Project

Management
Journal
Volume 35, Number 4 The Professional Research Journal
DECEMBER 2004 of the Project Management Institute

PAPERS

5 PROJECT TROUBLESHOOTING: TIGER TEAMS FOR REACTIVE

RISK MANAGEMENT
Alex Pavlak

15 AN EFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT-BASED APPLICATION

MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN RENEWAL IN HONG KONG
Dennis Heung-Fu Mui and Shankar Sankaran

35 TEAM LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN TECHNOLOGY-BASED

PROJECT ENVIRONMENTS
Hans J. Thamhain

47 A BALANCED SCORECARD APPROACH TO PROJECT

MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP
James Norrie and Derek H. T. Walker

57 THE INFLUENCE OF A PROJECT PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT

SYSTEM ON THE SUCCESS OF A CONTRACT FOR MAINTAINING
MOTORWAYS AND TRUNK ROADS
David James Bryde and Dominic Brown
PMBOK® Guide–Third Edition
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Project
Management
Journal
The Professional Research Journal of the Project Management Institute
Volume 35, Number 4
DECEMBER 2004
3 From the Editor
Christophe N. Bredillet, PhD, MBA, Ingénieur EC Lille

PAPERS

5 PROJECT TROUBLESHOOTING: TIGER TEAMS FOR REACTIVE

RISK MANAGEMENT
Alex Pavlak

15 AN EFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT-BASED APPLICATION

MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN RENEWAL IN HONG KONG
Dennis Heung-Fu Mui and Shankar Sankaran

35 TEAM LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN TECHNOLOGY-BASED

PROJECT ENVIRONMENTS
Hans J. Thamhain

47 A BALANCED SCORECARD APPROACH TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP

James Norrie and Derek H. T. Walker

57 THE INFLUENCE OF A PROJECT PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT SYSTEM ON THE

SUCCESS OF A CONTRACT FOR MAINTAINING MOTORWAYS AND TRUNK ROADS
David James Bryde and Dominic Brown

66 Cover to Cover—Book Reviews

Kenneth H. Rose, PMP

69 Guidelines for Project Management Journal Book Reviews

71 Notes for Authors

 PROJECT MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD
John R. Adams, Western Carolina University; Frank
T. Anbari, PMP, The George Washington University;
Bud Baker, Wright State University; Rick Bilbro, The
Innova Group, Inc.; David Christensen, Cedar City,
UT; David Cleland, University of Pittsburgh; Helen S.
Cooke, Cooke & Cooke; Dan H. Cooprider, Creative
People Management; Steven V. DelGrosso, IBM;
Deborah Fisher, University of New Mexico; Vipul
Gupta, Saint Joseph’s University; Francis T.
Hartman, The University of Calgary; Gary C.
Humphreys, Humphreys & Associates; Lewis
Ireland, PMP, Project Technologies Corp.; Peter
Kapsales, Bellcore; Young Hoon Kwak, The
George Washington University; Lee R. Lambert,
PMP, Lambert Consulting Group, Inc.; Alexander
Laufer, Technion-Israel Inst. of Technology; William
Leban, PMP, DeVry University; Robert Loo, The
University of Lethbridge; Kenneth G. Merkel, PMP,
University of Nebraska; Michael D. Okrent, Agilent
Technologies Inc.; Peggy C. Poindexter, Great Falls,
VA; Tzvi Raz, Tel Aviv Unversity; Paul B. Robinson,
The Eastern Management Group; Arnold M. Ruskin,
PMP, Claremont Consulting Group; Richard L.
Sinatra, PMP, Potomac, MD; Dwight Smith-
Daniels, Arizona State University; James Snyder,
Springfield, PA; Paul Solomon, PMP, B-2 Earned
Value Management Systems; Robert G. Staples,
Monroe, VA; Charles J. Teplitz, University of San
Diego; Zeljko M. Torbica, PMP, Florida International
University; Walter A. Wawruck, Vancouver, BC,
Canada; Itzhak Wirth, Saint John’s University; Janet
K. Yates, San Jose State University.
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Editor
Christophe N. Bredillet, PhD, MBA,
Ingénieur EC Lille
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 F ROM THE E DITOR
Christophe N. Bredillet, PhD, MBA, Ingénieur EC Lille
“T” TIME?
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
It is always strange to see that ideas come in spe-
cial circumstances resulting from interactions and
connections between various events happening at
sometimes very different times in very different
places. Two recent events lead me to share with you
some reflections about time and its role in pro-
gram/project management.
Recently, in between moments of writing a
paper for a Japanese colleague, I read the standard
guidebook A Guidebook for Project and Program
Management for Enterprise Innovation, which is
also known as P2M. (It was developed by the Project
Management Professionals Certification Center
(PMCC), under the auspice of the Engineering
Advancement Association (ENAA) of Japan.) Part of
this guidebook is grounded on a perspective of cyclic
time. In it, time is linear, with a before and an after;
time is more than a line in a figure indicating a feed-
back loop. Time is also cyclic, a philosophical con-
cept that forms part of many ancient traditions,
including Hinduism and Islam.
In economics, the concept of cyclic time
informs many schools of thought: Austrian
Business Cycle Theory, Hayekian Trade Cycle
Theory, “traditional” Business Cycle Theory, and
Keynesian Business Cycle Theory. Furthermore, it
has influenced numerous thinkers and theories:
Without being exhaustive, one can note, for
instance: Business Cycle Empiricists (as exempli-
fied by Nikolai D. Kondratiev in his 1928 book
The Long Wave Cycle), Wesley Clair Mitchell and
the American Institutionalists, Monetary
Overinvestment Theorists, Climate Theories of
Cycles, Keynesian Multiplier-Accelerator Theories,
and Shock-Dependent Theories. Many manage-
ment approaches are now also incorporating cyclic
perspectives such as classical Plan-Do-Check-Act,
Kolb Learning Cycle, Boyd Cycle (Observe-Orient-
Decide-Act), and Thermodynamics (the famous
Carnot cycle).
I recently participated in a research meeting in
the United Kingdom during which the business peo-
ple in attendance presented some of their most
important strategic projects. Interestingly, their sto-
ries shared a common theme: time. Time to change
the reading of the environment; time to move to a
new business model; time to implement the project;
time to change the organization; time to change the
culture and the people! All of these differing per-
spectives on time were focused on duration, density,
and quality. Together, these perspectives led to an
understanding of the tensions between the individ-
ual and the group, between the personal and the
social, between human-marked time and nature’s
continuous pace.
The way that time is perceived, according to a
linear timescale (straight line) or a cyclic timescale
(circle), can lead project professionals to chose very
different managerial approaches. Is one focusing on
the short-term and considering time as series or sum
of separable instants? Or is one considering the flow
of time as a whole from a long-term perspective?
The question of the experience and perception
of time has been repeatedly and seemingly infinite-
ly addressed by philosophers: What is the perception
of time? What kinds of temporal experience can one
experiment with? What is meaning of duration, spe-
cious present, past, present, passage of time, and
time order? What is the metaphysics of time percep-
tion? (Readers interested in exploring such questions
will enjoy reading the following online article:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/)
Every day, researchers and program/project
managers are confronted by the limits and chal-
lenges imposed on them by time. For these individ-
uals, time is much more than just the “t” variable in
a scheduling function; and because it is, it illustrates
the limitation of the classical positivist and other
similar optimization approaches. Through projects,
humans are creating the world, and in doing so, we
are creating ourselves. And when we accomplish
this, in the here and now, we are — each of us — per-
ceiving this (and every) particular instant of eternity.
Thus we should ask to ourselves: Are we running
out of time? Or is time running out on us?
And now is the time, as we reach the end of this
year, for me to wish all of you a happy new year!
And in closing to leave you with a few words about
time from the great Roman poet Virgil: Hoc quod
loquor inde est [Fast flies meanwhile the irreparable
hour…] (Georgics, III, v. 284).
Happy 2005.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 3
 T O O UR R EADERS
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Project Management Journal Upgrade Emphasis on Electronic Delivery

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porting the growth and use of new knowledge. Project access to its learning, PMI is emphasizing electronic
Management Journal, PMI’s academic and research distribution as the Journal’s primary delivery
quarterly, has supported those ends as the profession method.
has grown. Now is the appropriate time to pursue Effective the April issue, PMI began posting a
additional gains toward advancing the profession printable version of the Journal on the Members Area
and practice of project management and increasing of the Web site, concurrent with its limited print dis-
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As part of its effort to promote the worldwide uti- discontinued automatic mailing of the Journal to mem-
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while reaching out to those in the issues in print, but may PMI of their preference for this option
project management field with distin- will continue to receive the Journal in
elect to opt out in the future.
guished credentials to staff its review print, along with their regularly
board and advisory committees. mailed copies of PM Network® and
Initiatives to reach out to other disciplines that PMI Today™. PM Network and PMI Today will contin-
are strongly aligned with project management will ue to be mailed each month to all members, regardless
attract individuals in those disciplines as potential of their Journal delivery option.
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4 • Project Management Journal December 2004

