International Journal of Project Management 19 (2001) 433–435
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Editorial
Towards a holistic approach to strategic project management
Large projects can have large consequences, not only
for those who use them, but also for the organisations
and institutions that build and finance them. When
successful, large projects generate revenues and benefit
society, but when they go wrong society suffers and the
organisations and institutions that are in the business of
large projects confront financial difficulties and poten-
tial damage to their reputation. Interest in improving
the planing, design, and delivery of large projects is
therefore long-standing. It has generated a considerable
number of case studies and prescriptions that focus on
internal management issues such as engineering esti-
mates, scheduling, systems, control, and contractual
design. What is patently lacking is a ‘‘holistic’’ approach
that gives managers an understanding of how to tackle
the complexity of large projects as evolving systems that
are strongly influenced by their real world context. This
Special Issue brings together a group of papers that map
out many of the key issues facing a holistic study of
large projects.
The papers in this Special Issue are varied in content,
but with the exception of the paper by Rodney Turner
and Stephen Simister, they share a common research
context: They all emerged from the ‘‘International Pro-
gram on the Management of Engineering and Con-
struction’’, or IMEC1. This research program which was
conceived and championed by Roger Miller from the
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Canada,
was expressly designed to study large projects as evolu-
tionary systems, with as few preconceptions as possible.
The program identified sixty large projects world wide.
Most of the projects were in the energy and infra-
structure areas. They included thermal, hydro, and
nuclear power plants, oil platforms, mass transit sys-
tems, and toll roads. Twenty of the projects were built
in North America, 20 in Europe, eight in Latin Amer-
ica, and the remaining 12 were built in Asia.
1
Results of the IMEC study are presented in The Stategic Man-
agement of Large Infrastructure Projects, Roger Miller and Donald L.
Lessard (Eds), MIT Press, Boston, 2001. The paper by Miller and
Lessard, Floricel and Miller, and Hobbs and Andersen, are adapted
from chapters in that book.
0263-7863/01/$20.00 # 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved.
PII: S0263-7863(01)00050-3
The history of each project was reconstructed in
depth. Key actors and stakeholders were interviewed,
both for their recollections and their views. Every effort
was made to enter into the frame-of-reference of these
actors; to understand how they approached and dealt
with large projects. The intent, however, was not to
privilege the point of view of specific actors, but to
understand how their calculations and actions meshed
with the evolution of the projects. Such evolution is a
combination of the deliberate and emergent. It is delib-
erate in as much as projects do not get built without
formal commitment on the part of project participants
to agreements and to specific goals. And it is emergent
in as much as conflict and unforeseen events create new
problems and require strategic adaptation.
What balance between the deliberate and emergent
must be struck in order to improve the probability of
project success? Past literature on large projects has on
the whole been based on the assumption that emergence
and strategic adaptation are at best necessary evils.
Thus, every attempt should be made to make project
planning and execution as deliberate as possible, by
developing frameworks that identify all contingent
risks, and by designing projects in such a way as to
maximise the ability of managers to exert control.
The first paper by Roger Miller and Don Lessard
suggests that making prediction and control the touch-
stones of large-project planning is myopic and counter-
productive. Projects are admittedly risky, but beyond a
certain point reducing risks by exhaustive analysis and
projection prior to commitment can breed conservatism
and inflexibility. It is better to begin with a realistic
picture of the risks and then structure an approach that
improves readiness to deals with unexpected risks when
they emerge. Miller and Lessard base their approach on
a four-fold distinction between risks that are within the
control of key project actors and those that are not; and
risks that are specific to the project as opposed to risks
that are broader in origins. Each of these categories of
risk should be handled differently if and when they
arise. Miller and Lessard call their approach ‘‘layering’’
because it entails managing and dealing with risks as
project evolution exposes new ‘‘layers’’ of risks that
could not have been foreseen initially.
434 Editorial / International Journal of Project Management 19 (2001) 433–435
Building on these insights, Serghei Floricel and Roger
Miller develop a perspective on the management of
large projects as strategic systems. They argue that the
strategy and organisational design of large-scale pro-
jects must be based on the awareness that some risks
can be anticipated while others cannot. The organisa-
tional and strategic properties that deal with anticipated
risks is termed ‘‘robustness’’, while instilling organisa-
tional and strategic properties that deal with the second
is termed ‘‘governability’’. Robustness is generally a
product of deliberate prior strategizing. Governability,
by contrast, is the unintended consequences of strate-
gizing. It is emergent rather than deliberate.
Floricel and Miller suggest that managers are not
generally able to customise robustness and governability
according to the specific requirements of each project—
the sheer complexity of large projects precludes this
possibility. Instead, managers select from a limited
number of coherent and stable project configurations
which they term strategic systems. They discuss three
such strategic systems: rational-adaptive, entrepreneur-
ial, and relational. The selection of these types depends
on the type of sponsoring organisation, context, and
basic technological characteristics. Rational-adaptive
strategic systems are usually selected by government
agencies and large regulated firms that operate or are
embedded in power or transportation networks. Entre-
preneurial strategic systems, by contrast, occur under
deregulation and privatisation—often with projects that
are lower in size and complexity. Relational strategic
systems also occur in the context of deregulation and
privatisation, but they are favoured by sponsors and
firms intent on building and owning a portfolio of pro-
jects with low technological and market risks.
The next two papers in this issue examine the crucial
issue of the relationship between project participants.
