definite criteria by which the boundary of
the network may be identified and controlled.
3. Each project is temporally limited and dynamically
changing and (partially) reconstructed from one project
to the next.
Next, the article presents four types (the four R’s) of

mechanisms for governing not only projects but also proj-
ect networks: responsibilities, routines, roles, and relation-
ships. Finally, the article unearths five types of paradoxes
(the distance paradox, the learning paradox, the identity
paradox, the difference paradox, and the temporal para-
dox) impacting project networks and offers insights into
the governance-based choices available for coping with
these paradoxical tensions.
Personally, I would add a fifth “R” to the governing mech-
anisms and these are shared resources. Shared resources,
which are only available to (core) members of a project
network, generate a competitive advantage vis-à-vis all the
actors not parts of this network, but they can also create path
dependencies and lock-in effects. In addition, the partners
may decide which resources they want to share, and which
they want to keep exclusively for themselves or for partners
Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com).
DOI: 10.1002/pmj.21383
First, I want to share some very good news with the project
management research community and all our readers inter-
ested in project management research. The deadline for the
submission of papers to the PMI research conference has
been prolongated to 13 January 2014.
The PMI® Research and Education Conference, “Standing
on the Shoulders of Giants: In Search of Theory and
Evidence” will be held on 27–29 July 2014 in Portland,
Oregon, USA.
We welcome conceptual, empirical, or theoretical work

using project, program, or portfolio management as the subject
or context of the research. PMI also solicits papers and sympo-
sia on project management education; doctoral students are
encouraged to submit their work to the pre-conference
doctoral colloquium. For submission guidelines and instruc-
tions, please contact PMI.org/REC2014submit. Conference
registration is scheduled to open March 2014 and details can
be found on PMI.org/REC2014.
The December issue of Project Management Journal® offers
a rich variety of articles, each of which delivers a significant
contribution to theory building in project organizing and new
empirical findings with a high value of theory and practice.
The first paper by Dietrich, Kujala, and Artto addresses a fun-
damental organizational design question in project manage-
ment: How should the interdependencies between different
teams in a multi-team project be managed? There are many
different coordination mechanisms, but each of them has its
advantages and drawbacks and they can be combined in dif-
ferent ways, which differ in terms of coherence and potential
synergies. The organizational design reflections stated in this
article can also be used for the management of programs con-
sisting of an array of different projects or for the management
of a project portfolio in which the management of interdepen-
dencies between projects is also a critical challenge.
The management of interdependencies between proj-
ects is an issue that has been neglected in multi-project
management. Very often the interdependence is restricted
to resource conflicts between projects and the solution is to
identify the bottleneck resources and the projects that con-
flict with one bottleneck resource. The solution to this prob-
lem is often a muddling-through approach that delivers an
immediate solution, yet doesn’t acknowledge that typically
there are too many projects occurring at the same time, and

that an organization usually experiences a number of bottle-
necks simultaneously. This bottleneck obstacle makes it dif-
ficult to assess the consequences of measures that have been
taken to repair an immediate problem—a problem that may
only be a symptom of a much larger and obscure problem.
In addition, there are many kinds of different interdepen-
dencies between projects that have not been addressed sys-
tematically and simultaneously. Markowitz’s pioneering
work showed that the risk of a portfolio of projects can be
reduced if the project portfolio mixture combines projects,
which in sum show a smaller covariance of cash-flow. Thus,
managing risk interdependencies between financial invest-
ments, which could have been projects, in such a way that
the overall risk of a portfolio of financial investments, which
could have been projects, is reduced, has been an essential
element of designing portfolios since long.
Organizational design theory made the claim that the
kinds of interdependencies matter; in other words, for
pooled, sequential, or reciprocal interdependencies, differ-
ent kinds of organizational coordination instruments—or
more precisely, different kinds of coherent mixes of coordina-
tion instruments—should be used. Regarding project portfo-
lio management, pooled interdependencies among scarce
(human) resources during the development stage of a new
product, process, or service, have been the focus of interest.
But pooled interdependencies are not restricted to human
resources in the development process or to financial
resources in a more aggregated view. If potential users of a
project can only cope with a limited amount of new products
or product releases that are delivered to them, this creates a
new, thus far, often neglected type of bottleneck. The ability
and willingness of users or intermediaries may also create
bottlenecks and thus “pooled” interdependencies. Transfer
prices or prioritization systems have been proposed to solve

the internal resource coordination problem, but do they also
apply to the customer acceptance bottleneck problem?
Taking a marketing perspective or a purchasing perspective,
additional interdependence aspects have to be considered.
If two projects share the same customer as a recipient, or the
same supplier as a source, then these two projects need to be
coordinated. (This may pertain to the following questions:
When should which project be done? What should it deliver
to other projects serving the same client?) Or: Do resource
From the Editor
Hans Georg Gemünden, Dr. rer. oec. habil., Chair for
Technology and
Innovation Management, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin,
Germany
Photo credit: Markus Bullick
2 December 2013 ■ Project Management Journal ■ DOI:
10.1002/pmj
Photo credit: Markus Bullick
101278_PMJ_00_003-005.indd 3 9/8/16 11:21 PM
From the Editor: Project Networks—An Important—But Still
Under-Researched Topic
4 October/November 2016 ■ Project Management Journal
in other inter-organizational (project) networks. In the context
of open source development projects selective revealing of
strategic information has become a very intensively discussed
behavior—why not also in project networks in general?

However, this article is not the end of our discourse;
rather it is intended to open it. I recommend this very insight-
fully written article to all our readers and also to all authors
writing on projects as networks. The editor of this article was
Hans Georg Gemünden.
The next contribution is by Jan Christoph Albrecht and
Konrad Spang: “Disassembling and Reassembling Project
Management Maturity.” The concept of “maturity” is an
important one for many organizations that wish to benchmark
their use of project management approaches, which is often
motivated by the search for continual improvement and for
reassurance of internal progress through external verification.
In order for academic research to be helpful in providing those
in practice with reliable and helpful knowledge regarding this
area of concern, it is critical to ensure that our understand-
ing of the domain and its terminology are clear so that our
accumulation of knowledge is also clear in terms of its appli-
cation. In this article, Albrecht and Spang provide a detailed
examination of two separate but interconnected dimensions
of maturity as a broad concept. The authors focus on the
relative scarcity of knowledge about one of these dimensions,
strategic project management infrastructure, and stress the
importance of the role of project management within the
organization. This approach suggests that rather than being
a universal standard, maturity may be regarded as having
varied components or stages based on the varied approaches
to project management within the firm. The implication is
that industries or firms where project orientation is cen-
tral—perhaps the film and construction industries—maturity
may have a different look and feel relative to those in which
projects are more incremental—perhaps healthcare and man-
ufacturing. In any event, the article produces interesting
observations regarding how we look at maturity and what the
possibilities are for more thoroughly engaging with the con-