PROJECT TROUBLESHOOTING: TIGER TEAMS FOR
REACTIVE RISK MANAGEMENT
ABSTRACT
Large long-term projects with many
stakeholders generally entail unforeseen
risks and events that cannot, in principle,
be predicted. Given the impracticality of
pre-planning for every possible contin-
gency, managers must react to inevitable
disruptions, respond to unexpected
events, update risk management plans,
rescope the project, and problem-solve.
Contrary to these all-too-common project
occurrences, management continues to
view the project as a deterministic
process. The belief is that risk can be
anticipated and projects executed as
planned. The view presented in this
paper is that pragmatic project manage-
ment involves a practical balance
between proactive risk management
tools and reactive problem-solving tools.
Keywords: troubleshooting; risk manage-
ment; crisis management; problem-solv-
ing; teams; teamwork.
©2004 by the Project Management Institute
Vol. 35, No. 4, 5-14, ISSN 8756-9728/03
ALEX PAVLAK, Thales Research, Inc., Severna Park, MD
ven the best project managers are forever fighting fires. In addition to
E routine problems, they occasionally face unexpected disruptions that
may threaten the project and out-of-control crises that could threaten the
organization. Managers who have little explicit problem-solving training must
react to these events as best they can. Project troubleshooting provides a com-
prehensive toolkit that enables managers to react effectively to unexpected
disruptions.
Project troubleshooting is problem-solving applied to projects. Its core
performance engines are problem-solving and high-performance teamwork
(executed by so-called Tiger Teams). Managers are comfortable with problem-
definition tools such as root-cause analysis. But definition is only the first part
of the problem-solving process. Understanding a problem’s causal factors
sometimes suggests a solution; sometimes, however, it does not.
Solution-finding is the second stage of the problem-solving process. It is
very dangerous to pick a solution, even one suggested by causal factors, with-
out first conducting a disciplined search. I have heard many project managers
say that they understand the cause of problems and believe nothing can be
done to resolve their problems. This statement, however, must be justified.
Case studies show that managers, when under-pressure, often fail to conduct
a disciplined search for solutions and opportunities; as a result, these solu-
tions and opportunities can pass-by unseen. Indeed, this paper presents the
project troubleshooting hypothesis: There is always something that can be
found to improve the project situation.
Tiger Teams are the heart of the project troubleshooting toolkit. Tiger
Team productivity comes from deep, intense, productive conflict—an open,
honest struggle to reconcile opposing views. Sequestered offsite and well-suit-
ed for creative problem-solving, Tiger Teams can quickly resolve problems.
While these high-performance teams are most rare, they can be deliberately
set up and nurtured. They are effective in handling both out-of-control crises
and routine everyday problem-solving.
Troubled projects are often viewed as the consequence of management
failure. A common solution is for organizations to employ expert program
managers to assess the program, take charge, and replace current management.
This paper presents an alternative view: Current management possesses the
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 5
basic skills, but needs special tools to
cope with unexpected events.
Total project management
involves a balance between traditional
proactive risk management and reac-
tive project troubleshooting. These two
complementary tasks have different
purposes, employ different tools, and
require different skills. They are com-
patible, non-overlapping toolkits.
What is Project Troubleshooting?
Project troubleshooting is problem-
solving applied to projects. The project
troubleshooting toolkit consists of
those problem-solving heuristics (rules
of thumb) that are relevant to solving
project problems. Since project prob-
lems are highly multi-disciplinary,
project troubleshooting is executed
through high-performance teamwork
by the Tiger Teams.
An auto mechanic troubleshoots
an engine to find out why it will not
start. In this sense, troubleshooting is used
to characterize a deductive effort to discov-
er the root-cause of a problem. With some
problems, the solution is obvious once
the root-cause is understood (e.g.,
replace the fuel pump). Project trou-
bleshooting, however, is broader than
traditional troubleshooting, in that
effort is directed towards defining goals
and overcoming obstructions. Project
troubleshooting involves the total
problem-solving process. Particular
value will come from solution-finding
or creative problem-solving.
Project troubleshooting involves
high-performance teamwork because
project problems are highly multi-disci-
plinary and demand a diverse skill set.
Under the right conditions, teams can
also be adept at finding solutions. The
view here is that the existing project
groups are fundamentally competent,
but may need a temporary turbo-charge
in the form of high-performance team-
work and troubleshooting skills. This
temporary team is a Tiger Team.
Project troubleshooting is best
applied in a firefighting mode: a
focused, temporary, high intensity
effort for the purpose of aggressively
resolving a problem. A trouble-man-
agement effort can be triggered by sev-
eral factors, such as early-warning flags
6 • Project Management Journal December 2004
that exceed a threshold or earned value
analysis pointing to some unaccept-
able deviation from plan.
The Need for Project Troubleshooting
Several studies quantify the magnitude
and impact of project disruptions.
“Successful” — as used in Figure 1 —
means the project was completed on
budget and on schedule.
Success ratio
SUCCESSFUL
TROUBLED
Figure 1
In 1999, Keith Buchanan, United
States (U.S.) Assistant Secretary of the
Navy for Research Development and
Acquisition, conducted an earned
value audit of all of the Navy’s ACAT-I
and ACAT-II (the Navy’s highest prior-
ity) projects. In a letter sent to me on 9
September 2002, Mr. Buchanan stated
that less than one-third of the projects
studied were completed substantially
on-plan; however, the other two-thirds
of projects — despite including among
its team highly trained project man-
agers — were seriously disrupted.
The Massachusetts-based research
organization The Standish Group,
which conducts periodic audits of
information technology (IT) projects,
showed in a 2002 audit that only a
quarter of IT projects are successful. In
this report Standish researchers noted
a correlation between project success
and project size: Small projects (under
US$750,000) have higher success
rates; the largest IT projects, however,
are almost never completed on-sched-
ule and on-budget.
This size dependency is an impor-
tant observation. It suggests that large
projects are complex systems in the
complexity theory sense: Complex sys-
tems have an inherent level of unpre-
dictability. With large projects, this
unpredictability is the result of several
factors: many stakeholders and the
potential for divergent interests; long
timescales; vulnerability to external
environmental changes; and many
internal interfaces that could potentially
result in unexpected technical surprises.
These numbers are consistent with
commercial capital projects. According
to Lovallo and Kahneman (2003) and
Flyvbjerg, Bruzilius, and Rothengatter
(2003), unfounded optimism, com-
bined with political pressures from
many stakeholders, results in a 10 per-
cent success rate and an average 28 per-
cent budget overrun.
Consider a chart documenting,
over time, the percentage of troubled
U.S. Navy research and development
(R&D) contracts. Thirty years ago,
defense contractors had sound proj-
ect management tools under the
rubric systems engineering manage-
ment. Over the past 30 years, howev-
er, these tools have been only
marginally improved and primarily
in regards to risk management tools,
quality tools, earned value manage-
ment, and computerization. As
Figure 2 shows, these improvements
may have reduced the average num-
ber of troubled projects, but improve-
ments seem insubstantial because 70
percent of programs are still trou-
bled. Over the next 30 years, we can
expect that efforts such as the accept-
Perfection is impossible
100
90
80
70
% Troubled programs
60 Defense contracts
50
40
30
20
10
0
Today
Time
Figure 2
ance of Project Management
Professional (PMP) and OPM3® certi-
fications may provide further incre-
mental improvements. However,
without a revolutionary new
approach, such as project trou-
bleshooting, it is likely that the mag-
nitude of these changes would be less
than the improvements that have
occurred over the past 30 years.
Several observations can be drawn
from this information:
• After decades of developing
project management tools, par-
ticularly those created by the
U.S. Department of Defense,
the majority of large projects
remain troubled. These are very
dismal numbers.
• The largest projects with the
best and most experienced proj-
ect managers have the lowest
success rates, suggesting that
the underlying cause may
include concerns other than
training.
• The U.S. defense department’s
project management toolkits are
mature. This suggests that while
better proactive management
may improve outcomes, it is
unlikely to have a major impact,
such as improving the project
performance success rate from
33 percent to 66 percent.
• It is possible that a qualitatively
different set of tools may have a
substantial impact on overall proj-
ect performance. This is the poten-
tial of project troubleshooting.
Firefighter Analogy
The need for reactive project trou-
bleshooting is suggested through an
analogy with fire-management pro-
grams. Man has endeavored to control
fire since its discovery. Over millennia,
fire-management systems have become
quite refined. Today’s evolved fire-
management systems consist of a prac-
tical balance between two modes of
behavior: proactive and reactive.
Proactive fire-management has the
goal of avoiding fires. The tools consist
of fire codes, structure inspections, and
fire-resistant building materials and
construction methods. Training is pre-
scriptive: Managers are expected to rig-
orously follow well-defined policies
and procedures. The necessary person-
al skill sets are discipline, planning,
and attention to detail.
Reactive fire-management has the
goal of extinguishing fires. The tools
are physical: hoses, axes, ladders, etc.
Firefighting training is heuristic prob-
lem-solving: Firemen are exposed to
certain classes of fire and taught appro-
priate responses (Flyn, 1996). This is
called recognition-primed decision-
making (Klein, 1996). Firemen are
taught how to fight fires in the same
way that engineers are taught how to
solve problems. Firemen need the
skills to problem-solve: to think and
react under real-time pressure.
Table 1 shows that project man-
agement needs proactive and reactive
parts that are functionally similar to
fire-management. Proactive and reac-
tive management each has different
goals, requires different tools and
training, and demands different skills.
The proactive part consists of tradition-
al risk management programs. The
reactive part – project troubleshooting
– does not, however, presently exist in
project management. Project trou-
bleshooting is much broader than
root-cause analysis. Project managers
are forever fighting project problems,
yet there is no explicit training about
how to do this. Consequently, every-
one repeats the same mistakes and suf-
fers from the same classical
dysfunctions. In the absence of effec-
tive problem-solving, disruptions spi-
ral into crises that could have been
avoided.
No one would call firefighters
unnecessary because a good fire pre-
vention program exists. It is common
knowledge that in spite of having the
best fire prevention efforts, fires are
inevitable. And yet some senior project
managers believe that they do not need
troubleshooting because if they do
Fire-management
Proactive Prevention programs
Reactive Firefighters
Table 1: Proactive and reactive management
their job well, they will not encounter
trouble. The record shows that this pre-
sumption is simply not true.
Project management needs a prac-
tical balance between traditional
proactive risk management and reac-
tive project troubleshooting. Proactive
risk management minimizes the occur-
rences of anticipated problems to the
extent that it is practical to do so.
Project troubleshooting, implemented
through Tiger Teams, minimizes the
impact of all unexpected disruptions,
both the large and small.
Risk Management and Project
Troubleshooting: Complimentary Tools
Although today’s risk management
tools are developed to avoid problems,
even the most proactive tools have sev-
eral limitations.
• Some events are unknown and can-
not be anticipated. These bolt-out-
of-the-blue situations often cause
major disruptions to projects.
• From a cost-effectiveness perspec-
tive, preparing plans for every even-
tuality is impractical. Contingency
lists are made and lines are drawn;
but changing circumstances can
cause potential risks that occur
below the line (i.e., risk manage-
ment not funded). These can rap-
idly escalate into major
disruptions. High-scoring risk can
decline in importance, subse-
quently draining resources; new
risks can also appear.
• Contingency planning is based
on expectations, tools, and infor-
mation available at the time the
plans are made. From a practical
perspective, these plans influence
perception, blinding the user to
an evolving environment and
contributing to the user’s tunnel
vision (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001).
After a disruption has occurred,
these expectations can interfere
with solution-finding.
Project management
Risk management
Project trouble-shooting
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 7
 • In spite of the best-laid plans,
people make mistakes and com-
mit errors in their judgment.
Conflicting political and/or
business agendas often force
poor program decisions.
• Updating a risk mitigation plan
in response to changing project
conditions is more difficult and
less effective than the original
pre-program risk plan. Options
are constrained; commitments
have been made; money is burn-
ing at exceptional rates: There
emerges an urgent need for reac-
tive solutions that are not part of
traditional risk management.
Dealing with these events under
real-time pressure only results in
reactive problem-solving.
Risk is a healthy and necessary
consequence of worthwhile develop-
ment projects. A high-risk project
means that managers are pushing-the-
envelope to achieve high-performance
and produce high-value systems. A
low-risk project that is well within the
state-of-the-art generally yields low-
performance, dumbed-down systems.
The project manager’s goal should not
focus on avoiding risk; the project
manager should strive to manage risk
to prevent risk from disrupting the
project. The aim is not simply risk mit-
igation and risk avoidance; the manag-
er’s goal is the total management of
risk—proactively and reactively.
Traditional risk management is
proactive and based on the view that it
is possible in principle to plan a per-
fect project. Project troubleshooting
adds the reactive component, based on
the view that disruptive events, partic-
ularly with large long-term projects,
will occur no matter how carefully the
project is planned. Traditional risk
management and project trou-
bleshooting complement each other.
Together, these are powerful tools for
the total management of risk.
Advanced Teamwork Tools
High performance problem-solving
teams effectively tap into creative tal-
ent, integrate outside expert opinion,
find practical creative solutions, pro-
8 • Project Management Journal December 2004
vide authoritative advice, and motivate
the people who execute the project.
Creative problem-solving heuris-
tics work well with groups because the
presence of a group stimulates people
to think about things in a different
way. Stein (1974) points out — as oth-
ers have also noted — that individuals
can stimulate creativity. An idea
expressed by one person sparks a new
idea in the mind of a second person.
Neither individual would have devel-
oped the new idea in isolation: In this
case, creativity is a group process. If the
group is managed in a way that culti-
vates productive conflict, an open,
honest struggle to reconcile opposing
views emerges—from this comes a
high-performance Tiger Team.
The analysis skills required for
problem-definition are different than
the creative skills required for solution-
finding. Indeed, few people are very
good at both. We all know creative
people who do not have the patience
and discipline to be good managers.
The opposite also has some truth. The
discipline, decisiveness, and attention
to detail that make a good manager
can inhibit the ability to think outside
the box. Case studies reveal the impact
of this conflict as a difficulty perceiving
options and opportunities. However,
assembling a project team offers the
project manager the opportunity to
employ skills that they do not normal-
ly use during day-to-day operations.
Tiger Teams
The purpose of a Tiger Team is to help
project teams problem-solve. Tiger
Teams are distinguished by both a high
level of coordination and a deep inter-
personal dialog among the members.
Productivity comes from uninhibited
constructive conflict. One example of a
Tiger Team is ExCom, a group of senior
advisors that the late Robert F.
Kennedy, during his tenure as the U.S.
attorney general, led during the Cuban
missile crisis. The Manhattan Project
— the effort to develop the atomic
bomb — is another example, as are the
management groups that lead many
start-up companies.
For project troubleshooting, the
goal is to build strength in order to
provide existing teams with trou-
bleshooting skills. Lencioni (2002),
who provides an excellent description
of a high-performance team (he talks
about how it works and what it takes
to set it up), states that an effective
troubleshooting team exhibits five
characteristics:
1. Trust and respect: The team
functions as a unit; members
feel free to say what they think
without the threat of reper-
cussions from organizational
politics.
2. Uninhibited constructive conflict:
Total focus on content and ideas.
3. Commitment: Every team mem-
ber participates—no observers
and no holding back.
4. Accountability: Members hold
each other accountable for
results; this promotes a slacker-
free environment.
5. Common goals: Members place
common goals above individual
needs.
Tiger Teams are not work groups.
The purpose of a work group is to
exchange information and coordinate
activities. Working in a traditional
hierarchal structure, work groups are
most effective when the task can be
divided into well-defined functional
components with clean interfaces. For
this situation, work groups are far
more time efficient. A traditional staff
meeting is an example of a work group
experience.
Optimum Tiger Team Size
There is an optimum size for Tiger
Teams: While large groups bring much
experience to the problem, which
makes large group preferable, the size
of the group, as it grows, impairs com-
munications among team members.
Not everyone is fully engaged. A large
group impedes the intense, intimate
level of communication that Tiger
Teams need. As a result, the group
fractures and form subgroups. My
view is that the optimum size of a
problem-solving group depends on
each individual’s ability to process
information. Miller (1956) addressed
individual information processing
capability and found that people can
keep track of seven things. Fox (1989)
and Osborne (1963) have determined
that the optimum size of a facilitated
problem-solving group is between 7
and 10 active participants.
Participant Selection
Participant selection is important. The
task is to pack as much potential
power as possible into a limited group
size. All critical skill sets and problem
facets need to be represented. In addi-
tion, the Tiger Team needs to include
people responsible for executing the
results, thereby providing ownership
and motivation. Tiger Teams provide
project teams with the superb opportu-
nity to integrate the wisdom and expe-
rience of outside content experts.
Tiger Team Leadership
Effective leadership is a critical compo-
nent of an effective Tiger Team. There
are two basic forms, the traditional
group with a single leader and a group
with split leadership (client/referee).
The traditional group leader man-
ages both process and content. In
order for the team to be successful, it
requires a leader who is an exception-
ally talented individual. This type of
leader derives their authority from
their grasp of the project content. This
leader also possesses sufficient people
skills to motivate strong egos.
However, because traditional group
leaders are not trained in process, their
groups are susceptible to the classic
dysfunctions of small groups (domi-
nated by authority figures, minority
views ignored, premature solutions,
groupthink, focus drift, etc.). One of
the reasons Tiger Teams are so rare is
that this form of leadership is difficult
to effectively implement.
The client/referee form of project
leadership achieves higher project per-
formance by splitting the leadership
role into content and process man-
agers. Clients have primary responsi-
bility for the outcome: They participate
in content discussion, hold content
opinions, and manage content direc-
tion indirectly, through the referee. The
referee is a content-neutral facilitator
who is trained in small group process
and has a content-culture background.
This form has the distinct advantage of
enabling the client to manage outside
of his or her personal skill base. A ref-
eree can balance the client’s skills.
Environment
Moving the group to an off-site work
location eliminates distractions,
enables the group to focus on the prob-
lem at hand, and reinforces the impor-
tance of their task. If the emphasis is on
solution finding, an informal living
room environment works better than a
traditional conference room. Passive
observers sap energy and should be
avoided. Suitable audio/visual equip-
ment and note-keeping services should
be provided.
Group Processes
There are a number of standard exercis-
es that facilitators employ to dismantle
interpersonal barriers and encourage
the group to function as an intellectual
unit (Scannell, 1991). Group building
makes a real difference even with scien-
tific and engineering groups. To func-
tion effectively as an integrated unit,
participants need to respect certain
ground rules. These rules of engage-
ment are taught during the kick-off ses-
sion. Here are some examples:
In-and-out listening
Speaking in-headlines
Questioning for
understanding only
Structure offers:
How to ...
I wish ...
Build on the ideas of wishes
Respect roles
Assume value
Listen for newness
No (fatal) flying missiles
Staying loose until rigorous
conditions count
The importance of clearly defined
goals cannot be overemphasized. The
commitment to achieving these goals
must override the need for personal
recognition.
Groupthink
Groupthink is a classic dysfunction
of cohesive groups (Janus, 1971).
Groupthink is a leadership failure. The
pressure to conform, to be part of the
team, and to not make waves inhibits
healthy disagreement and critical
thinking. The result is that the group
confuses consensus with a solution
and takes strong positions that are
inconsistent with the external environ-
ment. Groupthink exhibits a number
of classic symptoms that can be used
to test for dysfunction and provide a
basis for mitigation (Beebe &
Masterson, 2000):
• Critical thinking is not encour-
aged or rewarded.
• Members believe the group can
do no wrong.
• Members are too concerned
about justifying their actions.
• Members apply pressure to those
who do not support the group.
• Members believe they have
reached a true consensus.
• Members are too concerned about
reinforcing the leader’s beliefs.
Problem-solving Tools
A problem is defined as an obstructed
goal. The project manager must con-
front disruptive events and problems
that demand resolution. Every problem
is defined by three characteristics: goal
state, present state, and obstructions.
These must align with the tasks
that project teams need to perform to
define the problem. In addition, the
hard-core problem-solving process
consists of two sequential stages: prob-
lem definition and solution-finding.
These stages must proceed in sequence.
It makes no sense to search for solu-
