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International Journal of Project Management 31 (2013) 1069 – 1071
Editorial
The challenges of managing complexity in projects: An
Australian perspective
Project Management (PM) as an academic field is relatively
new in Australian universities. Moreover, the field is distributed
across four main areas: business (management), built environ-
ment and construction, engineering and more recently ICT
(information systems). At an institutional level, with notable
exceptions, there is little engagement between researchers
working in those individual areas. Consequently, an initiative
was launched in 2009 to create a network of PM researchers to
build a disciplinary base for PM in Australia. The initiative took
the form of a bi-annual forum. The first forum established the
constituency and spread of PM research in Australia (Sense et al.,
2011).
This special issue of IJPM arose out of the second forum, held
in 2012, that explored the notion of an Australian perspective
on PM. At the forum, researchers were invited to collaborate
to explore issues, methodological approaches, and theoretical
positions underpinning their research and to answer the question:
is there a distinctly Australian research agenda which responds to
the current challenges of large and complex projects in our
region? From a research point of view, it was abundantly clear at
the forum that many of the issues facing Australian researchers
are shared around the world. However, what emerged from the
forum as the Australian perspective was a set of themes and
research issues that dominate the Australia research agenda.
To a large degree, an Australian perspective is driven by the
unique Australian geo-economic situation. Australia is a nation
that is also an island continent the size of USA, but with a
population of less than 30 million, with 80% concentrated in the
small south east triangle between Sydney and Melbourne. Its
economy is largely based on resource industries that are located
in remote areas on the north, north east and north west of the
country. Australia does not have significant manufacturing or
service industries and is largely a marketing branch office for
major companies. The country does have a strong knowledge
economy sector, as exemplified in its world leading bio-medical
research sector, and this extends to the outstanding research and
development that underpins the productivity of the resources
sector. For PM, the Australian context raises issues around
maturity and capability of managers to undertake the major
projects that are characteristic of the resource sector and national
infrastructure projects. It also raises issues around distributed
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work, including both the local and global activities of industry,
and associated cultural and communications issues that arise from
an export-oriented economy. While such issues around geo-
graphic clustering of a small number of dominant industry sectors
are not unique to Australia, it is, however, the specific focus on
these issues in research that drives an Australian perspective
on PM.
To contextualise this specific research focus, it is useful to
consider the Australian economy from a global perspective.
Australia has continued to surprise the rest of the world with its
strong economic position. In comparison, many first world
economies have struggled since the Global Financial Crisis in
2008 with debt and unemployment. Australia has relatively low
unemployment and continuing, if somewhat recently slowed,
economic expansion through the resilience of the resources
sector. A recent report, representing the chief executives of 100 of
Australia's largest companies, with members from all sectors of
the economy, including resources, manufacturing, retail, finan-
cial services, professional services and construction, identified a
$AUS 921 billion pipeline of existing and potential major capital
projects (Business Council of Australia, 2012). This investment
pipeline is built off the back of the confluence of three factors:
Australia's position in the Asia Pacific region and the pace and
scale of its development; the infrastructure and resources boom in
the region; and the expected population growth to an expected
36 million by 2050.
At the same time, there is considerable concern amongst
business leaders that Australia's capacity to deliver these projects,
many of which are major projects, is limited (CPM Task Force,
2011). Concerns have been raised about the capacity constraints,
productivity, cost and efficiency of delivery of major projects
in Australia. For example, resources projects are 40% more
expensive to deliver in Australia than in the United States Gulf
Coast (Business Council of Australia, 2012). Workforce
productivity is a major concern in Australia as productivity on
Australian projects is estimated to be 30 to 35% lower than for
comparable projects in the United States. There are also concerns
within Australian industry that this will worsen significantly for
some major projects experiencing significant skill shortages. It is
forecasted that an additional 73,000 employees will be needed by
2014 to deliver Australia's resources investments alone (Skills
1070 Editorial
Australia, 2011). The skill levels and experience of the project
managers and executive leadership to be able to deliver projects
of such scope and in remote and regional environments have also
been identified as critical issues (Skills Australia, 2011). With
these critical gaps, the emerging focus of research in Australia is
on project productivity performance and its drivers.