cept. The editor of this article was Fred Niederman.
The third article by Jordy Batselier and Mario Vanhoucke:
“Practical Application and Empirical Evaluation of Refer-
ence Class Forecasting for Project Management,” addresses
the estimation of project cost and duration, which is a persis-
tent challenge in project management. It has been highlighted
in the megaproject context by Flyvbjerg (2006, 2007, 2014),
who also recommends reference class forecasting as a way of
circumventing many of the decision biases in these large proj-
ects. This article is a contribution that lends further support
to the use of reference class forecasting (RCF) by comparing
this technique with other cost and time estimation methods.
RCF uses results from similar projects to estimate time and
costs rather than the more optimistic assumptions that can be
present in traditional project plans. The authors compare RCF
with other estimation techniques, such as Monte Carlo simu-
lation and earned value management, using real project data
for the key project performance dimensions of time and costs.
While earned value management (EVM) is different from RCF
in its use for controlling the project during delivery rather
than forecasting, the authors use RCF as a baseline and then
the final outcome can be compared with EVM. A Monte Carlo
simulation of various outcomes from different components
of the project can also produce a forecast range if the risks of
each component are also known. The context of the compari-
son is a real-life construction project in an office building and
the authors have compiled a reference class from previously
completed projects. From the results comparing RCF with
EVM and the Monte Carlo simulation, the authors conclude
that RCF indeed provides the most accurate forecast of project
performance. The editor of this article was John Steen.
The fourth article in this issue by Xiaoyan Huo, Liany-
ing Zhang, and Haiyan Guo on “Antecedents of Relation-
ship Conflict in Cross-Functional Project Teams” provides

an ambitious theoretical framework and its empirical test.
Relationship conflict is a pervasive phenomenon in cross-
functional project teams. Although previous studies have
demonstrated the dysfunctional effect of relationship conflict,
the direct drivers of relationship conflict in cross-functional
project teams remain unclear. To address this gap, a literature
Years 2000–2002 2003–2005 2006–2008 2009–2011
Unit of Analysis n % n % n % n %
Single Project 168 78.50% 161 68.22% 226 72.44% 194 62.18%
Program 9 4.21% 11 4.66% 17 5.45% 23 7.37%
Portfolio 3 1.40% 7 2.97% 9 2.88% 7 2.24%
Project-Oriented Organization 32 14.95% 53 22.46% 54
17.31% 77 24.68%
Project-Network 2 0.93% 4 1.69% 6 1.92% 11 3.53%
Total 214 100% 236 100% 312 100% 312 100%
Table 1: Development of the units-of-analysis in articles
published in the Project Management Journal® and International
Journal of Project
Management® in 2000–2011.
101278_PMJ_00_003-005.indd 4 9/8/16 11:21 PM
review and an advisory group discussion were performed to
identify the antecedents of the relationship conflict frame-

work. Afterward, the structural equation model (SEM) was
used to confirm the influence of such antecedents on rela-
tionship conflict. Intrapersonal diversity, uncertain project
tasks, organizational culture diversity, and inappropriate
behavior positively influence relationship conflict. These
findings help researchers better understand the drivers of
relationship conflict.
This article is not only of interest for the project manage-
ment research community, it is also highly relevant for the
innovation management research community and the team
research community. It has been expected that an increasing
cultural and cognitive diversity of a team provides more oppor-
tunities for higher creativity and global diffusion of a product
or service. Increasing diversity, however, does not only lead to
task conflicts, which may act as creative tensions, overcom-
ing functional fixations, and opening new ways of thinking;
task conflicts also pose higher challenges and require a more
cooperative and resilient team. The typical observation is that
task conflicts may drive relationship conflicts, which escalate
and cannot be regulated anymore; therefore insights into the
drivers of relationship conflicts are very important for finding
remedies to prevent or stop such escalation spirals. The editor
of this article was Hans Georg Gemünden.
Dirk Basten, Georgios Stavrou, and Oleg Pankratz inves-
tigate the following theme: “Closing the Stakeholder Expec-
tation Gap: Managing Customer Expectations Toward the
Process of Developing Information Systems.” Whereas
expectations concerning both process and product are essen-
tial for information system development (ISD) project suc-
cess, research has focused on end-user expectations toward
the product. Based on semi-structured interviews, we shed
light on the relevance of process expectations for customer
satisfaction in ISD projects, concrete customer expectations
toward the process, and approaches to managing these expec-

tations. Our study provides means to managing customer
expectations, thus increasing the likelihood of customer satis-
faction. The editor of this article was Hans Georg Gemünden.
The sixth article in this issue by Chuck Millhollan and
Michelle Kaarst-Brown provides “Lessons for IT Project
Manager Efficacy: A Review of the Literature Associated
with Project Success.” The authors state that overall proj-
ect success requires that project managers develop not only
project management skills, but also project success skills.
The article points out that even if one manages the project
successfully, the project can still fail, for example, because
of misalignment with organizational strategy or poor stake-
holder representation. Project managers need to develop a
range of skills outside those proposed in the project manage-
ment literature. Indeed, because we ignore these other skills,
there is often no difference in performance between Project
Management Professional (PMP)® and non-PMP® certified
managers. The article proposes a project manager needs
seven classes of skills:
1. Project management skills (hard skills; temporal)
2. Business and management skills (hard skills; perhaps soft
skills; temporal)
3. Knowledge of the project technical disciplines (hard skills)
4. Interpersonal skills (soft skills; stakeholders’ influences;
temporal)
5. Managing the project sponsor (soft skills; stakeholder
influences)
6. Situational awareness (soft skills; stakeholder influences;
temporal)

7. Integration management, or integrating the previous skills
and knowledge (soft skills; temporal)
This is an insightful literature analysis, which deserves
further discussion and reflection. The editor of this article was
Cecil Eng Huang Chua.
The last article is by Monique Aubry and Maude Brunet
on “Organizational Design in Public Administration: Cat-
egorization of Project Management Offices.”
This article aims to enlighten the organizational process
involved in managing multiple concurrent projects within
the public sector and associated with organizational design.
Public administration is not a monolithic entity; rather it com-
prises a collection of multiple organizations that differ in sta-
tus, some of them being departments, others being agencies.
Following this, the article proposes an empirical categoriza-
tion of PMOs based on four types of projects, based on a sur-
vey of 114 entities belonging to 42 departments and agencies
within a single public administration. This article contributes
to the relevance of organizational design within the project
management field. The editor of this article was Ralf Müller.
References
Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). From Nobel Prize to project management:
Getting risks right. Project Management Journal, 37(3), 5–15.
Flyvbjerg, B. (2007). Eliminating bias in early project
development through reference class forecasting and good
governance. In K. J. Sunnevåg (Ed.), Decisions based on weak
information: Approaches and challenges in the early phase of
projects (pp. 90–110). Trondheim, Norway: Concept Program,
The Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Flyvbjerg, B. (2014). What you should know about
megaprojects
and why: An overview. Project Management Journal, 45(2), 5–
19.
Schoper, Y., Gemünden, H. G., & Nguyen, N. N. (2016):
Fifteen future trends for project management in 2025. In:
Hans Knoepfel and Jesus Martinez-Almela (Eds.). Future
trends in project, programme and portfolio management 2016.
Proceedings of the International IPMA Expert Seminar in
Zurich, February 18–19, 2016, pp. 23–43.
101278_PMJ_00_003-005.indd 5 9/8/16 11:21 PM
P
A
P
E
R
S
IntroductIon
P
rojects matter for organizations, even whole industries or
regions.
Not only are many products and services developed, produced,
and
marketed with the help of this form of “temporary organization”
(Lundin & Söderholm, 1995), but processes within or across