tions without first developing a clear
definition of the problem.
The first task is to define the prob-
lem. What this means is that teams
must explicitly state the problem. In
many cases, the project manager has a
pretty good idea of the problem cause
or the present state. In other situations,
the root-cause may not be as clear. In
either event, project managers must
verify the causal factors, the goals, and
the boundaries of the problem. In the
problem-solving community, this
problem definition task is often called
rational problem-solving. The processes
are similar to rational decision-making.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 9
 Problem solving tasks
1 Define the problem
A) Goal state
B) Present state
C) Obstruction
2 Find the Solution
A) Develop all possible options
B) Select the most appropriate
Figure 3
Rational problem-solving is a reduction-
ist task that individuals can effectively
perform.
Once the problem is defined, the
second step is to find solutions: to dis-
cover or, if necessary, to invent ways to
overcome the problem obstructions.
The problem-solving community
refers to this task as creative problem-
solving—a disciplined search for solu-
tions. This process consists of two
subtasks: First, to identify all possible
options; then, to evaluate and select
the most appropriate option. Creative
problem-solving often involves induc-
tive reasoning skills and is best con-
ducted by small groups.
The two core problem-solving
tasks are conceptually very simple.
Projects are complicated by the wide
diversity of problems that project
must solve. With some problems,
project managers must direct the
team’s effort towards defining the
problem. Once the problem is
defined, the solution is obvious. With
other problems, the definition is obvi-
ous and the project manager must
direct the team’s effort towards finding
solutions.
Kinds of Problems
Problems can be classified as either
well-defined or ill-defined. With well-
defined problems, all the effort goes
into finding solutions. With ill-defined
problems, teams must direct consider-
able effort into defining the problem.
An example of a well-defined
problem is the “Towers of Hanoi” in
Figure 4. These towers are composed of
10 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Rational problem solving
Creative problem solving
three same-sized pegs and six differing-
sized rings. The task is to move all six
rings from peg one to peg three as illus-
trated in the figure. The constraint is that
the rings must be moved one at a time,
and a large ring can never be placed on
top of a small ring. For the “Towers of
Hanoi,” the goal state, present state, and
obstruction are all obvious. All the effort
goes into finding the sequence.
Another example of a well-defined
problem is attempting to open a corked
wine bottle when there is no corkscrew,
as shown in Figure 5. The task is to
pour a glass of wine. The goal state,
present state, and obstruction are all
obvious. The whole challenge is getting
the wine out of the bottle. All of the
effort here is necessarily directed at
solution-finding, inventing some
method to get at the wine. For this
problem, the best solution may depend
Towers Of Hanoi
Initial state
Goal state
Figure 4
on the materials at hand. The solution
may need to be both novel and practi-
cal. This is the definition of creativity.
With ill-defined problems, most
of the effort is directed towards defin-
ing the problem. Once the problem is
defined, the solution may be obvious
and require no additional effort. An
example mentioned earlier is a
mechanic confronted with an engine
that will not start. The mechanic con-
ducts a root-cause analysis and discov-
ers that the fuel pump is broken. Once
the problem has been defined, the
solution, replacing the fuel pump, is
obvious. Ill-defined problems can be a
complicated mess requiring consider-
able effort to sort out what the real
problem is.
Problems can also differ by the
number of acceptable solutions. Some
problems have no solutions; some,
only one correct solution; and some,
many acceptable solutions.
Some problems require pure
deductive reasoning: the process of
logically drawing conclusions. An
example of classic deduction is a syllo-
gism, such as all S are M; all M are P;
therefore all S are P. The counterpart to
deductive reasoning is inductive rea-
soning: the process of thinking as
hypothesis testing. An example of pure
inductive reasoning is to find the gen-
eral rule that would enable prediction
of additional numbers in the
sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc....
Most practical problems require a
combination of inductive plus deduc-
tive reasoning. Consider a detective
attempting to solve a murder mystery
(Figure 6). Most of the detective’s
time is spent acquiring information
and searching for clues (deductive).
Every so often, the detective must
hypothesize a theory of the crime,
then test the theory against available
facts (inductive).
We have become very good at
reductionist problem-solving strate-
gies: Divide the problem into function-
al components with clean interfaces,
solve the components, and then
reassemble the problem into a com-
plete system. Unfortunately, not all
problems yield to a reductionist attack.
With some problems, the components
 Wine bottle problem
Figure 5
are so strongly interrelated that there
is no reasonable way to decompose
the problem, and the whole problem
must be solved at once. These are
what Gestalt psychologists call insight
problems.
An example of an insight problem
is the nine-dot puzzle, as shown in
Figure 7. Given nine dots, the task is to
connect all nine dots with four straight
lines without taking the pencil off of
the paper. The obstruction here is the
imaginary box around the nine dots.
Once one realizes that this box is not a
real constraint and that it is okay to
draw the lines outside the box, the
solution becomes "ah-ha!" obvious.
Lastly, we have problems that are
unexpected surprises in the sense that
there is nothing in our background
that provides guidance as to how to
solve the problem. Unexpected prob-
lems often yield to analogic reasoning
(Holyoak & Thagard, 1999). With ana-
logical reasoning, we think of a source
analog, something that is similar to the
unexpected problem, then look for
similarities and distinctions.
An example of analogic reasoning
is a traveler in an unfamiliar environ-
ment: Thrust into an exotic culture,
unable to speak the language, the trav-
eler makes sense of the new culture by
comparing it with their familiar cul-
ture, looking for similarities and dis-
tinctions. The comparison, while
imprecise, provides useful guidance.
While the conceptual core of the
problem-solving process (problem
definition and solution- finding) is
conceptually very simple, the vast array
of different problem types complicates
the process. Heuristic tools provide
some useful structure.
Rational Problem-solving Tools
Rational problem-solving tools are
heuristic tools that help define the
problem: the goal state, the present
state, and the obstructions. As previ-
ously stated, problem definition is the
first stage of the two-stage problem-
solving sequence.
Rational problem-solving heuris-
tics include root-cause analysis (Gano,
1999), problem specification (Kepner &
Tregoe, 1997), fishbone diagrams, and
constraint analysis, among other factors
(Robson, 1995). A popular application
of rational problem-solving heuristics
involves repairing failed production
lines and resolving technical anomalies
in the nuclear power industry. We have
many poorly documented legacy sys-
tems in use and root-cause analysis is a
good method for figuring out why the
systems are not working.
Today, problem-solving is not a
complete theory. From a practical
point of view, this means that we must
rely on heuristics, better known as
rules-of-thumb. Root-cause analysis is
an example of a rational problem-solv-
ing heuristic. Heuristics are partially
based on research and partially based
on practical experience. Sometimes a
heuristic yields a solution, sometimes
it does not. There is an art to produc-
Figure 6: Who-done-it
Nine-dot problem
Nine-dot problem
Successful solution
Figure 7
tively mapping the heuristic to the
problem. The person who can do this
needs to grasp both the strengths and
weaknesses of the heuristic plus the
content culture. Individuals skilled
with the heuristic, but lacking a sound
grasp of the culture, are often unsuc-
cessful. This is the reason problem-
solving heuristics are not more
commonly used with esoteric content.
A close corollary to rational prob-
lem-solving is decision-making, which
involves many of the same skills.
Applying rational decision-making
tools is not magical; rather, the diffi-
cult task is recognizing that a particular
decision is critical and warrants the
cost of a formal process.
Managers tend to be comfortable
with rational problem-solving because
the necessary skill sets — discipline,
logic, patience, attention to detail —
are consistent with the skills that make
them good managers. Creative prob-
lem-solving is a different story.
The Limits of Causal Analysis
Understanding the cause of a problem
is an important part of the rational
problem-solving process. Sometimes
understanding cause suggests an obvi-
ous solution; other times, it does not.
The fact that causal analysis fails does
not mean a solution does not exist.
Rather, a deliberate search for solu-
tions is necessary.
To illustrate the need for a delib-
erate search, consider the situation
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 11
of a drowning woman. To her, the
immediate need is a solution, rescue,
cure. The causal factors about how she
got into that situation are irrelevant. A
search for causal factors would delay
rescue—she should direct all of her
effort to finding a solution to the
problem at hand. From a big-picture
perspective, understanding cause and
introducing preventive measures
would reduce (but not eliminate) the
risk of drowning.
Creative Problem-solving Tools
Creative problem-solving tools are
heuristics directed at finding or inventing
solutions. Solution-finding or creative
problem-solving is the second stage of
the two-stage problem-solving sequence.
Brainstorming (Osborne, 1963),
invented by Alex Osborn in the 1950s,
is the best-known creative problem-
solving heuristic. While classic brain-
storming is appropriate for
lightweight, easily understood prob-
lems, it is based on a principle that has
withstood the test of time and now
forms the basis for many creative prob-
lem-solving heuristics—the separation
of ideation from judgment. The basic
principle is that judging inhibits the
development of ideas.
Creativity is defined as the ability
to produce solutions that are both
novel and practical. But creativity is
more than the ability to develop ideas.
We all know free spirits who are a
fountain of ideas but who lack the
sense for determining the difference
between ideas that are meaningful and
ideas that are not. The challenge is to
find the one percent of ideas that one
can develop into a practical response
to a problem. Combine that font-of-
ideas person with someone possessing
good analytical skills and mutual
respect and a very productive creative
team would result. This two-person
creative team is consistent with
Osborne’s separation of ideation from
judgment. Representative creative
problem-solving heuristics include
nominal groups (Rickards, 1988),
Synectics Excursions (Gordon, 1961),
and lateral thinking (DeBono, 1992).
In practice, creative problem-solv-
ing heuristics are most widely used to
12 • Project Management Journal December 2004
develop ideas for new consumer prod-
ucts and advertising campaigns. These
are shallow problems; the given state is
obvious and there is usually more than
one acceptable solution. The basic
principles of creative problem-solving
have broader applicability: These prin-
ciples are appropriate for using to
solve intellectual problems, where no
one person understands the whole
problem and it is necessary to assem-
ble a group of compatible experts to
provide the necessary understanding
to realize a solution. Applying creative
problem-solving to project trou-
bleshooting represents enormous
untapped potential. To tap this poten-
tial, it is necessary to exploit problem-
solving teams.
Case Studies
Since case studies anchor theoretical
work to the real world, and provide us
with data to test hypotheses, these
studies can help project teams identify
dysfunctions that teams must over-
come. Case studies also provide project
managers with real-world recommen-
dations to consider when solving
problems and help teams define their
need and shape their requirements for
project troubleshooting tools.
A primary case study is TB-23B, a
US$35 million firm fixed-price full-
scale engineering development contract
won by Martin Marietta in 1988. The
contractor failed to meet the self-noise
specification (a limit on acoustic noise
generated by boundary layer turbu-
lences). As a result, the Navy terminat-
ed the contract “for cause” with triple
damages. On appeal, the termination
was reversed to “for convenience” with
no damages. I interviewed the people
involved and reconstructed events; I
found that there was more than one
opportunity for both parties to create a
win-win resolution to this dispute. The
parties involved in this case, however,
did not see their opportunities.
The lessons that I learned from the
TB-23B study were supported by my
study of other projects: the Navy’s A-12
Stealth Bomber Program, which was
cancelled by the Office of the Secretary
of Defense and claimed US$5 billion
in damages (Stevenson, 2001); the
Union Pacific merger with Southern
Pacific that produced a 1997 freight-
car gridlock in the Western U.S.;
Boeing’s loss of the A-22 Joint Tactical
Fighter; the Manhattan Project; the
Apollo 13 capsule recovery; the space
shuttle Challenger disaster; the space
shuttle Columbia disaster; the Big Dig
... plus many personal discussions with
experienced project managers.
The Project Troubleshooting
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a speculation that can-
not be proven, only disproved by test-
ing it against data. My project
troubleshooting hypothesis is present-
ed from this perspective:
There is always something that can be
done to improve a disrupted program.
Case Study Lessons
The following general practical lessons
are more or less appropriate approach-
es for working on projects, depending
on the circumstances.
• First priority is triage, to con-
tain the damage. Establish pri-
orities, find out what is bleeding
most and fix it.
• Be aggressive. Stamp out prob-
lems early and thoroughly.
Beware of the danger of prob-
lems spiraling out of control.
• Clearly establish ownership.
Know who has ultimate respon-
sibility for solving the problem.
• Defer to expertise. Authority to
make decisions migrates to the
people with the most expertise,
regardless of rank (Weick &
Sutcliffe, 2001).
• Deliberately search for early
warning signals. Look for bad
news. A strong devil’s advocate
participating in early project
reviews would likely have an
impact.
• Search for the potential impact
of external events. While the fall
of the Berlin wall immediately
impacted many cold-war budg-
ets, projects often move too
slowly to appreciate impact.
• An organization in crisis does
what it knows how to do, and
 it does it more intensely. If the
organization is good at disci-
pline, planning, and oversight,
that is what it will do when a
crisis occurs, as opposed to
focusing its efforts on trou-
bleshooting.
• Trouble-shoot, don’t micro-
manage. There is strong pres-
sure for upper management to
seize control and make deci-
sions that lower-level people are
more competent to make.
Instead, management should
provide the project team with
project troubleshooting tools
and make sure the team follows
the problem-solving basics:
define the goal state, present
state, and obstructions.
• The real problem may not be
what it appears to be. The TB-
23B contractor, from the lowest
tech through the most senior
executive, was convinced that
they had a technical problem
and that they could solve it. In
fact, they had reached, if not
exceeded, state-of-the-art quality.
The more serious issue was cus-
tomer relations. This reinforces
the need to verify the goal state.
• Test for Groupthink. Both the
TB-23B contractor and the cus-
tomer seemed to suffer here.
The contractor was obsessed
with engineering issues.
Management wanted to hear
"we got it under control." That
is what they heard, even though
it was clear to lower-level man-
agers that this was not true. On
the customer side, the govern-
ment seemed to have unrealis-
tic expectations about the
enforceability of a fixed-price
contract.
• The most serious loss was
unforeseen opportunity. On
TB23B, the contractor never
thought to question the validity
of the specification. The con-
tractor never focused on
improving customer relations
and dialog. The contractor never
pressed for a side-by-side test
(new vs. old) that would have
been the best measure of per- Summary
formance. A disciplined search In spite of the best proactive planning,
for solutions can create options large long-term projects are subject to
and opportunities. inevitable, unexpected disruptions.
• Poor decisions hurt. There were a Project troubleshooting mitigates
number of decisions on TB-23B these disruptions by applying general
that were made without a full problem-solving tools to projects.
appreciation of the consequences. Since projects are multi-disciplinary
While these decisions hurt the proj- and have multiple stakeholder inter-
ect, none proved fatal. On other ests, project troubleshooting is most
projects and crises, poor decisions effectively implemented by Tiger
can be fatal. Everyone on the team Teams. Today’s management profes-
knows when a decision is impor- sionals have no more powerful tool
tant and the tools are well estab- than a committed team.
lished; it is a matter of their paying Tiger Teams are intensely man-
attention and using the tools. aged small groups of selected experts.
• Outside expert opinion needs to Their core performance comes from
be integrated. On TB-23B, the open and honest dialog, productive
contractor had superb expertise conflict, and the struggle to fit the
inside the corporate organization, problem pieces together to produce a
but not as part of the project unified whole.
team. These experts, therefore, The Tiger Team task is problem-
had little impact on the crisis: solving. Problem-solving consists of
Their advice was rendered at too two sequential stages. The first stage
high a level and was not integrat- is to define the problem: present
ed by the project team. state, goal state, and obstruction. The
THE PROJECT TROUBLE-SHOOTING HYPOTHESIS:
There is always something that can be done to improve a disrupted program.
The challenge is to find it.
The first task is for the project manager to establish clear goals.
The goal provides the basis for selecting Tiger Team participants.
All problem facets and stakeholder interests must be represented.
Test for Groupthink and tunnel vision.
These results will guide you in setting up the Tiger Team.
Keep the Tiger Team size to 7-10.
Most problem-solving and decision groups are too big for effective discussion.
Sequester offsite to focus the group and avoid distractions.
The Tiger Team meeting is organized around the two problem-solving tasks:
First explicitly define the problem: present state goal state, obstructions.
Then conduct a disciplined search for solutions.
Search, explore and develop all potential solutions before judging and selecting.
Do not latch onto a solution without thoroughly exploring all options.
Manage an open, honest, high- intensity discussion - no politics.
Everybody participates - no slackers.
The goal is honest consensus. The whole group integrates and makes decisions.
The group should not be an extension of the leaders opinion.
Use problem-solving heuristics as appropriate.
Consider a content neutral referee/facilitator to manage process and map heuristics
to the problem.
Table 2: Project troubleshooting main elements
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 13
second stage is to find solutions: first
develop all possible options, then eval-
uate and select.
Individuals (project managers)
can serve as capable analysts, working
out the problem definition stage.
Sometimes defining the problem is all
that is necessary to solve the problem.
Solution-finding, however, is best con-
ducted by Tiger Teams. It is the creative
solution-finding stage of project trou-
bleshooting that managers should find
most useful.
Case studies anchor project trou-
bleshooting to the real world. The pri-
mary lesson is that the most serious
dysfunctional trait of project teams is
an inability to see options and oppor-
tunities. This observation supports the
claim that managers should find the
solution-finding stage of project trou-
bleshooting to have the most value.
Traditional risk management is
proactive and based on the view that it
is possible to anticipate and mitigate
disruptions through planning.
Advocates extend this view, suggesting
that it is possible in principle to plan a
perfect project. This may be true for
short-term and well-defined projects.
However, large, complex, and long-term
projects with many stakeholders entail
unforeseen risks and events that cannot,
in principle, be predicted. It is impracti-
cal to pre-plan every possible contin-
gency. As the project evolves, managers
must problem-solve. They must react to
inevitable disruptions, respond to unex-
pected events, update management
plans, and re-scope the project.
Project troubleshooting through
Tiger Teams adds a disciplined reactive
component, based on the view that
disruptive events, particularly with
large long-term projects, will occur, no
matter how carefully the project is
planned. Traditional risk management
and project troubleshooting comple-
ment each other. Together, these two
approaches provide project managers
with powerful tools for the total man-
agement of risk.
References
Beebe, S. A., & Masterson, J. T.
(2000). Communication in small groups:
Principles and practices (6th ed.). New
York: Addison Wesley.
DeBono, E. (1992). Serious cre-
ativity: Using the power of lateral
thinking to create new ideas. New
York: Harper Business.
Flyn, R. (1996). Sitting in the hot
seat: Leaders and teams for critical
incident management. Chichester,
UK: Wiley.
Flyvbjerg, B., Bruzilius, N., &
Rothengatter, W. (2003).
Megaprojects and risk. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Fox, W. M. (1989). The
improved nominal group technique
(INGT). Journal of Management
Development, 8(1), 20-26.
Gano, D. L. (1999). Apollo root-
cause analysis. Yakima, WA:
Apollonian Publications.
Gordon, W. J. J. (1961).
Synectics - The development of creative
capacity. New York: Harper.
Holyoak, K. J., & Thagard, P.
(1999). Mental leaps: Analogy in cre-
ative thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Janis, I. L. (1971, November).
Groupthink. Psychology Today, 5,
43-46, 74-76.
Kepner, C. H., & Tregoe, B. B.
(1997). The new rational manager.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton.
Klein, G. (1996) The recogni-
tion primed decision (RPD)
model: Looking back, looking for-
ward. In C. Zsambok (Ed.),
Naturalistic decision making (pp.
285-292). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lencioni, P. (2002). The five
dysfunctions of a team. San
Francisco: Wiley.
Lovallo, D., & Kahneman, D.
(2003, July). Delusions of success:
How optimism undermines execu-
tives' decisions. Harvard Business
Review, 81, 60-71.
Miller, George A. (1956). The
magical number seven. Plus or
minus two: Some limits on our
capacity to process information. The
Physical Review, 63, 81-94.
Osborne, A. F. (1963). Applied
imagination. New York, NY: Scribner.
Rickards, T. (1988). Creativity
and problem solving at work.
Brookfield, VT: Gower.
Robson, M. (1995). Problem
solving in groups. Brookfield, VT:
Gower.
Scannell, E. E. (1991). Still more
games trainers play. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
The Standish Group. (2002).
Chaos report. West Yarmouth, MA:
The Standish Group International.
Stein, M. I. (1974). Stimulating
creativity, v2 group procedures. New
York: Academic.
Stevenson, J. P. (2001). The $5
billion misunderstanding: The collapse
of the Navy's A-12 Stealth Bomber pro-
gram. Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press.
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M.
(2001). Managing the unexpected:
Assuring high performance in an age of
complexity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