The first, by Rodney Turner and Stephen Simister,
while not a product of the IMEC research program,
contains important insights that reinforce IMEC’s per-
spective and key findings.
Turner and Simister examine the relationship between
client and contractor, in particular the issue of contract
design that governs this relationship. Current practices
in this area are largely the product of past experi-
mentation legitimised by conventional wisdom. Inevi-
tably, there is a desire to put the foundations of contract
design on more solid theoretical footings. Transaction
costs theory is an obvious candidate, but as Turner and
Simister show, in spite of its appeal and undeniable ele-
gance, this theory does not predict current contractual
practices. These practices, they suggest, are shaped by
uncertainty about process, product, and purpose. The
choice of governance structure is not driven by ex ante
demand to reduce risk, as transaction cost theory would
predict, but by the need to achieve goal alignment
between the client and the contractor. Uncertainty, in
particular product uncertainty, can undermine goal
alignment. Contractual design is therefore a reflection of
the need to maintain and if necessary regain this goal
alignment, rather than an attempt to economise on the
costs of setting up and administering contracts.
The paper by Brian Hobbs and Bjørn Andersen which
follows the one by Turner and Simister, also begins by
exploring the disjunction between contractual design
which is based on normative economics, and project
governance that is relational in nature. Hobbs and
Andersen criticise the tendency to polarise these per-
spectives; to argue that projects should be either one or
the other. They suggest that it is possible to mix these
options. Front-end processes can be internalised
(usually within the owner’s organisation), or they can be
jointly enacted by owner, contractor, and other relevant
players. Execution can likewise take place on an arm’s
length basis, i.e. the contractor is left to execute without
involvement of others, or it can be a relational process
where many of the parties involved work to solve pro-
blems and explore new opportunities. These two
dimensions define four configurations of project devel-
opment and execution. Hobbs and Andersen explore in
length the two types that have relational execution in
common: projects in which owners drive the front-end
process with little input from contractors prior to
execution, and projects in which owners, contractors,
and other involved actors work together throughout the
life of the project.
Hobbs and Andersen show that each of these config-
urations contain considerable variations. In other
words, there are no pure governance types. Projects are
sensitive to industry and national contexts. They incor-
porate practices that are not explained by abstract pro-
ject categories. This leads Hobbs and Andersen to reject
the pervasive tendency in project management to iden-
tify and transfer ‘‘best practices’’ as a way of improving
project effectiveness. Most projects follow practices that
have been fine-tuned over many decades, not because
managers are hidebound conservatives, but because
they are acutely aware of critical nuances in their con-
text. Innovation in project management practices there-
fore occurs when established practices can no longer
deal with new problems. It is at this point, that man-
agers explore new possibilities within the ‘‘pregnant
complexity’’ implicit in the large number of permuta-
tions and combinations of existing project practices.
For the most part, IMEC focused on individual pro-
jects, or more precisely on the strategies, organisation,
and practices that enhance the planning and execution
of individual projects. This project-centric perspective is
consistent with the dominant comparative approach of
project management research where projects are seen in
isolation. Projects, however, are part of a larger ecology
of projects; an ecology in which certain types of firms
and institutions play a pivotal role as repositories of
 Editorial / International Journal of Project Management 19 (2001) 433–435
knowledge and expertise. This knowledge and expertise
is essential for the functioning of the large-project sec-
tor, and for this reason IMEC also gave attention to the
strategies and organisation of these players. The paper
by Joseph Lampel examines the strategy and core com-
petencies of one key type of large-project players: engi-
neering–procurement–construction, or EPC firms. An
important challenge facing EPC firms is how to balance
efficiency and flexibility under conditions of project and
market diversity. Striking this balance takes place at the
operating and strategic levels. At the operating level
EPC firms build core competencies that contain the tacit
and codified knowledge needed to effectively execute
projects. Based on field work in the USA, Canada, the
UK, France, Malaysia, and Japan, Lampel identifies
four kinds of EPC core competencies: entrepreneurial,
technical, evaluative, and relational. These core compe-
tencies are the product of learning and experience, but
they are constantly challenged by new market opportu-
nities. Thus, at the strategic level, EPC firms face funda-
mental tradeoffs when it comes to developing and
managing their project portfolio. Based on these tradeoffs,
Lampel identifies three types of generic EPC strategies:
focusing strategy which is competency driven, switching
strategy which is market driven, and combining strategy
which attempts to balance these two imperatives.
Large projects have always exercised fascination and
bred controversy. Their impact on society is undeniable,
435
and the urgency of the need to manage them more
effectively is therefore not in dispute. Yet in spite of
decades of experience it is difficult to say that sub-
stantial progress has been made towards improving
performance, in part because the scale and complexity
of large projects keeps increasing, but also because dis-
tilling this experience into prescriptions and ‘‘best prac-
tices’’ has its limits. This Special Issue attempts a
holistic approach to the study of large projects. Such
an approach holds the promise of a strategic theory of
project management. Achieving this goal, however, is
not without conceptual and methodological problems:
large-scale projects are difficult to study in their totality.
Yet as the papers in this Special Issue show, in spite of
such difficulties a holistic approach holds promise.
What is needed now is more research and more work
that explicitly aims at developing theory and practice
that was a comprehensive and strategic perspective in
mind.
Joseph Lampel
University of Nottingham Business School
Jubilee Campus
Wollaton Road
Nottingham NG8 1BB
UK
E-mail address: Joseph.lampel@nottingham.ac.uk