organizations are generated or changed within projects. What is
more,
projects are central to quite a number of firms, in particular so-
called
“project-based organizations” (Hobday, 2000) and they are
characteristic
of those industries and/or regions in which “project business”
(Artto &
Wikström, 2005) dominates. Examples of project-based
organizations include
general contractors, television production firms, as well as
advertising and
event agencies; the industries and/or regions in which these
organizations
are embedded and operate are correctly conceived as “project
ecologies”
(Grabher, 2004).
Projects, however, are not only embedded in organizations,
industries,
and regions but also in networks of interorganizational
relationships. If this is
the case, the notions of “project coalitions” (Pryke, 2004) or
“project alliances”
(Abrahams & Cullen, 1998; Clegg, Pistis, Rura-Polley, &
Marosszeky, 2002;
Kwok & Hampson, 1996) have gained some prominence in the
literature. This
is, however, particularly true for the notion of “project
networks,” although
its meaning is often not quite clear. Even worse, at least two
different, though
legitimate, understandings can be distinguished: (1) a single
interorganiza-
tional project (Hellgren & Stjernberg, 1995), and (2) a series of

projects that
are interconnected by interorganizational relationships (Sydow
& Windeler,
1999) that enable and constrain the management of projects.
In what follows, both types of project networks as forms of
temporary
organizing will be explained in more detail and illustrated using
empirical
insights from a variety of industries. Then, we will explore how
projects and,
in particular, these two types of project networks are governed.
We will high-
light four R’s as mechanisms for governing and coordinating
not only projects
but also project networks: responsibilities, routines, roles, and
relationships.
We will conclude by unearthing the tensions and contradictions
and even
the paradoxes that management has to deal with when project
management
implies also managing interorganizational relations and
networks.
Project Networks as (More Than) Temporary Systems
Hellgren and Stjernberg (1995) define project networks in terms
of three com-
ponent characteristics: (1) a set of relations, where no single
actor may act as a
legitimate authority for the network as a whole; (2) a situation
where the net-
work is open in the sense that there are no definite criteria by
which the bound-
ary of the network may be identified and controlled; and (3) an
environment
where the network is temporally limited, dynamically changing,

and (partially)
reconstructed from one project to the next. These authors, not
unlike Jones
and Lichtenstein (2008), focus mainly on a single inter
organizational project
Project Networks: Governance Choices
and Paradoxical Tensions
Robert DeFillippi, Sawyer Business School, Suffolk University,
Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Jörg Sydow, School of Business & Economics, Freie Universität
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
This article examines how project net-
works may be viewed as either a single
interorganizational project or as a series of
projects that are interconnected by interor-
ganizational relationships. The article then
discusses some core theoretic assumptions
about project networks as more than tempo-
rary systems in comparison with the extant
empirical research. Next, the article presents
four types of mechanisms for governing
and coordinating not only projects but also
project networks: responsibilities, routines,

roles, and relationships. Finally, the article
unearths five types of paradoxes (the dis-
tance paradox, the learning paradox, the
identity paradox, the difference paradox,
and the temporal paradox) impacting proj-
ect networks and offers insights into the
governance-based choices available for cop-
ing with these paradoxical tensions.
KEYWORDS: project; project-based
organization; project network; governance;
tensions; paradox.
ABStrAct ■
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 6 9/8/16 2:09 AM

actors (principal contractor or client
as lead organization and subcontrac-
tors) and how this disconnect can fil-
ter down to the operational interactions
impacting the relationships between the
(temporary) project (often team) enti-
ties created by each permanent prin-
cipal in the project. These disconnects
can become irreconcilable and result in
project termination, as illustrated in Van
Marrewijk and colleagues’ (2016) case
study of the Panama Canal megaproject.
Characteristic 2: There are no definite
criteria by which the boundary of
the network may be identified and
controlled.
The blurring of network boundaries in
general and project network boundar-
ies in particular is widely observed. One
reason is that project membership may
be less than definitive. What is more,
membership is dynamic and may vary,
as in sequential projects where a set
of actors in rather stable constellations
coordinates the production of a series
of projects. Here, specific participants
may vary from project to project while
the project principals may be more per-
manent. This ambiguity of boundaries
is well documented in a series of studies
by Sydow and colleagues on German
television production (Manning, 2008;
Manning & Sydow, 2011; Sydow, 2009;
Sydow & Windeler, 1999; Windeler &

Sydow, 2001). Their research suggests
that the single project as a temporary
organization is, in this industry at least,
embedded in a more durable network of
relations between permanent organiza-
tions and institutions that work on mul-
tiple projects over time. The more this is
the case, however, the clearer the bound-
aries of a project network, even over
time. Even if one avoids hastily classify-
ing some parts of these systems—prefer-
ably at the periphery of the network—as
“market-organized projects” (Lorenzen &
Frederiksen, 2005), certainly not all rela-
tionships should be tagged as having a
collaborative, reciprocal quality—which
is a defining characteristic of networks
as a form of governance (Powell, 1990).
of authority and typically require the
coordination of diverse sets of actors
and relationships. Hence, it comes as no
surprise that the governance of such net-
works may vary profoundly. As for any
network, authority to coordinate may be
organized in at least three forms (Provan
& Kenis, 2008): (1) Network governance
can be shared among the participat-
ing members, (2) a lead organization
may govern the network, or (3) a net-
work administrative organization (NAO)
may govern the network (an NAO is a
dedicated organization responsible for
coordinating the network or at least sup-
porting such processes). The effective-
ness of each of these three governance

modes hinges on particular boundary
conditions that, according to Provan and
Kenis (2008), include the level of trust,
the number of participants, the degree of
goal consensus, and to what extent there
is a need for network-level competencies.
To give just one example, shared network
governance seems to require more goal
consensus and trust and, thus, may be
suitable only for networks of smaller size.
All three forms of governance may also be
used in project networks, including what
Hellgren and Stjernberg (1995) exclude:
a lead organization. This form, like the
NAO, seems to be particularly appro-
priate, perhaps even indispensable, for
larger and dynamic (project) networks
in which shared governance, not least
because of a lack of goal consensus and
trust, may be difficult to establish.
There is abundant evidence of not
only the lead organization mode in proj-
ect networks (e.g. Manning & Sydow,
2011; Sydow & Windeler, 1999) but also
of governance failures in coordinat-
ing project networks. For example, Van
Marrewijk and his research colleagues
(2016) observed the critical importance
of agreements about responsibilities
and roles made in the tender phase of an
interorganizational project being clearly
communicated to the project employees
of both the contractor and client organi-
zation during the execution phase. Their
research documents the disconnect that

can occur between the more permanent
as a temporary system—and the tempo-
rary network of relationships that sup-
ports project coordination.
This focus on single projects and
internal relationships is perfectly legiti-
mate, not least as a unit of analysis
considered at one point in time. For
that reason, researchers talk of “project
governance” (Ahola, Russka, Artto, &
Kujula, 2014; Müller, 2009) and highlight
governance mechanisms at work on the
level of single projects in order to ensure
a predictable delivery of projects in time,
quality, and cost. However, most proj-
ects are embedded either in organiza-
tions or in interorganizational networks
so that they are surrounded by corpo-
rate governance or network governance,
respectively, and in many cases even by
both. The project business perspective
takes this into account by focusing on
“the part of business that relates directly
or indirectly to projects, with a purpose
to achieve objectives of a firm or several
firms” (Artto & Wikström, 2005, p. 351).
Many projects have a predecessor as
well as a successor of some kind (Davies,
Dodgson, & Gann, 2016). More than a
general sense that “history matters”
(Engwall, 2003), this kind of temporal
embeddedness is particularly obvious if
projects are part of a series (Manning &