ALEX PAVLAK offers project troubleshooting training workshops, short-term consulting to disrupted
projects, and speaker services on the topics of project troubleshooting, problem-solving, teamwork, and
system synthesis. For the past 10 years, he has been investigating the origins and stimulation of high-
performance problem-solving teams. Under grants from National Science Foundation and the National
Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Pavlak has provided problem-solving support to scientific teams addressing
fundamental problems in basic science. Prior to 1992, Dr. Pavlak spent 25 years managing a wide variety
of research and development (R&D) projects. In response to the 1985 quiet Soviet submarine threat, Dr.
Pavlak led a team of scientists & engineers in developing a novel sonar system concept known as TAVA. A
variant of this concept is being built and sold today.

14 • Project Management Journal December 2004

AN EFFECTIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT-BASED
APPLICATION MODEL FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN
RENEWAL IN HONG KONG
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we describe how a project
management-based application model
was designed to implement sustainable
urban renewal projects in Hong Kong. The
model was based on project organization-
al structure, team structure, attributes of
team members, stakeholder manage-
ment, communication, and information
technology enablers. We conducted stud-
ies of other local and international urban
renewal cases to verify and fine-tune the
project management model identified in
this paper. From our study, we conclude
that the model used in Hong Kong can
improve the efficiency and effectiveness
of urban renewal project implementation.
Our findings e also provide a foundation
for applying the model at other locations,
after taking into account the respective
environments of these other locations.
Keywords: sustainability; urban renewal;
project management; stakeholder man-
agement; partnering; public participation
©2004 by the Project Management Institute
Vol. 35, No. 4, 15-34, ISSN 8756-9728/03
DENNIS HEUNG-FU MUI, Facilities Management & Building Services, Hong Kong Cyberport
Development Holdings Ltd, Hong Kong
SHANKAR SANKARAN, College of Management, Southern Cross University, Tweed Heads, Australia
Introduction
he capitalistic and consumer- and consumption-oriented nature of the
T Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) economy has led to urban
decay attributable to uncontrolled and unsustainable growth patterns dom-
inated by short-term economic indicators. In his 1999 policy address, the chief
executive of the Hong Kong SAR, The Honorable Tung Chee Hwa, mentioned:
“…Out of the existing 8,500 urban buildings which are over 30 years old, some
2,200 require redevelopment or extensive repair. Another 3,900 or so also require
repairs of varying scale. In ten years’ time, the number of buildings over 30 years
old will increase by 50%…” (Tung, 1999, p. 42).
With the city’s rapid rate of urban deterioration and an increasing outcry
from the community to the city to quicken the pace of its urban renewal effort,
the Hong Kong SAR government has decided to redevelop some 2,000 aging or
dilapidated buildings and improve 67 hectares of old and run-down urban areas
via a 20-year urban renewal program (Planning and Lands Bureau, 2001a). In
May 2001, as a way to address the public’s increasing concern, the Hong Kong
SAR established the Urban Renewal Authority (URA), which replaced, as a result
of its founding, the city’s Land Development Corporation (LDC) (an agency
formed in 1988 to deal with urban renewal). Though it was set up by the gov-
ernment under the authority of an ordinance, the URA operates as an
autonomous non-government commercial practice and is managed by a chief
executive officer (CEO) and a board of directors comprised of business profes-
sionals from the community: the government has no direct control of the URA’s
operations. The Hong Kong SAR’s motivation in founding the URA was to create
an organization that would expeditiously move forward the government’s aim of
establishing an effective urban renewal process. As a result, the URA operates with
more public accountability and transparency than the LDC; the method of oper-
ating was developed to meet the public’s call for a more open public process and
form of governing. With its founding, the government handed the URA the for-
midable task of completing 225 projects over the next 20 years. The cost involved
in meeting this goal is currently estimated at more than US$38 billion.
Recently, the Hong Kong SAR Government began focusing on sustainability as
a way to address Hong Kong’s future (Planning Department, 2000; Tung, 1998,
1999, 2000). The intention is to initiate a process of change in the built environment
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 15
September
that will foster widespread economic
development while simultaneously
conserving resources and promoting
individual, communal, and environ-
mental health (Maiellaro & Lerario,
2000). To accomplish this, the city’s
put forward a paradigm shift towards
sustainable construction that focuses
on durability, maintenance, adapta-
tion, refurbishment, new construction
technologies, and partnerships to
bring about a long-term solution for
achieving urban renewal (Augenbroe,
Pearce, & Kibert, 1998). Sustainability
development demands that project
managers adopt a holistic perspective
and a cradle-to-grave approach in
managing projects.
Moving an urban renewal effort
forward demands participation from a
diverse group of external and internal
stakeholders, each of whom have dif-
fering and sometimes conflicting inter-
ests in the process. These interests
include the government, community,
affected tenants, professionals (partic-
ularly those in the property develop-
ment field), private sector developers,
advocacy and political groups, internal
staff, and the management of the URA.
Most plans for implementing urban
renewal projects include the city’s
acquisition of property, re-housing of
affected tenants, planning the project
development (architectural and engi-
neering services), and managing con-
struction. In fact, effectively managing
the interface and interaction of these
elements with the involved stakehold-
ers and efficiently implementing the
urban renewal plan are key factors in
achieving project success. The URA is
given charge to manage the expecta-
tions of these stakeholders and main-
tain the attractiveness of urban renewal
investment.
The increasing frequency and
intensity of complaints about shoddy
workmanship in the finish of build-
ings — and the series of deficiencies in
piling works discovered in local gov-
ernment housing projects — have
undermined public confidence in local
development. This loss-of-confidence
has caused the loss of multi-millions
of dollars that were spent to rectify
these problems (Housing Authority,
16 • Project Management Journal December 2004
2000). These recent quality problems
highlight some pitfalls of the current
project management approach used in
the Hong Kong construction industry.
It appears that the Hong Kong SAR
must commit to a radical rethinking of
the conventional time-cost-quality
project management approach to over-
come the problematic issues outlined
above. The individuals involved in this
renewal effort need a much broader
perspective regarding time (full life-
cycle assessments), space (the objects
in its wider system settings), and cost
(sustainability-oriented cost metrics
rather than pure monetary-focused
metrics) if sustainability is to move
forward (Augenbroe et al., 1998). The
formation of the URA provides those
individuals involved with an appropri-
ately timed opportunity to study the
specific issues involved, such as the
effective and efficient implementation
of a large-scale urban renewal effort.
Against this background, the
Hong Kong SAR’s research focuses on
the development of an appropriate
project management application
model for its effective and efficient
implementation of urban renewal
projects. This research takes into con-
sideration the expectations and the
influence of external stakeholders,
cross-functional interfaces at different
project phases, and environmental
management issues. Based on this, we
formulated our research question:
How can the project management
body of knowledge and the practice of proj-
ect management enable the Hong Kong
SAR to effectively and efficiently imple-
ment urban renewal projects?
A project stakeholder’s determin-
ing the need for research hinges on
time constraints, the availability of
data, the nature of decision to be
made, and the value of business
research information in relation to its
cost (Zikmund, 2000). But since urban
renewal is a long-term mission, stake-
holders need not consider time a con-
straint for their research. Moreover,
since urban renewal work in the Hong
Kong SAR has occurred since 1988,
historical data about how previous
projects were managed is readily avail-
able. Project stakeholders should have
little difficulty soliciting the data and
information they need in researching
their urban renewal efforts. The strate-
gic and tactical nature of urban renew-
al warrants a need for business
research because a new project man-
agement approach will have a signifi-
cant effect on the operation of the
URA. Given the scale of the urban
renewal effort, and the associated
multi-billion-dollar cost over the next
20 years, the benefits of realizing this
plan to create the Hong Kong SAR a
sustainable competitive advantage will
undoubtedly bring it prestige in terms
of finance, public confidence, and
maintenance. The cost involved in con-
ducting this research is small in com-
parison to the expected benefits
derived from this effort.
Although the specific social, eco-
nomic, legal, and political situations
may differ in each of the districts slat-
ed for redevelopment, the outcome of
the Hong Kong SAR’s research will pro-
vide other cities in the region with the
insight they need to realize similar
efforts for addressing serious urban
dilapidation. The relevance of this
information to help other communi-
ties further justifies the time and cost
of this research.
Literature Review
Figure 1 shows the concept map for
the literature review presented on the
next page.
The definition and objectives of
urban renewal will assist in setting the
boundary of the Hong Kong SAR’s
research. The two parent disciplines —
urban renewal and project manage-
ment — are the background for Hong
Kong SAR’s applying project manage-
ment body of knowledge to urban
renewal projects. In light of our litera-
ture search, we formulated a project
management application model for
urban renewal projects.
We found that the definition of
urban renewal is a contested one: there
exist several definitions proposed by
many researchers, including Atkinson
and Moon (1994), Blackman (1995),
McCarthy (1999), Pacione (1997), and
Zielenback (2000). For the purpose of
this research, we adopted the definition
 2001, after a public consultation on
sustainability, the Hong Kong SAR gov-
Definitions and objectives
of urban renewal
ernment asserted sustainable develop-
ment as one of the main objectives in
its urban renewal strategy (Planning
and Lands Bureau, 2001b). Possible
definitions of urban sustainability has
been proposed by Breheny (1992),
Parent discipline 1 - Parent discipline 2 -
Elkin, McLaren, and Hillman (1991),
urban renewal project management
Maclaren (2001), and Williams,
Burton, and Jenks (Eds.) (2000).
For the purpose of this research,
we defer to the Post Conference
Immediate discipline - Report’s (2000) definition of sustain-
application of project management body able development: the ability of an
of knowledge to urban renewal projects urban area and its region to continue
to function with a quality-of-life that is
desired by the community, without
restricting the options available to
Project management application model
for urban renewal projects present and future generations and
without causing adverse impacts inside
and outside the urban boundary.
Figure 1: Concept map of the literature review Within the parent discipline of
urban renewal, our literature review
used by the Hong Kong SAR, which • To achieve more efficient land covered the following specific aspects:
states that urban renewal is the plan, use in the dilapidated areas and • The role of sustainable building
process, and program through which to make such land available to construction in urban renewal;
environmental-quality redevelopment meet various developments. • The value of an integrative and
occurs in large derelict urban areas via • To prevent the decay of the built multi-disciplinary project approach;
massive demolition and clearance. In environment by promoting the • The role of cultural heritage in
contrast to in-situ urban redevelop- maintenance and improvement urban renewal;
ment schemes, which are smaller and of individual buildings, in • The value of stakeholder man-
accomplish only limited improvement regards to structural stability, agement in the urban renewal
of urban environments, urban renewal integrity of external finishes, and process.
efforts are large scale and seek to fire safety, as well as to provide
improve the overall urban environ- opportunities for improving the Within the parent discipline of
ment through comprehensive plan- physical appearance and condi- project management, we found that
ning, incurring in the process much tions of the built environment. urban renewal literature focused on:
financial cost and a degree of social • To preserve buildings, sites, and • Project management body of
disruption and structural redefinition. structures of historical, cultural, knowledge;
The Hong Kong SAR’s Planning and or architectural interest. • Stakeholder issues in project
Lands Bureau (2001a) recognizes that management;
the URA is putting forward a people-cen- Over the last decade, cities world- • Partnering in projects.
tered approach to redeveloping the wide have embraced, with renewed • Organizational structure for
Hong Kong SAR. The URA’s objectives interest, urbanism as a concept for cre- project management;
for this effort, as stated explicitly in its ating sustainable environments. In • People issues in project man-
ordinance (Hong Kong SAR doing so, city leaders also recognize agement;
Government, 2001), are: the need to conserve resources. • Communication management
• To improve the standard of hous- In the Hong Kong SAR, Chief in projects.
ing and the built environment and Executive Tung Chee Hwa, in his 1998
the layout of built-up areas by and 1999 policy addresses, stressed the Urban renewal projects are tempo-
replacing old and dilapidated importance of the city’s need for a bet- rary endeavors undertaken to improve
structures with new development ter environment, cleaner water, cleaner derelict urban areas. Each project is
that is properly planned and where air, less waste, and more efficient use of distinguished by its unique characteris-
appropriate, provides adequate energy resources. These factors, he tics and connected activities. These
transport and other infrastructure said, will make Hong Kong SAR a truly projects, which are completed in an
and community facilities. sustainable city (Tung, 1998, 1999). In environment of conflict, must adhere