Grounded in these issues, identified as of critical importance
to Australia's future, there is an on-going call for relevance and
rigour in academic research. Scholars such as Boyer (1990) and
Van de Ven (2007) argue that there is a need to break down the
insular behaviours of academic departments and disciplines, and
to undertake ‘engaged scholarship’ which respects the different
knowledge that academics and practitioners bring to problem
formulation, theory building, methodology and problem-solving.
As a research model, engaged scholarship, first and foremost,
recognises the way differing perspectives enrich understanding of
a problem. Van de Ven (2007) argues that knowledge can be
advanced by engaging with others across a range of activities that
constitute a research programme.
With this imperative in mind, the 2012 forum adopted the
engaged scholarship model as the basis for its programme. The
stated objective was to identify and scope a series of papers that
would articulate an Australian perspective of PM research,
drawing on the diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodolog-
ical orientation of the participants. About 40 researchers
participated in the forum. In the morning of the first day,
participants made short presentations, strictly limited to 10 min,
outlining their research interests, methodological approaches and/
or theoretical grounding. In the afternoon, there was a collective
discussion to identify themes that crossed the broad range of
topics presented. In addition, an invited industry panel explored
the challenges and opportunities faced by practitioners. The
views of researchers and practitioners were synthesised by the
forum facilitators, who are the guest editors of the special issue,
into a broad set of salient themes.
On the second day of the forum, participants formed breakout
groups to elaborate on the themes and build a shared
understanding within the group. At the end of this session, each
group reported back to the forum their understanding and
conceptualisation of their theme. In the afternoon session, the
groups moved into collaborative writing teams to develop one or
more papers to address substantive issues around their theme.
Without being prescriptive, the papers were intended to explore
issues, drawing on the collective research findings of the writing
team to substantiate the issue, rather than report on specific
research. At the end of the second day, each group presented
details of their papers to the forum. These details included
the paper title, a short abstract and the contributing authors. A
timeline was set for the submissions and a review process was
agreed for the special issue.
The guest editors also decided to invite other PM researchers,
as well as forum participants, to submit other papers around the
special issue theme to supplement the papers that were developed
at the forum. One of the most pressing challenges for all the
writers was to respond to the editorial demands of relevance to
establishing an Australian perspective within the broad themes.
While many authors drew on their collective wisdom of project
management research and practice, they were encouraged to
consider how their problem formulation linked to a peculiarly
Australian agenda. It was made clear that any submitted paper
would not be automatically accepted for the special issue. The
guest editors' desk reviewed all submissions to ensure the topic
of the special issue and themes were addressed in the papers.
Authors were able to revise their papers prior to submission to the
usual IJPM review process.
The papers that met the rigorous review process and built on
the agenda within the broad themes of the forum are diverse and
represent some of the significant PM challenges faced in the
Australian context. It is worthy of note that the collection of
papers from this special issue reflects what Neal Ashkanasy, in a
recent issue of the Academy of Management Review (2013), has
called the ‘fusion theory’ emanating from Australia. As he points
out, Australian academic departments in general and business
schools in particular attract a diverse cultural mix and this brings
with it a diversity of methodologies and approaches. The papers
by Bredillet, Conboy, Davidson and Walker on the ‘Getting of
Wisdom: The Future of PM University in Australia’ and
‘Development of an Australian Competency Standard for Project
Portfolio Management’ by Conboy and Young are a direct
response to the Australian challenges of our urgent need to
professionalise the talent pool as we move to larger and more
complex projects. How universities should approach the task of
educating project managers and what should be taught about
project, programme and portfolio management are addressed
against global economic activity. The paper by Chilese and
Hoseini takes up a similar position but from a different trajectory
in ‘Global Virtual Engineering Teams’, as Australian industry
recognises that we cannot deliver projects of the scope and size of
upcoming infrastructure and resources projects without extensive
collaboration with skilled international experts.
In order to understand the management of complex projects,
Pollack, Costello and Sankaran argue that Actor-Network theory
(ANT) is a useful methodological approach. They use ANT to
understand how a project management information system was
implemented to introduce and stabilise project management in
three state-based Public Sector agencies, and to build project
management capability within those who were engaged in the
tasks. The paper by Metcalfe and Sastrowardoyo illustrates the
use of an argument map to conceptualise a complex Australian
mining export project. As Australian mining projects depend on
the China market so strongly, project managers need to be aware
of the growing geo-political tensions between the US and China.
This paper focuses attention on the urgent need to broaden
the conceptualisation of the ‘capacity’ building agenda for
project management development programmes in the Australian
environment.