Sydow, 2011), a lineage (Midler, 2013),
or even an entire program (Artto, Mar-
tinsuo, Gemünden, & Murtoaro, 2009).
In consequence, project networks more
often than not are likely to be more than
mere temporary systems. In this respect,
they emulate project-based organiza-
tions (Hobday, 2000; Lundin et al., 2015).
With regard to the three characteristics
highlighted by Hellgren and Stjernberg
(1995), empirical evidence seems some-
what to contradict this characteristic of
strict temporariness.
Characteristic 1: No single actor may
act as a legitimate authority for the
network as a whole.
Project networks are complicated as
authority structures because they are
not only dynamic but polycentric; in
other words, they have several centers
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 7 9/8/16 2:09 AM
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of project-based organizing in cre-
ative industries (DeFillippi, 2015) but
deemed to be useful also in other proj-
ect ecologies, including construction
and science-based industries. Although
we do not claim that these four R’s cover
all dimensions of project and project
network governance, they are certainly
the more important ones. What is
more, these mechanisms interact and
serve the purpose of governance to be
practiced—governing (Pitsis, Sankaran,
Gudergan, & Clegg, 2014).
Given the fact that many project
networks, as laid out above, should
be conceived as more than temporary
systems, all four governance mecha-
nisms are relevant on two levels: the
focal project and the broader network
in which this temporary form of organi-
zation is embedded (see Table 1), con-
tributing to outcomes on both levels in
terms of project and network efficiency
and effectiveness. Interestingly, proj-
ect governance is often discussed with
relation to corporate governance (Joslin
& Müller, 2016; Müller, 2009), neglect-
ing the fact that projects may not only
put in place to regulate exchange, mini-

mize exposure to opportunism, protect
transaction-specific investments, and
promote the continuance of relation-
ships (Jap & Ganesan, 2000; Jones, Hes-
terly, & Borgatti, 1997). Olsen, Haugland,
Karlsen, and Husøy (2005) described the
use of contracts, relational norms, and
administrative controls as governance
mechanisms for handling complex pro-
curements involving several actors. Their
work highlighted the importance of the
interplay among more than one gover-
nance mechanisms.
Such mechanisms, potentially at
work also in project networks as (more
than) temporary systems, may be use-
fully summarized under a “four R’s”
classification: responsibilities, routines,
roles, and relations. In terms of gover-
nance, responsibilities represent more
contract-based governance, whereas
routines and roles reflect administrative
controls, and relationships represent
social modes of governance. Previously,
the second through fourth R’s of this
classification had been conceptual-
ized and applied to the examination
Characteristic 3: Each project is
temporally limited and dynamically
changing and (partially) reconstructed
from one project to the next.
If anything, temporariness is the defining
feature of projects or temporary organi-

zations (Bakker, 2010; Lundin & Söder-
holm, 1995). At the same time, it has
been observed that no project is an island
(Burke & Morley, 2016; Engwall, 2003;
Lundin et al., 2015). History matters and
many single projects seem to be embed-
ded in either project-based organizations
or project networks, as outlined above.
In addition, both such organizations
and interorganizational networks are
embedded within broader institutional
fields (Windeler & Sydow, 2001) or proj-
ect ecologies (Grabher, 2004). Finally,
in the shadow of past project engage-
ment and anticipation of future project
opportunities, managing a focal project
is very different from the idea of manag-
ing an isolated project as an outcome of
temporary organizing. To capture these
particularities, we can only underline
the value of Hellgren and Stjernberg’s
(1995) third characteristic, that projects
are “(partially) reconstructed from one
project to the next (p. 381).”
A recent case study of Dutch film-
making illustrated how a movie produc-
er’s specific sponsorship of sequential
projects affects the permanent and tem-
porary organization’s connectedness
and project outcomes. This research by
Stjerne and Svejenova (2016) suggests
that the shadows of the past and future
experienced in earlier projects in the
sequel sequence indeed impacted the
tensions, boundary work, and bound-

ary roles created in subsequent sequel
projects to address these tensions.
Project and Project Network
Governance—Governing by
Four R’s
Projects and project networks, depending
among others on the above-differentiated
governance modes, utilize a variety of
mechanisms to coordinate their work.
More generally, governance mecha-
nisms are safeguards that organizations
Level of Analysis Focal Project Project Network
Network emphasis Internal network of relationships External
network of relationships in
which projects are embedded
Governance types Project governance: (1) shared,
(2) project manager, (3) PMO
Network governance: (1) shared,
(2) lead organization, (3) NAO
Governance
mechanisms
Dominantly designed and
formal, but increasingly reflexive
with regard to unintended
consequences
Dominantly emergent and informal,
despite increased reflexivity

- Responsibilities Project responsibilities Network
responsibilities
- Routines Project routines Interorganizational routines
- Roles Project roles, including project
manager
Roles in the network, including lead
organization
- Relations Within project, relations are
temporary
Across project relations more than
temporary
Governance outcome Project success, often measured
in terms of efficiency and
effectiveness (i.e., with regard to
quality, time, and cost)
Project network success, to be
measured in number of projects
“successfully” completed, but
also in terms of broader network
effectiveness
Table 1: Project governance and project network governance.
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 8 9/8/16 2:09 AM

tion of outliers that require more urgent
and closer attention by personnel whose
roles mandate their attention to par-
ticular areas of project performance and
associated project activity. Like respon-
sibilities, within-project routines can be
distinguished from across-project rou-
tines situated in the project network.
Again, we argue that the former may be
more deliberate, and the latter of a more
emergent nature. However, coordination
of project networks—not unlike supply
chains or networks—may require more
managerial attention to interorganiza-
tional routines (Zollo, Reuer, & Singh,
2002) on the network level.
The importance of repeated collab-
orative experiences on this level of anal-
ysis upon choice of governance modes
is borne out in several studies. Davies
and Brady (2000) develop the concept
of economies of repetition to show that
project-based organizations can offer
“repeatable solutions by recycling expe-
rience from one project for others in the
same line of business” (Davies & Brady,
2000, p. 932). Crucial to the achievement
of economies of repetition is the very
development of routines, which may—
as interorganizational routines—also be
in effect in project networks. Once hav-
ing undertaken a one-off project, the
same participants are involved in suc-
cessive ones of the same type in order to
consolidate routines, which they adapt

according to the contingencies of each
project (D’Andrea, 2014). García-Canal,
Valdés-Llaneza, and Sánchez-Lorda
(2014) argue that when developing new
collaborative projects with the same
partner, firms tend to repeat the same
contractual form used in previous proj-
ects to take advantage of the governance
routines developed in the past. Support
for their predictions is provided by an
analysis of a sample of technology alli-
ances carried out by European firms. We
assume that the inclination toward rep-
etition is not restricted to formal con-
tracts but includes informal routines as
well, in particular if project networks
are composed of project participants
from previous collaborative projects.
instance, of the production of a series
or a portfolio of projects to be man-
aged with regard to cross-project rela-
tionships. From the music industry,
typically clustered in major cities, it is
well known that the “majors” use con-
tracts to coordinate projects (Lorenzen
& Frederiksen, 2005).
Though not focusing on projects,
Huang, Cheng, and Tseng (2014) exam-
ined the influence of formal, contract-
based controls and social controls (e.g.,
relationship-based governance) upon
the buyer–supplier cooperative perfor-
mance in supply chains. Empirical evi-
dence obtained via a mail survey from