December 2004 Project Management Journal • 17

to designated timeframes, defined
budget, and prescribed specifications.
Therefore, to accomplish such projects,
developers should use the project
management body of knowledge to
ensure the efficient and effective
implementation of urban renewal
efforts. This information will enable
project managers to meet the project
requirements in light of the stakehold-
ers’ needs and expectations. For not-
for-profit organizations like the URA,
this means that stakeholders will want
the organization to deliver the desired
outcomes within the defined econom-
ic constraints.
Cohen and Graham (2000) sug-
gest determining project success by
studying the way in which the project
helps the organization implement
organizational strategy and achieve
customer satisfaction, its strategic
intent, an external focus on customers,
and the entire life cycle of projects.
Cooke-Davies (2001) recognizes that
the direction of project management
is shifting focus from the management
of a project to the management of
interrelated projects. Project manage-
ment, in the context of an urban
renewal effort, should focus on the
management of the interrelated proj-
ects from a district perspective and the
creation of synergies among the differ-
ent districts.
Based on the key theoretical issues
that we reviewed in our literature
search, we found that the immediate
discipline of project management
application is narrowly focused on the
issues of design, production, and
requirement management, as well as
organizational structure, leadership,
communication, and management of
people.
The URA aims to manage its
urban renewal projects to ensure the
kind of ownership required for suc-
cessful implementation. We found
that the integrated and multi-discipli-
nary requirements for the URA’s real-
izing a sustainable urban environment
may be most favorably achieved by
using matrix — or projectized — types
of organizational structures comprised
pure functional type. For the manage-
ment of multiple projects, we prefer a
projectized type of organization struc-
ture to a matrix type. In order to use
such a structure, organizations will
need professionals from engineering,
architectural, property, planning and
quantity surveying, as well as individ-
uals from corporate communications
and social services teams, who can
handle the such concerns as liveli-
hood of the disadvantaged, social life
of the elderly after relocation, and
compensation packages, as expressed
by the different stakeholders including
the media, affected residents, and
local district boards. The URA could
design a projectized structure to han-
dle multiple regional projects; such a
structure would allow the URA to effi-
ciently and effectively address the dif-
ferent concerns of the diverse
communities affected by this urban
renewal effort. Figure 2 shows the pro-
posed project organization for a tar-
geted area.
The first formulated research issue
we recognize relates to the effect that
the proposed organizational structure
will have on the Hong Kong SAR’s
implementation of its urban renewal
initiative. This structure is comprised
Development project director
TEAM 1* TEAM 2*
Project (Setup similar
manager to TEAM 1)
Planning Architectural
professional professional
team team
Remark: *Two teams are shown for indicative purposes, the number of teams will depend on the
projects involved.
of integrated and multi-disciplinary
teams, corporate communications
teams, and social services teams, as
well as an informal project manage-
ment community under the leadership
of a development project director.
Research Issue 1 (RI 1): What results
will a projectized organizational struc-
ture produce when implemented in each
of the targeted districts?
Since the scale required to com-
plete an urban renewal project in the
Hong Kong SAR is immense, we
believe that any concerns regarding
the uncertainty of life-after-the-project-
ends is not an issue because the proj-
ect team can continue working on
other new urban renewal projects
after completing the current one. We
regard the risk of resource duplication
a minimal concern because each dis-
trict has different characteristics and
each district demands a distinct solu-
tion devised through a dedicated
team effort. To resolve other potential
disadvantages that could result from
developing and using a projectized
organizational structure, we propose
that the structure of the project head-
quarters should include:
Corporate Social
communication services
professional professional
team teams
Quality
Property Engineering
surveying
professional professional
professional
team team
team
Project management community

of an array of specialized functions, as

opposed to structures that are of a Figure 2: Proposed project organization for a targeted district

18 • Project Management Journal December 2004

 • A project support group that for-
malizes the organization’s oper-
ational procedures and
consistency standards.
• A project management commu-
nity that interacts with the peo-
ple and organizations involved
to minimize ineffective alloca-
tion of resources and “projectitis
disease” (a social phenomenon
involving inappropriately
intense loyalty to the project).
• A project auditing team that
compiles informed and intelli-
gent answers to questions about
strategic issues and stakeholder
interest.
• A functional specialist advisory
group that acts as the center for
excellence by administering
skills training for specialists and
providing specialists with proj-
ect-related advice, on an as-
needed and as-required basis, to
help them fulfill their project
responsibilities.
Figure3 illustrates the proposed
setup for URA’s headquarters.
Research Issue 2 (RI 2): How will a
headquarters-based organizational struc-
ture — which includes a formal project
management community, a project audit-
ing team, a project support group, and a
functional specialist advisory group —
support each targeted district’s projec-
tized organizational structure?
We propose that a detailed organi-
zational structure will enable the URA
to manage the engineering, architec-
tural, property, planning, and quantity
surveying professionals — as well as
the knowledge specialists involved —
and motivate these individuals as it
solicits their commitment to the proj-
ect. To accomplish this, we suggest a
flattened hierarchy. Such a setup can
enhance communication within the
team; it also demands that project
leaders, as well as the manager of these
leaders, possess the appropriate attrib-
utes to manage internal and external
stakeholders. Under this system, the
project directors, as well as the project
managers, will serve as generalizing
specialists. Besides possessing an
understanding of urban renewal devel-
opment, these individuals should pos-
sess the knowledge needed to address
environmental and sustainability
issues. Similarly, team members must
also understand the ins-and-outs of
sustainable urban development.
Research Issue 3 (RI 3): What are the
results of the project team’s performance
when the team is organized according to
a flattened hierarchical structure with
team members possessing sustainability
knowledge and project managerial lead-
ers serving as generalizing specialists?
To develop urban renewal projects
that are sustainable, quality-oriented,
and customer-focused, the URA must
engage all of its external professionals
and stakeholders at the outset, as
opposed to adopting a sequential and
independent project approach. The
URA should establish a partnering
relationship with its external forces:
each district’s corporate communica-
tions team should establish district
advisory committees and communities
with local people to encourage true
community participation and to
acquire the knowledge needed to
ensure that each community’s heritage
is conserved.
Top management team
Finance and Project
administrative auditing
team team
Other business
supporting
functions
(e.g. IT, human
resources)
Remark: The project support group and the functional specialist advisory group are also members of the
project management community.
Figure 3: Proposed organizational structure for headquarters of Urban Renewal Authority
Research Issue 4 (RI 4): What results
are achieved from involving stakehold-
ers — from the outset and throughout
the duration of each urban renewal
project — in the partnering relationship
and the formation of the district adviso-
ry committees and communities?
The URA needs an efficient and
effective communications system to
distribute project information to all of
its external and internal stakeholders.
To ensure organizational consistency,
the URA must organize an internal
communications system to support
project teams deployed to different
localities. Besides the organizational
support from the project support
group and project management com-
munity, the URA needs information
technology enablers. We suggest devel-
oping — to facilitate the distribution
of the type of information required to
maintain communications — a com-
puterized project management infor-
mation system that offers varying
levels of security access. For example,
an executive information system, com-
prised of sensitive financial data with
secured access limited to senior man-
agement, would provide project teams
with key project information and pro-
mote information sharing. This system
could also link to a Web site that
Project Project
support management
group community
Functional
District
specialist
project
advisory
teams
group
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 19
 Research method Form of research question
Experiment how, why
Survey who, what, where, how many, how much
Archival analysis who, what, where, how many, how much
History how, why
Case study how, why
Source: adapted from Yin (1994)
Table 1: Three conditions for determining the appropriate type of research method
would provide the general public with
access to project information; the
intention in creating such a system is
to engage the public and promote gov-
ernment transparency, both of which
would help encourage and garner
community support for the projects.
Research Issue 5 (RI 5): What results
are realized when information technolo-
gy enablers establish a computerized
project management information system
that is interlinked to a public-access
Web site showing visitors project infor-
mation that is also communicated to the
other stakeholders?
The following section describes the
methodology we chose to address the
above-mentioned research issues and to
resolve the above-mentioned research
questions.
Methodology
We reviewed two broad and dichoto-
mous areas of thought that reflected
our research paradigm:
• Methods to test hypothetical-deduc-
tive generalizations (i.e., starting
with a well-defined hypothesis and
from this seeking to prove or dis-
prove the hypothesis): This thesis
allows the project team to organize
information under the heading
“positivist” (Perry & Coote, 1994).
• Methods (i.e., a naturalistic
approach drawing on induction
and seeking to understand experi-
ence): This exploratory approach,
which is open to new informa-
tion, organizes information under
the term “interpretive” (Perry &
Coote, 1994).
20 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Requires control over
behavioral events?
yes
no
no
no
no
Positivist methods are often based on
scientific processes of deduction and
formulate theories as a result of deduc-
ing empirical consequences from large
research samples and observing the
validity of research practices.
The research issues that we identi-
fied did not fit a number of the criteria
that characterizes a positivist approach.
Our investigation turned up no envi-
ronmental controls, no control vari-
ables, and no control groups. However,
these characteristics matched those in
the interpretive paradigm, which con-
siders words, rather than numbers, as
the major elements of data. We studied
the entire situation in order to under-
stand that the research needed an
inductive focus emphasizing theory
building and relying on subjective
information about different views that
were obtained through multiple meth-
ods. Based on this information, we
adopted the interpretive approach.
Yin (1994) proposes three condi-
tions that relate to five major research
strategies in the social sciences: experi-
ments, surveys, archival analysis, histo-
ries, and case studies. Table 1 illustrates
Yin’s three conditions for determining
an appropriate research method (i.e.,
the type of research question posed,
the extent of control an investigator
has over actual behavioral events, and
the degree of focus on contemporary,
as opposed to historical, events).
Yin’s research issues are of a causal
(explanatory) type and likely require
the use of case studies, histories, and
experiments as the preferred research
methods. These research issues relate
to the operational links that are traced
over time, as opposed to issues that
Focuses on
contemporary events?
no
yes
yes/no
no
yes
look at mere frequencies or incidence.
Yin’s research also focuses on contem-
porary events and has no control over
behavioral events. Therefore, we decid-
ed that this case study was the appro-
priate method.
Selection and justification of case design
We considered several options for
studying the research issues identified.
Table 2 summarizes these options.
URA represents a single-case situa-
tion because its urban renewal strategy
is unique for coping with the specific
local conditions and is the only one
that meets all of the conditions of the
theory. However, researchers could use
cross-case analysis to research other
overseas cases (Yin, 1994). Using
cross-case analysis allows for more
mature theory building because of
replication. Stake (1994) suggests that
its relevance rather than its capacity to
represent is the criterion for case selec-
tion. Therefore, we did not recom-
mend option 1 (single case).
Option 2, on the other hand,
required an in-depth study of overseas
cases similar to that of the Hong Kong
SAR case. The accessibility and sensitiv-
ity of information acquired through
option 2 might pose problems in
regards to the richness in accuracy,
quality, and maturity of the informa-
tion; the reliability of the case studies
shows the need for cross-case analysis.
Options 3 and 4 require less in-
depth studies of overseas cases, but this
advantage might also have accessibility
and sensitivity of information prob-
lems. We found that using projects as
sub-units might not be as advantageous
as using functional departments as sub-
Option Type of case
study design
1 Single case
2 Detailed multiple cases
3 Embedded case
focusing on projects
4 Embedded case
focusing on functional
departments
Source: developed for this research
Table 2: Case design options
units because all of the involved proj-
ects were conducted according to simi-
lar methods. On the other hand, each
functional sub-unit included different
levels of people who might have varying
experience in — and perspectives on —
project implementation and the
research issues.
These sub-units could provide sig-
nificant opportunities for extensive
analysis that would enhance the project
team’s insights into the Hong Kong SAR
case. Furthermore, the team could also
conduct cross-case analysis for some of
the research issues involving the over-
seas case studies. Hence, we selected as
our case study methodology the embed-
ded case study that focuses on the Hong
Kong SAR’s functional departments,
focusing less on the in-depth studies of
overseas cases.
As a general guide, our definition
of the unit of analysis (and therefore of
the case) is related to the way we
define the initial research issues. That
is, the research question usually deter-
mines the unit of analysis in case-
based research (Carson, Gilmore,
Gronhaug, & Perry, 2001). Using the
above case design, we determined that
the appropriate unit of analysis for this
research was the entire urban renewal
organization.
Criteria for case selection and their numbers
We used purposive selection of cases.
This method of selection is based on
information-rich cases chosen for in-
depth study (Patton, 1990). Eisenhardt
(1989) pointed out that the random
selection of cases is neither necessary,
Hong Kong SAR case study
detailed/in-depth study
detailed/in-depth study
embedded case studies with projects as sub-units
embedded case studies with functional
departments as sub-units
nor even preferable, because this
method of selecting cases uses replica-
tion logic rather than sampling logic
and involves either literal replication
predicting similar results or theoretical
replication producing contrary results,
both of which are used for predictable
reasons. We selected literal replication
for this research to produce a cross-case
analysis with the overseas cases. Our use
of theoretical replication in contrasting
cases would have made a valuable con-
tribution to this study, and we consid-
ered this approach. However, our using
a contrasting-case approach raised a
number of issues. First, we knew that an
inefficient or ineffective project manage-
ment model would require definition.
Second, we realized that the practical
issue of identifying those actual cases is
difficult: overseas urban renewal organi-
zations might be reluctant to describe
and disclose their failures or problems;
if this were to occur, such information
would be unobtainable. Finally, we
found the criteria for determining the
inefficiency and ineffectiveness of
implementing urban renewal projects
too difficult to work out.
We designed an embedded case so
as to provide significant opportunities
for extensive analysis and enhance our
insights about the Hong Kong SAR
case. We selected the functional depart-
ments of URA as our sub-units. The
staff of these departments was
involved in handling the local urban
renewal projects; they would thus have
different experiences and perspectives,
as well as insights, regarding the
research issues.
Overseas cases studies
—
detailed/in-depth study of each case as for
the Hong Kong SAR case
less in-depth studies for each case
less in-depth studies for each case
The criterion for selecting cases,
and for the number of cases selected,
depends upon the purpose of the
research and the results that the
research effort will garner. Patton
(1990) explains that the validity, mean-
ingfulness, and insights generated from
a qualitative inquiry have more to do
with the information-richness of the
cases selected and the observational and
analytical capabilities of the researcher
than with sample size. This means that
the issue of information-richness is fun-
damental to deciding on the number of
cases, rather than the traditional issue of
sample size. In sum, we have found that
the number of cases is not critical.
However, what is critical is the selection
of cases. Our research has focused our
attention on selecting relevant embed-
ded sub-units and overseas cases that
are based on information-richness
instead of number.
We have found that the case selec-
tion criteria fell into three categories,
each based on the research design:
• Criteria for selecting sub-units in
the embedded case of the Hong
Kong SAR.
• Criteria for selecting individual
respondents for the embedded
sub-units.
• Criteria for selecting overseas cases.
Table 3 tabulates the criteria for
these three categories. We formulated
this criteria based on the information-
richness that the informants or cases
provided. For example, we positioned
the functional groups in the project
value chain to ensure that their roles
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 21
 Case Selection Criteria

Embedded sub-units within the • the functional groups have been involving in the value-chain of urban renewal projects.
Hong Kong SAR case

Individual respondents within
embedded sub-units of the
Hong Kong SAR case
• respondent has management responsibility for urban renewal projects and/or has been
led in a ‘team’;
• respondent is a professional in one of the functional groups constituting the value chain of urban
renewal project;
• respondent has participated in the present or past urban renewal projects in which he/she is a
member the ‘team’;
• respondent has a general overview of urban renewal projects; and
• respondent can provide specific additional knowledge.