The focus on conceptualisation continued with the paper by
Chang, Chih, Chew and Pisarski where they argue that the
value co-creation process, consisting of creating knowledge and
developing processes and systems for suppliers and customers,
must involve engagement of diverse stakeholders and balance
their often competing needs. This was demonstrated through
three major defence capital equipment acquisition projects as
a new way to overcome the limitations of traditional PM
 Editorial
approaches. Continuing with the focus on stakeholders in project
conceptualisation, a case study, presented by McKenna and
Metcalfe, addresses the challenges of stakeholder conflict prior to
project conceptualisation. The authors suggest that the so-called
‘linguistic turn’, popular in fields such as organisational studies,
will assist in being able to coherently address complex project
conceptualisation. This fresh methodological approach represents
an important recognition of the value of broadening the field of
view of possible approaches to project management research.
The impact of competing values on the capacity for knowledge-
sharing in a project-based organisation was reviewed by Wiewiora,
Trigunarsyah, Murphy and Coffey. Awareness of the dominant
culture is suggested as critical to enhance knowledge sharing
between projects. Issues of diversity are further taken up in
Crawford, French and Lloyd-Walker's paper on career paths and
issues of career management in Australia. Highlighting its unique
labour market and the ‘tyranny of distance’ that the country faces,
the paper particularly explores the role of generational and gender
differences in the experiences of project based work and career
development.
Considerable attention is given in this special issue to the
sense making that occurs in project management design and
delivery. Many of the papers highlight the critical role of project
management practitioners who are increasingly required to
engage as reflective practitioners, rather than as technicians, and
who need to learn and adapt effectively in complex project
environments. This shift in thinking from tools to reflective
practice, a core theme of the ‘Rethinking Project Management’
Agenda (Winter et al., 2006), is of particular significance in
Australia, where regional and remote projects are a dominant
form of activity.
The research agenda for Australia demands a vision of project
management outside the traditional tools and techniques
approach and requires a strong understanding of the interplay of
project, community, globalisation and professionalization com-
bined with an understanding of the national and governmental
(regulatory) contexts as well as the dynamics of the emergent
economy. This vision, which is demonstrated through the papers
in this forum special issue, reflects the need to improve the
delivery of large and complex projects, which in turn will require
project leadership, cultural change and skill development
strategies. In this way, Australia will be positioned to deliver
the major projects that will provide the cornerstone of the
Australian GDP and employment growth into the future and will
make Australia the most investment-intensive economy in the
OECD (Business Council of Australia, 2012).
1071
Finally, we would like to acknowledge the support and
sponsorship of the forums by the project management profes-
sional bodies, the Australian Institute of Project Management and
the Project Management Institute. Such support recognises the
need for engagement between practitioners and researchers and
helps the forum create a venue for such discussions.
References
Boyer, E., 1990. Scholarship Reconsidered. Priorities of the Professoriate.
Carnegie Foundation, Princeton, N.J.
Business Council of Australia, 2012. Pipeline or Pipedream? Securing
Australia's Investment Future. http://www.bca.com.au.
CPM Task Force, 2011. Complex Project Management. Global Perspectives
and the Strategic Agenda to 2025. International Centre for Complex Project
Management (http://www.iccpm.com).
Sense, A., Owen, J., Watt, C., 2011. Profiling the context and opportunities for
Australian project management research. International Journal of Managing
Projects in Business 4 (1), 105–117.
Skills Australia, 2011. Major Projects Schedule of Resource Projects: Construction
Workforce Estimates. http://www.awpa.gov.au/our-work/sector-specific-skill-
needs/documents/Major_Projects_Projections.pdf.
Van de Ven, A., 2007. Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and
Social Science Research. Oxford University Press, New York.
Winter, M., Smith, C., Morris, P., Cicmil, S., 2006. Directions for future research in
project management: the main findings of a UK government-funded research
network. International Journal of Project Management 24 (8), 638–649.
Caroline Hatcher
Director
QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: c.hatcher@qut.edu.au.
Henry Linger
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia
E-mail address: henry.linger@monash.edu.
Jill Owen
Senior Lecturer
School of Business, University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia
E-mail address: j.owen@adfa.edu.au.
Chivonne Algeo
Lecturer
School of the Built Environment, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
E-mail address: chivonne.algeo@uts.edu.au.