106 firms participating in the Taiwanese
“Center Satellite Production System”
indicates that (1) there is an inverted
U-shaped relationship between formal
control and cooperative performance;
(2) social control has a consistent posi-
tive effect on cooperative performance;
and (3) the joint use of formal control
and social control could enhance coop-
erative performance in supply chains,
but only in cases with moderate usage
of formal control. Otherwise, social
control becomes a supportive factor
that repairs cooperative performance
damage from overwhelmingly applied
formal control. This finding also makes
sense for projects and project networks;
in other words, we would expect that
contractual governance is more effec-
tive if used in moderation and com-
plemented by more relationship-based
modes of governance.
Routines are repetitive patterns of
interdependent actions (Parmigiani &
Howard-Grenville, 2011). In projects,
routines are often supported by shared
artifacts (including information sys-
tems) and typically reflect established
cycles of project work activities and their
monitoring. These routines define the
expected work flow and the milestones
for evaluating project progress. Routines
serve as a complement to responsibilities
insofar as many of the project manage-
ment routines facilitate the monitoring

of project progress in meeting perfor-
mance requirements and the identifica-
be embedded in corporations, but also
in other types of organizations (project-
based or not) and even in interorganiza-
tional networks or fields.
On the level of the focal project,
responsibilities refer to the requirements
or deliverables expected of all project
participants and their liability for failing
to fulfill these responsibilities, which
encompass the four T’s of temporary
systems associated with project-based
organizing: to manage a specific sets of
tasks that are time-limited, and typically
performed by a semi-temporary collec-
tion or team of individuals with differ-
ent expertise who collectively enable
the sponsoring or host organization
to transition from one state of perfor-
mance and capability to a new state
(Bakker, 2010; Lundin & Söderholm,
1995). More often than not, the respon-
sibility for project outcome, in other
words, predictable delivery of projects
in time, quality, and cost, is allocated
to a project manager, sometimes sup-
ported by a project management office
(PMO), typically installed in organiza-
tions that run portfolios of projects in
order to standardize project manage-
ment and enhance across-project learn-
ing (Hobbs, Aubry, & Thullier, 2008;
Narayanan & DeFillippi, 2012). Only in

rare cases is this responsibility shared
among project members.
Though for any single project Lun-
din and Söderholm’s (1995) four T’s
result from more or less intentional
decisions or design choices, the same
four T’s can be identified on the net-
work level as well for clarifying respon-
sibilities. However, despite increasing
attempts that Sydow and colleagues
have observed in the television indus-
try to coordinate activities more reflex-
ively also on this level (Manning &
Sydow, 2011; Sydow & Windeler, 1999),
the whole network of relationships
is—not least because of its complexity
and dynamics—more of an emergent
nature (Mintzberg & McHugh, 1985).
Nevertheless, contracts regulating
responsibilities are likely to play a role
on the network level as well. Think, for
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 9 9/8/16 2:09 AM
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previously codified skills. Coordination
of tasks and skills is more complex in
these kinds of project-based organiza-
tions, but their greater organizational
flexibility enables them to change work
processes (routines) more readily. In
consequence, we expect project net-
works to employ standardized, separate,
and stable roles on projects that require
stable and standardized requirements for
each project network engagement. By
contrast, project networks are likely to
employ more idiosyncratic roles on proj-
ects that require unique requirements for
each project network engagement.
Relations refer to specific qualities of
the interactions among participants in
project work. Powell (1990) argues that
network forms of organizing are distinc-
tive from both market (contractual) and
hierarchical (administrative) forms of
governing economic activity, as they are
based on trust, reciprocity, and open-
endedness. Further examination of net-
work forms of organizing projects has
emphasized the relational as well as the
structural embeddedness of economic
activity involving network participants
(Jones et al., 1997; Jones & Lichtenstein,
2008). Relational embeddedness refers

to how focal dyadic (interpersonal or
interorganizational) relationships and
their qualities, histories, and devel-
opmental processes affect economic
behaviors and outcomes. The structural
aspect of embeddedness emphasizes
the relevance and impact of the larger
ongoing network of relationships—its
density or centrality, for instance—in
which economic action occurs and
develops and the dyads are themselves
embedded. Capaldo (2014) concludes
that simultaneous consideration of
structural and relational embedded-
ness can enrich our understanding of
network-based forms of organization
and their impact on outcomes, specifi-
cally of interorganizational cooperation.
Qualities of relationships often
include trust and reciprocity, as illus-
trated in Swärd’s (2016) longitudinal
case study of a three-year construction
project. Jones and Lichtenstein (2008)
organizations (Gemünden, Salomo, &
Hölzle, 2007). Turner and Keegan (2001)
suggest two specific interface roles, the
broker and the steward, which should
be of particular importance not only in
projects but also in project networks.
The broker is responsible for the rela-
tionship with the external project cli-
ent, whereas the steward focuses on the
relationship between the parent orga-
nization and the project team. These

roles may be generically defined by
project contracts, but the specific types
of relationships enjoyed by various role
participants are more likely to emerge
during the course of the project, in other
words, to result not simply from passive
role-taking but also active role-making
(Graen, 1976). In project networks, tak-
ing and making the broker role seems
particularly important, to connect the
project not only to the project client but
also to other external project partners.
In television production, the client,
the producer, and the director—all of
whom are involved in brokering of some
kind—are very likely to form the stable
core that coordinates project networks
(Manning & Sydow, 2011).
Whitley (2006) distinguishes between
those project-based organizations that
expect project participants to utilize
standardized, separate, and stable roles
and skills versus those that require
project participants to utilize change-
able roles and skills. Stable and sepa-
rate roles are most likely to be found in
craft-dominated sectors (e.g., filmmaking
and video games) where roles are skill
based, craft standardized, and remain
stable over a succession of projects for
various project participants, who can
move quickly from project to project and
join new project teams with their roles
predefined by their skill specialization
and function (Bechky, 2006). By contrast,

in some project-based organizations,
such as those in the Munich enterprise
software industry (Grabher, 2004; Ibert,
2004), workers adopt different roles over
the course of projects and in different
project teams, and the division of labor
is not so strongly structured around
Drawing primarily on the televi-
sion industry, where the tendency to
repeat past project collaborations is
significant, Sydow (2009) argues that
the repetitive patterns and practices
surviving beyond single projects may
become project network routines. These
routines may even become industry
practices when they are repeated in
different project networks. One risk of
such project network routines is that
they may lead to path dependence or
even “lock-in” where these systems find
it difficult to depart from previously
employed routines even when specific
project circumstances might call for a
more flexible modification of previous
project network practices. The lock-in
problem of project network routines
has particular implications for the rela-
tionship between project network rou-
tines and innovation. We expect that
project network routines are positively
associated with performance on proj-
ects that have similar requirements to
projects that previously utilized these
project network partners. By contrast,
we expect project network routines to