Overseas cases for cross • core business is urban renewal;

case analysis
• a non-commercial organization in which profit-making is not the main objective;
• urban renewal strategy is focusing on long-term;
• replication logic can be applied for some of the research issues;
• urban renewal projects have been completed by adopting the issues of the model identified for
this research;
• they are developed countries with considerable experience in urban renewal; and
• information is readily accessible.

Source: developed for this research

Table 3: Criteria for selection of cases

and responsibilities were relevant to
the proposed project management
model.
We selected respondents from dif-
ferent levels of the sub-units to ensure
that we gathered the team members’
views and opinions on project team
structure, attributes of members, com-
munication, stakeholder management,
and so forth. In selecting overseas
cases, we would look for similar oper-
ational backgrounds as the Hong Kong
SAR case. Figure 4 below illustrates the
case study procedure that we adopted
for our research.
Our procedure involved selecting
functional groups for the embedded
cases, individual respondents from
each of the functional groups, and
overseas cases for cross-case analysis.
The respondents or informants select-
ed for interviews possessed consider-
able knowledge and experience in the
urban renewal process. We invited
members from the seven major func-
tions of the Hong Kong SAR’s project
development — planning, re-housing,
property acquisition, construction
management, contract management,
corporate communication, and corpo-
rate services — to participate in our
study. We conducted personal inter-
views that were designed to facilitate
feedback, probing, and high participa-
tion. We completed 13 interviews and
investigated 18 overseas cases. Of these
overseas cases, only 10 cases satisfied
the criteria for overseas cases selection.
Table 4 summarizes these cases.
Our procedure for conducting case study
analyses
As part of our research, we analyzed
the embedded units of the Hong
Kong SAR case and examined each of
the embedded units for research
issues. We then analyzed by patter-
matching — or explanation-building
— at the single-case level. We com-
pared the patterns or explanations
for the Hong Kong SAR case in rela-
tion to the overseas cases, following
the replication mode for multiple
cases. From this analysis, we devised
our conclusions. One of the most
important principles involved the
mapping of questions back to the
research issues. Below we outline the
process we used to conduct our
research:
• Obtaining the research issues.
• Reviewing the related questions.
• Reading and noting the relevant
responses observed.
• Repeating this process for each
respondent, case, and research
issue studied.
Quality of research
Table 5 shows the methods we used to
enhance the quality of this case study
research.
Results
Research Issue 1
This case study provided data about
sustainable development for urban
renewal and included information
on a regional team approach, the
organizational structure, and the
integrated/multi-disciplinary team
composition.
In the Hong Kong SAR embedded
case study, we found that sustainable
development was unanimously con-
sidered one of the main urban renewal
objectives and was the means to
resolve urban dilapidation on long-
term basis. We found similar findings
in eight of the overseas cases.

22 • Project Management Journal December 2004


Actual case selection
Design of research instrument
Pilot interviews
Refinement of interview questions
Hong Kong SAR case
Interviews for each embedded sub-unit i.e.
functional group (multiple informants of
different grades and documentation
for triangulation)
Answers to the questionnaire and individual
interview report (to be endorsed by the
respective informant to establish
construct validity)
Embedded sub-unit report for each
functional group based on the individual
interview reports
Hong Kong SAR case-study evaluation
and analysis based on the embedded
sub-unit reports
Cross case evaluation and analysis
Figure 4: Case study procedure
This case study also showed that a
regional team approach would pro-
duce effective results when all of the
sub-units contributed to the Hong
Kong SAR’s implementation of an
urban renewal project. We found five
overseas cases adopting a similar
approach for their urban renewal
projects.
Although this study favored a pro-
jectized-type of organizational struc-
ture, it revealed that the scoring for this
type was not overwhelmingly higher
than the matrix type (7.86 versus 6.37
Overseas cases
Case studies
(Information via web site and e-mail
communication whenever necessary)
Case studies report for each
selected overseas case
out of 10). The functional type of struc-
ture was the least favored; it scored
very low (2.02 out of 10). Out of the
five cases using a regional team
approach that we studied, we found
that three used a projectized structure;
the other two used a matrix structure.
The majority of the sub-units in
the Hong Kong SAR case thought that
a multi-disciplinary and integrated
professional team was the effective way
to enhance the team’s accomplishing
sustainable designed environment,
which as previously mentioned, is one
of the main objectives of the urban
renewal effort. Four of the overseas
cases adopted this approach in imple-
menting other urban renewal projects.
A majority of the Hong Kong
SAR’s sub-units favored a regional cor-
porate communications team because
it focuses on the region. One sub-unit
pointed out that only this team should
handle the Hong Kong SAR’s commu-
nications with the regional communi-
ty, while matters such as corporate
affairs and images should be handled
centrally. Such job specification
appears to be in line with the benefits
of working in a regional communica-
tion team, as cited by a majority of the
sub-units. Two overseas cases showed
that regional communication teams
likewise served the communities in the
urban renewal region.
We found mixed opinions con-
cerning the inclusion of a social servic-
es team in the regional urban renewal
project team. The main concerns
voiced focused on the team’s credibili-
ty, independency, and conflict of
accountability. One of the overseas
cases included a social services team
that served the affected community.
In the Hong Kong SAR embed-
ded sub-unit case study, we found
that the informal project manage-
ment community was considered
effective to resolve inconsistency
among the different project teams
within the region. Other relevant
findings for enhancing the effective-
ness of the team included formal and
regular meetings for the community,
inclusion of corporate communica-
tions and social services teams in the
community, and encouraging public
interaction and a transparent culture
offering open discussions. Two of the
overseas cases featured formal project
management communities that
enhanced communications between
the project teams within the same
region.
Although studies showed mixed
opinions in regards to the social serv-
ices teams, the majority of the sub-
units in the Hong Kong SAR case
believed that this approach would
improve the urban renewal effort and
provide an efficient and effective
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 23
 Case Designation Case Brief Description

HONG KONG SAR CASE

EMBEDDED SUB-UNITS

ES-1 Planning Division Identification and preparation of development proposal and schemes, the preparation of
master layout plans and the submission of plans and applications to government
authorities to obtain approval

ES-2 Property Division Valuation, acquisition of properties, liaison and negotiation with the government on land
grants/exchanges and associated premium assessment and submission of resumption
application to government

ES-3 Housing and Site clearance including rehousing, compensation for occupiers, management of project
Estate Management properties and rehousing properties
Department

ES-4 Project Project management for implementation of urban renewal projects

Management
Division

ES-5 Contract Contract administration, checking and monitoring of specification and project deliverables,
Management all tendering activities, procurement, cost planning and control, technical audit, legal and
Division contractual advice

ES-6 Corporate Receiving/issuing information to the public, promoting healthy understanding of the
Communication corporation’s achievements amongst the younger generation, handling complaints
Department

ES-7 Corporate Quality management, identification of improved management techniques, promotion of the
Services Division application of information technology
OVERSEAS CASES
OC-1 Australia Multi-billion dollar program to revitalize one of the main city’s inner suburbs
OC-2 Singapore Statutory board responsible for Singapore’s physical development
OC-3 UK Implementation of the Renewal Area concept introduced by the Local Government and
Housing Act 1989 and promotion of sustainability
OC-4 USA Revitalization of a 30-block area in a city
OC-5 USA Urban renewal authority in a city
OC-6 Denmark Regeneration of an old market area in a city
OC-7 Denmark Urban renewal work carried out in a city aiming at ecologies and sustainability
OC-8 Austria Urban renewal organization founded by a city-government
OC-9 Ireland Revitalization of the historic city center of a city
OC-10 Spain Urban renewal of the central district of a city

Source: developed for this research

Table 4: Summary of the selected cases

means for completing the project, as ded sub-units found that the for-
compared to the approach adopted by mal project management com-
the current setup. munity was effective in resolving
major potential problems relat-
Research Issue 2 ed to inconsistency, resource
Our research with the embedded allocation, uneven workload,
sub-units in the Hong Kong SAR case priority setting, and communi-
showed: cation among the different
• The same findings as in Research regional teams. However, these
Issue 1: a majority of the embed- sub-units also stated similar
comments regarding the necessi-
ty of the Hong Kong SAR to
instill an open culture to ensure
operational effectiveness.
• The project support group was
effective in formalizing proce-
dures and standards for consis-
tency among the different
regional teams. However, one
sub-unit cautioned that the

24 • Project Management Journal December 2004

 Tests Case study method Phase of research in
which method is used

Construct validity Use multiple source of evidence e.g. different informants in each Data collection
functional group and documentations

Establish chain of evidence Data collection

Have key informants review draft case study report Composition of case study report

Do pattern-matching Data analysis

Internal validity
Do explanation-building Data analysis

External validity Use replication logic i.e. multiple-case study using overseas cases Research design

Use case study protocol Data collection

Reliability
Develop case study data base Data collection

Source: adapted from Yin (1994)

Table 5: Methods to enhance the quality of the case study research

project support group should not
have executive power over the
day-to-day operation of the
regional team. This is because the
operation of the regional team
would not be effective or efficient
if the team members always need
to refer back to the headquarters
for a decision; doing so would
cause them to work under dual
chains of command.
• The functional specialist adviso-
ry group could serve as the cen-
ter of excellence for training
specialists and provides advice
to project teams.
• The project auditing team was
useful in providing informed
and intelligent answers to the
top management and to the con-
cerned teams on matters involv-
ing strategic issues and
stakeholder interests.
Our study showed that the major-
ity of the sub-units believed that the
headquarters for each of the four spe-
cific teams could effectively enhance
the regional team’s performance and
minimize any potential problems. We
found that performance is enhanced
by minimizing inconsistency, allocat-
ing appropriate resource between
teams, preventing uneven workloads,
setting priorities, facilitating inter-team
communications, standardizing proce-
dures and policies for consistency, and
providing specialist/objective advice
and answers on specific issues. To
improve resource and working efficien-
cy, the sub-units suggested that the
four teams develop alternative struc-
tural arrangements. Such an alternative
structural arrangement would include:
• A project support group to take up
the work of the formal project
management community (sug-
gested by one sub-unit).
• A project support group combined
with a project auditing team (sug-
gested by two sub-units).
• A project support group com-
bined with a functional specialist
advisory group that has the
expertise to formulate policies
and procedures (suggested by the
majority of the sub-units).
• Enlisting members from a regional
team to work part-time or ad hoc
with either a project support group
or a functional specialist advisory
group (suggested by two sub-units).
• Employing outside consultants to
give functional specialist advice
on an as-needed basis (suggested
by one sub-unit).
One overseas case used a formal
management community to facilitate
inter-area communication on resource
allocation, best practice transfer, and
stakeholder liaison. Another overseas
case featured an internal audit section
that was administratively responsible
to the chief executive officer but which
reported directly to the chairman of
the organization.
Research Issue 3
All the embedded sub-units in the
Hong Kong SAR case preferred a flat-
tened hierarchy to a complex structure
because of its potential for efficient
communications, better accountabili-
ty, clearer roles and responsibilities,
and better team spirit and motivation.
The groups also believed that team
members, including the leader, should
possess sustainability knowledge; such
an understanding, they noted, would
enable the Hong Kong SAR to achieve
its main objective of realizing an urban
renewal project that is focused on real-
izing sustainable development. The
groups also thought that a generalizing
specialist was a more appropriate
choice to serve in the role of project
management leader. Such an individ-
ual would possess the skills needed to
effectively manage the professionals,

December 2004 Project Management Journal • 25

 Findings Hong Kong SAR Case Overseas Cases
Government • Important in terms of policy and finance • Government body in seven cases;
Support
• Non-governmental body but appointed/established by
government or government heavily involved for the
remaining three cases

Team Member • General knowledge of other disciplines; • No information available

Attributes
• Broader picture of the project work;
• Social impact knowledge

Top Management • Knowledgeable on nature of urban renewal and ability • Specializing generalist in one case
Attributes to give appropriate direction;
• Generalizing specialist or specializing generalist

Education of the • Useful to gain support • Done in three cases

Public on Urban
Renewal

Maintenance • Mandatory maintenance by owners; • Sustainable maintenance strategy to minimize the

Strategy dependency on local authority funding for housing
• Long term strategy of the development maintenance and improvement in one case

Face-to-face • Importance as compared to information technology • Considered important in two cases

Communication enablers

Testing of Project • Necessary • No information available

Management
Application Model

Award System • Appropriate system required to enhance the success of • No information available
the project management application model

Environmental • Property market, economy affecting urban renewal • No information available

Forces

Financial Viability • Costly compensation package and land cost, lack of • No information available
development potential affecting urban renewal

Urban Renewal • Rehabilitation to minimize acquisition expenditure, • Mainly private sector involvement and the
Strategy and private sector involvement, comprehensive planning organization acted only as planner, facilitator, capital
Direction works and infrastructure provider, and the
development broker between private sector,
government and the community in three cases;
• Organization responsible for strategic planning,
bringing parties to the table, providing finance for
both re-development and rehabilitation in one case

Involving Legislative • Necessary to enhance success of the project • No information available