be negatively associated with perfor-
mance on projects that have unique
requirements not previously experi-
enced by project network participants.
Finally, the usefulness of routines may
also depend on the innovativeness of
the task. For very innovative tasks, more
flexible, informal coordination (infor-
mal roles and relationships) may be a
better mechanism to support project
progress than routines.
Roles refer to the various authority
assignments for each party to a proj-
ect contract, and these roles typically
include hierarchical authority lines
as well as expected lines of commu-
nications among project participants
occupying specified project roles. Pre-
sumably there is an expectation that
authority assignments are matched to
responsibility assignments for each
project participant. This expectation
may even be valid for innovator roles
that are not only particularly dynamic
but characteristic of many project-based
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 10 9/8/16 2:09 AM
Sometimes project networks can
anticipate the likelihood of needing
new sources of expertise in a complex

project by including representatives
with diverse previous project experi-
ences and expertise. This intentional
injection of diversity and novelty into
a project network comes with the risk
that the new project partners may lack
the past experience of working with
its other partners who share common
past project engagements. As a result,
the challenge becomes one of integrat-
ing new project partners into a project
network where other project network
partners have past project experi-
ence that shapes their expectations for
their respective project relationships.
Such relationships, characterized by
trust and reciprocity, must be earned,
whereas project responsibilities, roles,
and routines are more an artifact of
industry- or region-wide project norms
and historical practice.
Paradoxical Tensions in Project
Networks
Project networks are subject to a
variety of tensions whose resolution
or even mitigation poses problematic
dilemmas for the participating indi-
viduals or organizations (DeFillippi,
Grabher, & Jones, 2007). These ten-
sions are referred to as paradoxical
insofar as they typically resist simple
binary choices among alternatives for
their management (Lewis, 2000). A
recent review of the paradox literature
describes paradoxes as persistent con-

tradictions between interdependent
elements (Schad, Lewis, Raisch, &
Smith, 2016). Our discussion will exam-
ine a set of tensions and contradictions
between interdependent elements in
project networks and note the implica-
tions of these paradoxes for project net-
work governance. In more detail, we will
present the distance paradox, the learn-
ing paradox, the identity paradox, the
difference paradox, and the temporal
paradox. All five paradoxes—and others
(cf. with regard to interorganizational
relationships more generally, Sydow,
in some fields or ecologies but not in
others (cf. Lundin et al., 2015). In both
cases, context enables and constrains
project network organizing. Moreover,
the complexity of working in project
networks means that contract-based
project responsibilities may need to be
revisited during the course of project
work, more often than not relating to
past experiences and/or future expecta-
tions. Previous research has indicated
how project responsibilities in the con-
tract may be contradicted by operational
responsibilities assumed by the tempo-
rary project network organization as a
result of the legacy of responsibilities
assumed in previous project engage-
ments (Van Marewijk et al., 2016).
The uncertainties of complex proj-
ect work may induce unexpected proj-

ect changes and a search for innovative
solutions to these uncertainties, which
may be exogenous and/or endogenous
to the project network. As a result, proj-
ect participants may be compelled to
make real-time adaptations to their
original expectations for project respon-
sibilities, roles, routines, and relation-
ships for working with one another. It
is during these periods of crisis, uncer-
tainty, and innovative challenge that the
quality of the contractual relationships
among project participants is tested and
becomes—or fails to become—the rela-
tional governance mechanism for cop-
ing with these uncertainties (Macneil,
1974). In these situations, the “required”
trust must be swift (Meyerson, Weick, &
Kramer, 1996), but must also be nur-
tured during a complex project, or even
a series of projects, by large and small
actions that signal reciprocal commit-
ment to the project and the basis for
making larger trust-based actions that
may not have been anticipated ex ante
in the project contract (Swärd, 2016).
Recent work has examined the multidi-
mensionality of trust, and such concep-
tual development should contribute to
more nuanced applications in examin-
ing trust-based governance of project
network relations (Shazi, Gillespie, &
Steen, 2015).
propose that trust evolves out of prior
relations that reduce transactional

uncertainty and increase the shared
understanding needed for effective
coordination. Ebers and Maurer (2016)
have empirically tested and modeled
how prior relationships by project part-
ners and relationship-specific invest-
ments by these partners can overcome
recent project collaboration disappoint-
ments and provide the trust for these
partners to renew their collaborations
on future projects. However, such proj-
ect commitments are not absolute. The
availability of alternative potential part-
ners whose expertise better fits new
collaborative project requirements can
lead to such new partners joining col-
laborations.
Network analysis of the structural
embeddedness among project network
participants offers additional insights
into the importance of these charac-
teristics on project performance. For
example, Sedita and Apa (2015) inves-
tigated how a contractor’s network
position affects his or her success in
winning public procurement proj-
ects, measured as the average value
of projects won. They examined the
network positions of general contrac-
tors involved in public procurement
projects in the construction industry
in the Veneto, Italy region from 2008 to
2012. They employed three measures
of network position: breadth, reach,
and brokerage. Only network breadth

was found to be crucial in determining
the success of firms in public procure-
ment practices. Such studies promise
to enrich our understanding of how the
structural positions of key individual
actors within project networks can sup-
port their collaborative success.
Project networks, quite like single
projects or project-based organizations,
occur in a context that impacts the use
and effectiveness of these governance
mechanisms. In particular, the institu-
tional or regulatory context may allow
for some contract or work arrangements
and not for others. Moreover, particular
coordinative practices may be common
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2008; Grabher, 2004; Ibert, 2004). This
dilemma between the ease of knowledge
creation and the difficulty of knowl-
edge transfer is com monly re ferred to
as the learning paradox.
In their study of the learning paradox
in knowledge transfers between interor-
ganizational project ventures and their
parent organizations, Bakker, Cambré,
Korlaar, and Raab (2011) identified three
relational governance factors (relational
embeddedness, cognitive embedded-
ness, and temporal embeddedness) that
contribute to knowledge transfer from
the interorganizational project venture
to the parent organizations of the proj-
ect network:
• Relational embeddedness refers to the
strength of the tie between two or more
organizational actors (Uzzi & Lancaster,
2003). In interorganizational collabo-
rations, such as project networks, the
relational embeddedness of the tie
between the project and the parent
organization(s) is commonly mani-
fested in the frequency of interaction
between the project and parent, and the
level of resource commitment (Rowley,
Behrens, & Krackhardt, 2000). Another
important indicator of the relational
embeddedness of the relation between
the project venture and the partnering
organizations concerns the level of trust
(Moran, 2005), both between the proj-