Counselors at management application model
Outset with
Partnering
Relationship

Source: developed for this research

Table 6: Findings of issues not expected from the literature review

26 • Project Management Journal December 2004

foresee potential problems, and
make informed decisions. The major-
ity of the embedded sub-units
believed that the project team’s per-
formance would improve if the team
was organized according to a flat-
tened hierarchical structure, if its
team members and leaders possessed
sustainability knowledge, and as
noted above, if a generalizing special-
ist served as its leader.
We found that the outcomes of
the embedded cases echoed some
overseas cases. Two overseas cases
adopted flattened hierarchical struc-
tures to organize the project organiza-
tion. Three cases required that
members possess sustainability
knowledge; two cases showed general-
izing specialists serving on the pro-
ject’s managerial staff. These cases
also explained that leaders must pos-
sess the personal and professional
skills required to lead a multi-discipli-
nary team.
Research Issue 4
All of the embedded sub-units in the
Hong Kong SAR case believed that in
order to minimize abortive work,
meet customer needs, gain customer
support, and generate the cooperation
of the parties concerned and involved
in the project, the project team would
first need to address issues related to
sustainability, quality, and customer
service. Accomplishing this, the sub-
units further believed, would enhance
the project team’s effort to implement
the project and increase their chances
of achieving the project’s goals.
The sub-units thought that the
involvement of the stakeholders and
their relationship with the project
team would affect the team’s ability to
accomplish the three above-men-
tioned issues. All the embedded sub-
units agreed that the project team
should engage the consultants, gov-
ernment, and communities affected
from the project’s outset. However, the
majority of the sub-units thought that
the project team should guard against
involving advocacy groups in the proj-
ect during the early stages; they
believed that political rivalry could
affect the project’s progress. They also
thought that the project team should
wait to engage contractors until late in
the project’s development. The sub-
units also suggested that the project
team should engage joint-venture
developers from the outset to obtain
the financial support needed to move
the project forward. We found in three
of the overseas cases — numbers two,
three, and eight — that the project
team engaged the government, com-
munity, and advocacy groups at the
project’s outset.
With regard to the project team’s
relationship with stakeholders, the
majority of the sub-units thought that
partnering offers the most appropri-
ate method for involving consultants,
contractors, government agencies,
and community and advocacy groups.
One sub-unit also suggested that the
project team should forge a partner-
ship with the joint venture developer.
However, among those sub-units
favoring partnering relationships,
some expressed concerns about the
chances of such theoretical relation-
ships working in practice. In our
research, we found that some of the
overseas cases had adopted partner-
ing relationships: government (5
cases), community (7 cases), advo-
cacy groups (1 case), and developers
(2 cases).
The sub-units also noted that
community participation and the for-
mation of district advisory communi-
ties or committees could affect the
achievement of sustainability, quali-
ty, and customer-focused issues. Our
findings from reviewing the embed-
ded cases showed that community
participation could facilitate urban
renewal projects and that district
advisory communities or committees
could encourage true community
participation and solicit local her-
itage knowledge, provided that the
participants were true representatives
of the community who cared for the
good of the community, as opposed
to those individuals who would use
such a forum as a means to promote
their own personal or political inter-
ests. All 10 of the overseas cases we
analyzed encouraged community
participation. Eight of them showed
established district advisory commu-
nities or committees that dealt with
external stakeholders.
Research Issue 5
All of the embedded sub-units recog-
nized the important role that commu-
nications plays in achieving an urban
renewal project. All of the sub-units
also believed that using computerized
project management information sys-
tems (PMIS) as an information tech-
nology enabler would effectively
enhance the project team’s capacity to
communicate with the stakeholders.
The sub-units also added that a
desired communications feature is the
project team’s offering stakeholders
different levels of project access. One
overseas case developed a computer-
ized PMIS — similar to the one the
sub-units suggested — for implement-
ing urban renewal projects.
According to a majority of the
sub-units, if a PMIS could display an
appropriate amount of project infor-
mation, they would consider the
Internet an effective tool for achieving
government transparency and public
participation. We found, however, a
mixed response among the sub-units
in regards to their views on the
Internet’s effectiveness in soliciting
community support. However, all of
the sub-units did believe that informa-
tion technology enablers (i.e., PMIS
and the Internet) could improve com-
munications between stakeholders
and the project team, as compared to
the methods currently used; they also
noted that this process would subse-
quently improve the team’s ability to
implement the urban renewal project.
We found that in three of the overseas
cases the project team used Web sites
to provide information to the public
as part of their effort to reach as wide
an audience as possible.
Relevant results not expected from the lit-
erature review
Table 6 summarizes our findings of
the relevant issues that we did not
expect to find from our review of liter-
ature pertaining to the Hong Kong
SAR’s embedded case and the overseas
case studies.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 27
 Research Issue/New Finding and the Summary of Conclusions Drawn from that Issue/New Finding

RI 1 What are the effects of projectised type organizational structure with integrated and multidisciplinary teams, corporate
communication team, social services teams and informal project management community for each targeted district on
urban renewal projects implementation?
Regional team approach with the following structure is to be adopted for each targeted district:
• projectised type structure;
• with multi-disciplinary and integrated professional project teams to enhance sustainable design which can resolve urban
dilapidation on long term basis;
• with communication professional team to handle the communication with the community; and
• with formal project management community to minimize inconsistency between project teams.
Social services team is required to facilitate urban renewal project implementation but has to be independent of the urban
renewal organization to enhance credibility and avoid conflict of interest.
The above would improve the urban renewal work efficiency and effectiveness as compared to the approach adopted by the
current setup.

RI 2 What are the effects of a headquarters organizational structure with formal project management community, project
auditing team, project support group and functional specialist advisory group on supporting the projectised organizational
structure for each targeted district?
The headquarters structure is to comprise of the following:
• formal project management community to resolve potential problems and interfaces between the regional teams;
• an independent auditing team to provide unbiased checking of the team operation, informed and intelligent answer on
strategic issues and stakeholder interest; and
• project support and functional advisory group with no executive power on the day-to-day operation of the project teams to
formulate standards/procedures and act as the center of excellence for training the appropriate specialized skills and
giving advice.
These specific teams in the headquarters are effective in enhancing regional team performance and minimize potential problem.

RI 3 What are the effects of a flattened hierarchical structure with team members possessing sustainability knowledge and
project managerial leaders being generalizing specialists on the project team performance ?
A flattened hierarchical structure will have efficient communication, better accountability, clearer roles and responsibility,
better team spirit and motivation.
Team members and leaders are to possess sustainability knowledge to facilitate the incorporation of such concept in the urban
renewal projects.
The project managerial leader is to be a generalizing specialist with appropriate technical and general management skills,
having a system approach perspective as well as the ability to instill open culture in the team for effective operation of the
project management community.
The effects of the above team structure and members’ attributes are improvement of team performance, effectiveness of the
project management community in the regional team and facilitation of the sustainability objective for urban renewal that can
resolve urban dilapidation on long-term basis.

RI 4 What are the effects of involving stakeholders at the outset of and throughout the projects with partnering relationship and
formation of district advisory committee/community on urban renewal project implementation?
Stakeholders that are to be involved at the outset include consultants, government, community, joint venture developers, social
services teams and pressure groups.
The appropriate relationship between the urban renewal agent and the consultants, government, community, joint venture
developer, social services teams, pressure groups and contractors is partnering. However, pilot projects may first be
implemented to go through learning and experience curve before applying to larger scale projects.
Such stakeholder management will address the critical issues of sustainability, quality and customer-focused at the outset,
which can enhance the long-term goals of urban renewal.
Formation of district advisory community/committee can encourage community participation and solicit heritage local
knowledge. Community participation will facilitate project implementation whereas heritage local knowledge is an important
objective of sustainable urban renewal. However, mechanisms to ensure true representation of the participants for the
community are required.

Table 7: A summary of the conclusions about each research issue and the new findings (part 1)

28 • Project Management Journal December 2004

 RI 5 What are the effects of adopting information technology enablers by establishing computerized project management
information system interlinked to Web site accessible to the public on communication to stakeholders?
Information technology enablers can enhance communication to stakeholders, which is imperative for achieving urban renewal
project task.
The computerized PMIS will be able to display all relevant project data, keep up-to-date and user friendly. It will have different
access levels to appropriate types of information for different internal and external stakeholders. The system will include a Web
site accessible by different stakeholders for different appropriate and controlled information.
With these information technology enablers, communication to stakeholders is enhanced. Transparency and public participation
can be achieved. Urban renewal project implementation will subsequently be improved.

New Government Support

Findings Better government support or involvement can be solicited by establishing a close link with the relevant government
departments at two levels of the project management application model i.e. working level at the regional team level and policy
level at headquarters level.
Team Member Attributes
Team members can develop general knowledge of other disciplines, a broader view of the project and some other knowledge
such as social impact assessment through the multi-disciplinary project team structure.
Top Management Attributes
No definite conclusion about the suitability of generalizing specialist or specializing generalist can be drawn from the analysis.
Separate detailed research is required. However, the project team structure is suitable for developing future top managerial
leader since members are exposed to a broader perspective of the entire project, which is one of the essential attributes for
top management.
Education of the Public
It can be tackled in two levels i.e. at local level by the community communication professional team in the regional team and at
general public level by the corporate communication professional in the functional specialist advisory group in headquarters.
Maintenance Strategy, Environmental Forces Consideration, Financial Viability and Urban Renewal Strategy/Direction
These inter-related issues concern with the broader picture of urban renewal policies and are excellent separate research topic.
Face-to-Face Communication
The importance of face-to-face communication strengthens the proposal of setting up district advisory committee/community in
RI 4. The information technology enablers in RI 5 will enhance the face-to-face communication that can facilitate urban renewal
project implementation.
Testing of the Model
This finding has echoed the pilot project issue in RI 4.
Placement of Appropriate Award System
This issue relates to the implications for practice.
Legislative Counselors
They are considered as political groups, which can be treated as one of the stakeholders in RI 4.

Source: developed for this research

Table 7: A summary of the conclusions about each research issue and the new findings (part 2)

Conclusion
Table 7 summarizes our conclusions
about the five research issues this study
addresses. From these conclusions and
our new findings, we can now address
the research question. Figure 5 shows
the application model for implement-
ing urban renewal projects with regard
to our resolution of the research issues
and new findings. Our application
model uses project management body
of knowledge and practice to address
the four main areas: organizational
structure, team structure and attributes
of team members, stakeholder manage-
ment, and communication and infor-
mation technology enablers. Our
model also considers urban renewal
practices, objectives, and principles.
Organizational structure. To enhance
the efficiency and effectiveness of urban
renewal, we recommend that project
teams use a regional team approach. Each
regional team should include multi-disci-
plinary and integrated projectized teams.
These teams would ensure that the sus-
tainable design project achieves its goals
and resolves the urban dilapidation
issues on a long-term basis. We also pro-
pose that the regional community com-
munications teams would effectively
improve communication among the
local communities, resulting in a better
facilitated process for implementing the
urban renewal project. A project manage-
ment community is required to mini-
mize any inconsistent performance
among the project teams.
To ensure the effectiveness of the
regional teams, headquarters should
use a structure that supports the struc-
ture used by the regional teams. We

December 2004 Project Management Journal • 29

 Urban Renewal in Hong Kong SAR

Sustainability • Customer-Focused • Quality

Partnering Partnering
Urban renewal authority Government

Involved from the outset

Top management team
Government
policy
bureaus
STAKEHOLDERS
TO BE INVOLVED Other business Project support
Project
FROM OUTSET supporting and functional
management
functions Project specialist
community
Consultants e.g. finance, auditing team advisory group
(with open
administration, IT, culture) (duties include
Pressure human resources educating the
groups public on
urban renewal)
Community
REGIONAL TEAMS
Joint venture Leaders Government
Involved from the outset
developers (generalizing executive
specialists) departments
Social services Formal project management community
teams (with open culture)

Political groups
Community Community
participation, PROJECT TEAMS communication
OTHER heritage Leaders professional team
STAKEHOLDERS knowledge and (generalizing (duties include
face-to-face specialists) educating the public
Contractors communications on urban renewal)

District advisory Multi-disciplinary

committee/ and integrated
community professional teams
with true with flattened
representation hierarchal
of the community structure

Information technology enablers - Computerized project management information system and web site

Figure 5: Application of project management knowledge and practice for effective and efficient implementation of urban
renewal projects in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China