ect venture and its parents and among
the parents themselves. Higher rela-
tional embeddedness fosters knowl-
edge transfer.
• Cognitive embeddedness refers to the
extent to which the relation between
the parent organization and the proj-
ect venture is characterized by “shared
representations, interpretations, and
systems of meaning” (Van Wijk, Jansen,
& Lyles, 2008, p. 835). In interorgani-
zational collaborations, the degree of
overlap between the knowledge bases
of partner organizations is critical: Too
low an overlap and partners cannot
work together; too high an overlap and
there is little for the partners to learn
from one another.
new media industries, respectively.
By allowing for local autonomy within
specific core project teams, the over-
all project organization can provide
a more flexible organizing context
for project work. However, there are
challenges involved in getting differ-
ent project stakeholders to agree about
how they can align their contribu-
tions within some coherent (inter-)
organizational context.
Our conjectures suggest the follow-
ing: These tensions between the tempo-
rary and permanent organizations are
likely to be intensified in project net-

works where the responsibilities, rou-
tines, roles, and relationships among
interorganizational project teams depart
from the constituent responsibilities,
routines, roles, and relationships that
exist between the participating project
organizations and project stakeholders
or sponsors. Hence, modes of collab-
oration during the interorganizational
project may depart from modes of collab-
oration that more typically define rela-
tions between the durable (permanent)
organizations participating in the project
network. Such risks seem heightened
when unique project requirements and
the participation of project managers
and project staff with divergent project
experiences and modes of collaboration
come together.
The learning paradox: Tensions exist
between knowledge creation and
transfer.
A frequent paradox in the study of
project learning refers to the following
dilemma: On the one hand, through
their transience and interdisciplinary
nature, project ventures are likely to
be very suitable for creating knowl-
edge in the context of its application
(Gann & Salter, 2000; Grabher, 2004;
Hobday, 2000; Scarbrough et al., 2004).
On the other hand, however, the tem-
porary nature of projects seems to
inhibit the circulation of knowledge.

When the project dissolves and par-
ticipants move on, the created knowl-
edge is likely to disperse (Cacciatori,
Schüßler, & Müller-Seitz, 2016)—have
to be managed, not only within single
projects but also on the level of the
whole project network. Although in
some cases the network level will make
managing paradoxes more difficult, in
others it may remove some of the ten-
sions involved.
The distance paradox: Tensions exists
between the temporary and permanent
organization.
The “attachment-detachment dilemma”
(Sahlin-Andersson & Söderholm, 2002,
p. 19) or “distance paradox” (Cohendet
& Simon, 2007, p. 598) represents an
ongoing debate regarding the extent
to which a project organization should
be decoupled from, or embedded in,
a wider organizational context. Lun-
din and Söderholm (1995) advocate the
planned isolation of the project organi-
zation once the task is defined in order
to minimize disturbances from the envi-
ronment and subsequent obstacles to
implementation. However, Bresnen,
Goussevakaia, and Swan (2004) point
out that by encouraging project auton-
omy, project sponsors increase the dif-
ficulty of subsequently integrating the
resulting project organization’s activi-

ties within an overarching set of organi-
zational processes.
A related dilemma or tension within
project-based networks is between the
autonomy requirements of project par-
ticipants and their embeddedness within
interorganizational settings that demand
integration of project activities within
interorganizational coordination efforts
(Sydow, Lindqvist, & DeFillippi, 2004).
Alliance or coalition participants seek
to maintain some control over project
performance by their partners. However,
effective collaboration requires some
degree of organizational autonomy so
that different project partners can con-
tribute their specialized expertise with-
out undue constraints.
Grabher (2002a, 2002b) identifies
networks of governance and control
as defining features of project-based
organizing within the advertising and
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 12 9/8/16 2:09 AM
(routines) and customized crafted solu-
tions to the challenges of unexpected or
innovative project work tasks and chal-
lenges. Standardizing policies provide
economies of repetition and repeatable

solutions (Davies & Brady, 2000). How-
ever, these standardizing policies can
become dysfunctional when a project
or a series of projects contains unique
(innovative) requirements.
Several options have been rec-
ognized for managing the difference
paradox. One option is to create sep-
arate routines for managing the
familiar versus more innovative ele-
ments of the project. Such a separa-
tion strategy assumes that the overall
project is decomposable into such com-
ponents and can have dissimilar oper-
ating routines for managing them. This
simultaneous management of both
standardized and customized operat-
ing routines has been characterized as
an ambidextrous strategy (Tushman
& O’Reilly, 1996). Indeed, a study of
Heathrow’s Terminal 5 project suggests
that routines may be adapted ambi-
dextrously in response to changing cir-
cumstances as a dynamic capability in
complex projects, although Davies et al.
(2016) point to the continuing fragility
of such a capability. A second option
is to create sequential project organi-
zations. A vanguard project organiza-
tion will create customized solutions for
managing initially the most innovative
elements of a project assignment. A
second project organization will then
transfer those lessons learned back into
the mainstream project organization so

that it can standardize these routines
for coping with similar project assign-
ments in the future (Brady & Davies,
2004). However, neither the separa-
tion nor the sequentialization strategy
makes full use of the paradox theory
and other dialectical approaches that
prescribe accepting and managing
rather than suppressing or circumvent-
ing the underlying tensions (Farjoun,
2010; Lewis, 2000). These paradox man-
agement approaches have received
only limited attention in the project
certifications of competency, and their
record of performance in previous proj-
ect engagements.
As noted previously, some indus-
tries and project circumstances may
require project team members to play
different roles from project to project
and sometimes within a single project.
Grabher (2004) observed in the Munich
software industry that software profes-
sionals in the course of their careers,
and sometimes even in the course of
a single project, switch roles, in part
because of the lack of standardized role
expectations for different categories
of software workers, such as design-
ers, coders, and testers. The practice
of switching roles is also facilitated by
the absence of explicit training cer-
tification for competency in software
development. Collaboration within a

software project team more typically
evolves from an interaction between
strict professional roles into relation-
ships among acquainted colleagues.
This finding suggests that relationships
can sometimes replace roles as the pri-
mary governance mechanism for man-
aging the tensions between individual
and collective identity.
Another mechanism for reducing
tensions between individual and collec-
tive identity is the creation of swift trust
among project participants who have
not previously worked together (Mey-
erson et al., 1996). Such trust may arise
from team-building efforts necessitated
by the high level of project work engage-
ment among project participants, who
subsequently form a team identity that
complements rather than contradicts
their individual role-based identities.
This trust-building process thus reflects
the utilization of relationship building
as a governance mechanism for mitigat-
ing the tensions between individual and
collective identity.
The difference paradox: Tensions exist
between crafting and standardizing
practices.
Project networks experience tensions
between standard operating procedures
• Temporal embeddedness refers to

whether the parent organizations
have worked with one another on
previous project ventures in the past,
and whether they expect—as is typi-
cal of project networks—to do so
again (Bakker, Cambré, & Provan,
2009; Brady & Davies, 2004). Other
things being equal, one would expect
higher levels of temporal embedded-
ness of the project venture relation-
ship to be associated with higher
levels of knowledge transfer.
These three relational governance
factors or forms of embeddedness are
not exhaustive. Additionally, but some-
what cross-cutting, issues of resource
control, power, and domination need to
be mentioned. Together with the others,
they contribute to the learning paradox
and how it may be managed.
The identity paradox: Tensions exist
between individual and collective
identity.
A challenge facing all project networks
is that of creating a collective identity
for project participants while respecting
the individual identities that participat-
ing individuals bring to the enterprise.
A further complication of project net-
works is that project participants bring
a third identity—namely, their orga-
nizational membership. These orga-
nizational identities and associated

loyalties can create tensions with the
requirements for working on a project
with participants from other organiza-
tions with seemingly conflicting cultural
norms and work expectations. A variety
of governance mechanisms has been
employed to address the tensions of
individual and collective identity.
Role assignments are an organi-
zational and industry mechanism for
managing the identity paradox. Project
participants in project networks bring
with them a set of role-based identities
that can be transferred from project
to project (Bechky, 2006). These role-
related identities are based upon partici-
pants’ training, industry, or professional
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 13 9/8/16 2:09 AM
Tensions
P
A
P
E
R
S

to be managed—or practiced—not only
in projects but also in project networks.
Acknowledgments
We thank John Steen and Arnold
Windeler and, in his role as Project
Management Journal® editor-in-chief,
Hans Georg Gemünden, for very help-
ful comments on an earlier draft of this
article.
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Beyond the debate of whether project
networks are a temporary or more than
temporary organizational form, project
networks are amorphous because they
can be governed and coordinated in a
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project networks may be either gov-
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The degree to which a project relies
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future (expectation of future project
work with the same participants) can
impact how a project network governs

its interactions with project partici-
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flexibility shown by a project network
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its project partners is in part deter-
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vious interactions and expectations of
possible future collaboration (Ligthart,
Oerlemans, & Nooderhaven, 2016).
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their current project participants are
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and that an increasing frequency of prior
collaboration accentuates this positive
effect. In addition, the authors iden-
tify two boundary conditions—namely,
the degree of trust and relationship-
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Management, Queensland University of Technology,
Brisbane, Australia. He is the co-editor of the

Business Innovation and Disruption in Creative
Industries book series (Edward Elgar). He also
serves on the editorial board of Journal of Media
Business Studies and has published twelve books
and over 70 academic papers and book chapters.
Professor DeFillippi has published in a range of
leading journals, including Academy of Management
Review, California Management Review, Journal
of Organizational Behavior, Organization Studies,
Regional Studies, and Research Policy. His primary
areas of project scholarship include project-based
organizing, project networks, project learning, and
project-based careers. Dr. DeFillippi received his MA,
M.Phil., and PhD in Organization Studies from Yale
University, New Haven., Connecticut, USA. He can
be contacted at [email protected]
Jörg Sydow is a Professor of Management at the
School of Business & Economics at Freie Universität
Berlin. He is a founding co-editor of two lead-
ing German journals, Managementforschung and
Industrielle Beziehunge – The German Journal of
Industrial Relations, and a member of the editorial
review boards of Organization Studies, Academy
of Management Journal, Academy of Management
Review, Journal of Management Studies, and The
Scandinavian Journal of Management. Two of his most
recent books are: Managing and Working in Project
Society (Cambridge University Press, co-authored by
R.A. Lundin, N. Arvidsson, T. Brady, E. Ekstedt, & C.
Midler) and Managing Inter-organizational Relations
(Palgrave Macmillan, co-authored by E. Schüßler &
G. Müller-Seitz). He is currently also the director of
the Research Unit “Organized Creativity,” sponsored
by the German Research Foundation (DFG). For more
information visit: http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/en/
fachbereich/bwl/management/sydow/index.html. He

can be contacted at [email protected]
evolutionary and revolutionary change.
California Management Review, 28(4),
8–30.
Uzzi, B., & Lancaster, R. (2003).
Relational embeddedness and learning:
The case of bank loan managers and
their clients. Management Science, 49,
383–399.
Van Marrewijk, A. H., Ybema, S., Smits,
K., Clegg. S., & Pitsis, T. S. (2016). Clash
of the titans: Temporal organizing and
collaborative dynamics in the Panama
Canal megaproject. Organization Studies,
37 (forthcoming).
Van Wijk, R., Jansen, J. J. P., & Lyles, M.
A. (2008). Inter- and intra-organizational
knowledge transfer: A meta-analytic
review and assessment of its antecedents
and consequences. Journal of
Management Studies, 45, 830–853.
Whitley, R. (2006). Project-based firms:
New organizational form or variations
on a theme? Industrial and Corporate
Change, 15(1), 77–99.
Windeler, A., & Sydow, J. (2001).
Project networks and changing industry
practices—Collaborative content
production in the German television
industry. Organization Studies, 22(6),
1035–1061.

Zollo, M., Reuer, J. J., & Singh, H.
(2002). Interorganizational routines
and performance in strategic alliances.
Organization Science, 13(6), 701–713.
Robert DeFillippi is Professor of Strategy and
International Business at the Sawyer Business
School, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts,
USA and is Adjunct Professor in the School of
Swärd, A. (2016). Trust, reciprocity, and
actions: The development of trust in
temporary inter-organizational relations.
Organization Studies, 37 (forthcoming).
Sydow, J. (2009). Path dependencies
in project-based organizing: Evidence
from television production in Germany.
Journal of Media Business Studies, 6(4),
123–139.
Sydow, J., Lindkvist. L., & DeFillippi.
R. (2004). Project-based organizations,
embeddedness and repositories of
knowledge. Organization Studies, 25(9),
1475–1490.
Sydow, J., Schüßler, E., & Müller-Seitz,
G. (2016). Managing inter-organizational
relations. London, England: Palgrave-
Macmillan.
Sydow, J., & Windeler, A. (2004).
Projektnetzwerke: Management von
(mehr als) temporären Systemen

(Project networks: Management of (more
than) temporary systems). In J. Sydow
& A. Windeler (Eds.), Organisation
von content-produktion (pp. 37–55).
Wiesbaden, Germany: Westdeutscher
Verlag.
Teece, D. J. (2007). Explicating
dynamic capabilities: The nature and
microfoundations of (sustainable)
enterprise performance. Strategic
Turner, J. R., & Keegan, A. (2001).
Mechanisms of governance in the
project-based organization: Roles of
the broker and steward. European
Management Journal, 19(3), 254–267.
Tushman, M. L. & O’Reilly, C. (1996).
Ambidextrous organization: Managing
101278_PMJ_01_006-017.indd 17 9/8/16 2:09 AM
P
A
P
E
R
S

Disassembling and Reassembling
Project Management Maturity
Jan Christoph Albrecht, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
Konrad Spang, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany
INTRODUCTION
A
s an instrument to assess and enhance organizational project
management, project management maturity models (PMMMs)
are
well recognized in the professional field. They have also evoked
remarkable scholarly interest (Besner & Hobbs, 2008; Wendler,
2012). Research in the context of PMMMs can be structured
along three
phases (Albrecht & Spang, 2014): Initially, the research focused
on the
development of PMMMs, dealt with assessment techniques, or
described
case studies on the application of a particular model within an
organization
(Grant & Pennypacker, 2006, p. 60, and the references therein).
In the second
phase, scholars compared average maturity levels among
selected industries
(e.g., Pennypacker & Grant, 2003; Cooke-Davies &
Arzymanow, 2003). In the
most recent phase, research is focused on studying the benefits

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