30 • Project Management Journal December 2004

propose forming a headquarters-based
project management community com-
prised of members from the regional
teams and other headquarters teams.
This community would work to mini-
mize performance inconsistencies and
optimize resource allocation and com-
munication between regional teams.
In addition, we suggest forming two
special teams — a project auditing
team and a project support and func-
tional specialist advisory group — to
support the regional teams. A commu-
nication specialist at headquarters and
the community communications team
in each region will supervise educating
the public in order to solicit support
for implementing the project.
Team structure and member attrib-
utes. We believe that appropriate team
structures and member attributes are
essential for improving the project
team’s performance, increasing the
project management community’s
effectiveness, and implementing the
long-term urban renewal plan to real-
ize a sustainable environment. We
have found that a flattened hierarchi-
cal structure is better than a complex
structure with multiple layers of
staffing in the areas of communica-
tion, accountability, and team spirit
and motivation. Our research also
showed that team members, including
the leaders, should possess knowledge
about sustainability and that individu-
als who are generalizing specialists —
who have appropriate technical and
management skills, a systems-
approach perspective, and an ability to
create an open culture in teams — are
the preferred choice to serve as team
leaders We found that the projectized
team approach may offer team mem-
bers opportunities to acquire knowl-
edge of disciplines other than their
own. This training could help the team
more efficiently realize the urban
renewal effort and more effectively
accomplish the project’s goals by
ensuring that team members have a
broad picture of the project.
Stakeholder management. We found
that the key issues determining an
effective outcome of an urban renewal
project include having sustainability
goals, customer-focused approach,
and quality focus. Team members
must address these critical issues
from the project’s outset and should
require stakeholders to manage the
process carefully. From the beginning
to the end, stakeholders must partici-
pate in the project and should part-
ner with the project team.
Government support and involve-
ment is also critical to accomplishing
the project’s goals, as is community
participation and the project team’s
acquisition of heritage knowledge
and its continuous face-to-face com-
munications with the individuals
working to develop a renewed and
sustainable urban environment. The
project team can successfully address
these issues through its forming dis-
trict advisory communities or com-
mittees that honestly represent the
good of the community affected.
Communication and information
technology enablers. We found that
information technology enablers
enhance the project team’s com-
munication to stakeholders, which
is essential for achieving urban
renewal project tasks. Appropriate
information technology enablers
include computerized PMIS that
are accessible by different stake-
holders via the Internet. PMIS
would distribute different types
and different levels of controlled
information to the stakeholders.
We believe that project teams can
improve the process of imple-
menting urban renewal projects by
promoting transparency and gen-
erating public participation.
The above-mentioned issues —
regarding the application of project
management knowledge and practice
to urban renewal projects (namely,
organizational structure, team struc-
ture and members attributes, stake-
holder management, communication,
and information technology enablers)
— will reinforce each other and will
enable project teams working on the
Hong Kong SAR urban renewal effort
to effectively and efficiently imple-
ment the project plan. Below we dis-
cuss the theoretical implications of
our solution in relation to the research
questions we posed earlier.
Theoretical implications
Solving the research question about
applying project management knowl-
edge and practice to effectively and
efficiently implement urban renewal
projects in the Hong Kong SAR has
several implications for the parent
disciplines of project management
and urban renewal.
Sustainability through a multi-disciplinary
and integrated project team approach.
Our literature review found that the
project management body of knowl-
edge does not mention sustainability.
Yet sustainability is a contemporary
issue considered by many global
nations as an essential task for main-
taining the future prosperity of human
beings. To accomplish such a task,
these nations adopt a multi-discipli-
nary and integrated project team
approach similar to the structures we
found in our research. The theoretical
implication suggests that the project
management body of knowledge
should include this essential knowl-
edge area and should emphasize the
importance of a multi-disciplinary and
integrated approach.
Team hierarchical structure and team
member attributes.
Our research found that a flattened
hierarchical structure strengthens
the performance of teams working
on urban renewal projects.
Furthermore, members and leaders
of these teams should possess sus-
tainability knowledge and the team’s
leaders should have experience as
generalizing specialists. Although
the literature covers project team
structure at length, the literature
fails to discuss developing a hierar-
chical structure that matches the
professional nature of the teamwork
with the idiosyncrasies of individu-
als. The literature also ignores the
current level of professional knowl-
edge on sustainability issues and the
suitability of generalizing specialists
or specializing generalists in the role
of project leader. Thus, we recom-
mend updates to the project man-
agement body of knowledge to
include these neglected facets.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 31
Stakeholder involvement.
Several of the literature sources we
studied discussed stakeholder manage-
ment as an important issue. Our
research found that project teams must
involve the stakeholders in the project
from the outset in order to successfully
solicit their support. The implication is
that the timing for involving stake-
holders is important in managing proj-
ects. Furthermore, our research found
that public participation — which acts
as one of the stakeholders — is critical
for achieving project success.
Information technology enablers.
Our research found that information
technology enablers are useful tools for
enhancing team communication with
stakeholders, which is, as previously
mentioned, a significant factor in suc-
cessfully accomplishing the project’s
tasks and goals. This information is
especially relevant for knowledge work-
ers. Some of the knowledge-focused lit-
erature we reviewed showed the
usefulness of PMIS in managing proj-
ects. However, given the fast pace of
information technology development,
the project management body of
knowledge may need to exploit more
information technology enablers in
order to enhance how efficiently and
effectively projects are implemented.
Government support.
In our literature review, we found that
the affected community is regarded as
the most important stakeholder
involved in a successfully implement-
ed urban renewal project. Our research
also showed that in addition to garner-
ing the community’s support, project
teams should secure the support of the
government, especially when the proj-
ect is spearheaded by non-governmen-
tal urban renewal organizations, as is
the case with the URA in the Hong
Kong SAR. The literature should direct
more attention to the influence the
government support plays in both the
policy creating and project implemen-
tation levels.
Urban renewal strategy and policy.
Urban renewal work is a continuous
task that occurs over an extended peri-
32 • Project Management Journal December 2004
od of time. Achieving the desired qual-
ity on such projects requires that proj-
ect teams use project management
knowledge and practices. Our research
found that urban renewal strategies are
influenced by environmental forces —
such as the economy — and that the
outcomes of urban renewal projects
are shaped by financial aspects. These
interrelated issues require further
research. Below we discuss the implica-
tions of our findings — and the con-
clusions from our research — on
project management practice and poli-
cy in regards to urban renewal efforts.
Implications for practice and policy.
As we discovered in our researching the
theory of project management and
urban renewal, our resolving of the
research questions has many implica-
tions for using project management —
in practice and in policy — to imple-
ment urban renewal projects.
Practice.
To implement the findings and conclu-
sions of this research (i.e., the applica-
tion model), the Hong Kong SAR
project teams would need to restructure
the existing URA organization. Most
necessary is a comprehensive change
management plan; the existing setup
has been operating for more than 10
years. Based on the five-step change
model of Lussier (1999) and the key-
success-factor approach of Ulrich
(1997), we recommend that project
teams use the following procedures
and steps:
• Changing leadership: The team
should identify a leader who
owns the project and commits to
making it happen; this individual
will champion the change and
garner the resources necessary to
sustain the project.
• Defining change and sharing
the need: The internal stake-
holders need to understand the
change, the reason for the
change, why the change is neces-
sary, why the change is impor-
tant, and how they will help
accomplish the mission of com-
pleting a long-term urban
renewal project.
• Shaping a vision: The internal
stakeholders need to under-
stand the changes and out-
comes of the changes that the
project will produce for the ben-
efit of the community and the
other stakeholders involved.
• Identifying possible resistance
to the change: The team must
identify the internal and exter-
nal forces that can cause resist-
ance—especially the deeply
rooted and culturally motivated
resistance from within the exist-
ing organization.
• Mobilizing commitment:
Stakeholders need to commit to
the change to make it happen;
they should identify and solicit
the commitments and support of
others involved in — or affected
by — the project.
• Implementing the change: To
support and implement
change, teams must institution-
alize systems, technology, and
structures, such as human
resources, training, appraisal,
rewards, organizational struc-
ture, and communications.
Teams must involve internal
stakeholders, wherever possi-
ble, to implement change in
phases; teams must also
involve stakeholders in pilot
projects in order to help them
learn and experience the curves
of change before they and the
team implement change
through larger projects and
across entire organizations.
• Controlling and monitoring
progress, reinforcing the
change: The team should have
a means of measuring the suc-
cess of change and should
define benchmarks to gauge
the progress and the imple-
mentation of change and the
results of change.
• Making the change last:
Teams must have short- and
long-term plans to focus
attention on the change;
teams also needs plans for
adapting the accomplished
changes over time.
Policy.
Since government involvement is
imperative to the success of the appli-
cation model, teams need to adopt a
more proactive approach than the cur-
rent policy used by the relevant gov-
ernmental departments. This approach
could enable teams to better commu-
nicate with the URA. Our research
shows that the teams need close com-
munications links. These will enable
the teams to establish operational and
policy levels that enhance their imple-
mentation of the urban renewal proj-
ect. Such policy changes may require
governments to introduce new legisla-
tion to supplement existing ordi-
nances, on which the operation of the
URA is based.
Despite the implications for theo-
ry, practice, and policy when applying
project management knowledge and
practice to efficiently and effectively
enhance the implementation of urban
renewal projects, we recognize that our
research contains limitations, which
we have outlined below.
Limitations
Our findings are based on the imple-
mentation of an urban renewal proj-
ect in the Hong Kong SAR. We
caution anyone applying our findings
to projects beyond the Hong Kong
SAR because of the inevitable cultur-
al, political, economical, and social
differences among countries and
places. However, this research can
serve as a springboard for generaliz-
ing our results and providing a prece-
dent for researchers who are studying
other countries.
We collected our data from the
single case in the Hong Kong SAR
(i.e., the URA), which is the sole
urban renewal organization. Our
research considered evidence from
overseas cases, as described in the
research methodology section
above. Furthermore, we also looked
at non-governmental urban renewal
organizations. However, the majori-
ty of our findings — after a required
adjustment to the model we used —
can be equally applied to other gov-
ernmental setups. Thus, the findings
from this research can provide a
platform for further research using
this perspective, as discussed in the
next section.
Further research
We have some suggestions for further
research. First, because we used a case-
study methodology for our research,
we relied on inductive analytical gener-
alizations emphasizing theory build-
ing that aimed at internal validity
through information-richness, coher-
ence, and insight, via triangulated
sources. Future research could focus on
quantitative research and consider
numbers that test the theory built in
this study by collecting survey data
from the pilot projects regarding the
time, cost, and quality achieved.
Second, this research is concerned
with the urban renewal work in the
Hong Kong SAR. Similar research
could occur for urban renewal agents,
governmental or non-governmental, in
other cities throughout the world,
which may have different political,
social, cultural, and economic environ-
ments, and where urban renewal work
is desperately needed. Future research
may include a broader scale by study-
ing the effect of these different envi-
ronments in other countries and
generalizing the project management
application models.
Third, besides applying project
management knowledge, successful
urban renewal initiatives also
depend on the broader and interre-
lated issues of urban renewal poli-
cies, such as maintenance strategies,
environmental forces (e.g., property
market), and financial viability and
support. These are challenging and
important factors that could serve as
future research topics.
Fourth, since our research does
not offer a definite conclusion on the
appropriateness of using a generalizing
specialist or the specializing generalist
as the project leader, researchers could
study the attributes of the urban
renewal project’s top management
agent. Appropriate leadership is essen-
tial for managing project organizations
and for successfully achieving long-
term urban renewal missions.
Lastly, since the Hong Kong SAR is
an international arena for urban
renewal projects, researchers should
consider cultural risk as one of the
competencies for team members to
manage during the life of similar-type
projects. Cultural risk involves busi-
ness blunders, poor customer rela-
tions, and wasted negotiations that
result when management fails to
understand and adapt itself to the dif-
ferences between their culture and the
culture of their host country
(Czinkota, Ronkainen, & Moffett,
2000). This is an important competen-
cy that demands further research.
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DENNIS HEUNG-FU MUI has over 23 years of experience in engineering and project management for construction and
corporate management projects in Hong Kong, Australia, Indonesia, China, and various Southeast Asian countries. Prior
to his current position as the senior manager of Hong Kong’s Cyberport Development Holdings Ltd., he worked in senior
positions with several Australian and Hong Kong engineering consultancy firms and the Urban Renewal Authority of Hong
Kong. A graduate of the University of Hong Kong, APESMA/Deakin University of Australia, and Southern Cross University
of Australia, Dr, Mui is a fellow of the professional engineering institutions in Hong Kong, Australia and UK, a fellow of
Australian Institute of Project Management, and a member of the Project Management Institute.

SHANKAR SANKARAN, has more than 30 years of management experience in Asia, the Middle East, and Australia. For
the past 15 years, Dr. Sankaran has managed large engineering and IT-based industrial projects. The former director
of a Japanese multinational company in Singapore before joining Southern Cross University in Australia as an associate
professor, he teaches MBA-level courses in project management, international management, innovation and
technology, management information systems, information technology for managers, and management research. He
is also the director of postgraduate studies and research for the Graduate College of Management and the director of
Southern Cross Institute of Action Research (SCIAR). Through SCIAR he is actively involved in providing research and
consultancy services to organizations. A Chartered Professional Engineer status professional who is a member of
several professional engineering institutions, he is a member of the Australian Institute of Project Management and
the Project Management Institute.

34 • Project Management Journal December 2004

TEAM LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS IN TECHNOLOGY-
BASED PROJECT ENVIRONMENTS
ABSTRACT
Managerial leadership and the organiza-
tional environment must be conducive to
the professional needs of the project
team. I reached this conclusion after con-
ducting a field study of 80 technology-
intensive project teams in 27 companies.
This paper aims to improve the project
management field’s understanding of
team performance as it is influenced by
the organizational environment and
managerial leadership. The results of
this research suggest that many of the
factors that drive project team perform-
ance, such as commitment and the abili-
ty to deal with conflict and risk, originate
in the work environment. While effective
management of the technical aspects of
the project is critical to success, team
leaders must also pay close attention to
managing relations across the entire
work process, including support func-
tions, suppliers, sponsors, and partners.
In this paper, I discuss the implications
of — and criteria for — effective team
leadership.
Keywords: team leadership, teamwork,
project management, technology, proj-
ect performance, survey research.
©2004 by the Project Management Institute
Vol. 35, No. 4, 35-46, ISSN 8756-9728/03
HANS J. THAMHAIN, Department of Management, Bentley College
Introduction
hat effective teamwork is crucial to project performance is seemingly obvi-
T ous. Virtually all organizations, from computer manufacturers to retailing
and medical suppliers, pay attention to teamwork. But few managers know
their organizations well enough to create a team environment that is optimally
conducive to the professional needs of their team members. Having such an envi-
ronment, however, affects project performance (Bhatnager, 1999; Keller, 2001;
Nellore & Balachandra, 2001).
Where are the challenges? Today’s business culture demands that project
teams — in meeting and performing their project responsibilities — engage in
multiple activities. These activities span numerous organizational lines that
involve a broad spectrum of personnel, support groups, subcontractors, vendors,
partners, government agencies, and customers. Organizing and managing con-
temporary project teams is an art, a science, and a great challenge. And those who
seem most challenged are the managers of complex and technology-intensive sit-
uations that are characterized by high speed, high change, and high uncertainty
(Shim & Lee, 2001; Zhang, Keil, Rai, & Mann, 2003). These situations are the
focus of my field research.
Teamwork: A New Managerial Frontier
To be sure, teamwork is not a new idea. Readers can trace the basic concepts of
organizing and managing teams back to biblical times. However, in today’s more
complex, multinational, and technologically sophisticated environment, the
work group has reemerged as a business concept and its unified team perform-
ance is now regarded as crucial to project success (Thamhain & Wilemon, 1998;
Williams, 2002).
Supported by modern information and communication technologies, and
consistent with the concepts of stakeholder management (Newell & Rogers,
2002) and learning organizations (Senge & Carstedt, 2001), the roles and bound-
aries of teams are expanding toward self-direction because of more open and
organizationally transparent processes. Work teams play an important role in
realizing traditional projects — such as new product development, systems
design, and construction — and in implementing organizational change and
transferring technology concepts, as well as in running election campaigns.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 35
 Whether Yahoo creates a new search engine, Sony devel-
ops a new laptop computer, or the World Health
Organization rolls out a new information system, project
success depends to a large degree on effective interactions
among the team members responsible for the new develop-
ment. This team often includes support groups, subcontrac-
tors, vendors, partners, government agencies, customer
organizations, and other project stakeholders (Armstrong,
2000; Barkema, Baum, & Mannix, 2002; Dillon, 2001; Gray
& Larson, 2000; Karlsen & Gottschalk, 2004; Thamhain,
2003; Zanomi & Audy, 2004). Globalization, privatization,
digitization, and rapidly changing technologies have trans-
formed our economies into a hyper-competitive enterprise
system where virtually every organization is under pressure
to do more things faster, better, and cheaper. A team work-
ing effectively together is seen as a key success factor in
deriving competitive advantages from these developments.
At the same time, the process of team-building has become
more complex and requires more sophisticated manage-
ment skills as bureaucratic hierarchies and support systems
decline.
Managers of these teams must not only deal with con-
temporary technology challenges, they must also contend
with a wide spectrum of economic, political, social, and reg-
ulatory challenges. In fact, current project management lit-
erature documents field research that shows managerial
challenges are dominated by behavioral and organizational
issues, rather than technical difficulties (Belassi & Tukel,
1996; Hartman & Ashrafi, 2002; Whitten, 1995). As a result,
the leadership styles of project managers working in tech-
nology-based team environments have changed consider-
ably, showing an increased emphasis on the human side of
project management.
Not too long ago, project management was considered,
by-and-large, a management science. Project leaders, in ensur-
ing the successful integration of their projects, focused on
properly defining the project’s work, timing, and resources;
they also followed established procedures for project track-
ing and control. And although these factors are still crucial
in today marketplace, these are now considered threshold
competencies—critically important, but unlikely to guaran-
tee project success. To effectively and efficiently realize the
project goal, project leaders must build fast, flexible project
teams that can dynamically and creatively work toward
established objectives in a changing environment
(Bhatnager, 1999; Jasswalla & Sashittal, 1998; Thamhain,
2002). This approach requires effective networking and
cooperation among the individuals involved in the proj-
ect—the people from the different organizations, support
groups, subcontractors, vendors, government agencies, and
customer communities. This approach requires that teams
are led by managers who posses carefully developed skills in
leadership, administration, organization, and technical
expertise (Shenhar & Thamhain, 1994; Thamhain, 2003).
All of this has strong implications for organizational
process and leadership. For one, traditional forms of hierar-
chical team structure and leadership are seldom effective.
36 • Project Management Journal December 2004
These are now often replaced with self-directed, self-man-
aged team concepts (Barner, 1997; Thamhain & Wilemon,
1998). Frequently, in these situations, the project manager
will serve as a social architect who understands the interac-
tion of organizational and behavioral variables, who facilitates
the work process, and who provides overall project leader-
ship for developing multidisciplinary task groups into uni-
fied teams and for fostering a project climate conducive to
involvement, commitment, and conflict resolution.
Objective, Scope, and Method
My objective in this paper is to enhance the project man-
agement field’s understanding of team performance by
exploring the factors that influence and affect the character-
istics of project teams working in technology-based envi-
ronments. Because of the complexities and the absence of
specific theories or constructs in this subject area, I chose an
exploratory field research format that involves question-
naires and two qualitative methods: participant observation
and in-depth retrospective interviewing. Specifically, I cap-
tured data — between the years of 2000 and 2004 — from
27 technology-based organizations. 65 percent of these
companies are classified as Fortune 500 United States (U.S.)
corporations; 23 percent are Fortune 1000 firms. And
although the remaining 12 percent are considered smaller
firms, none of those studied are small- or medium-sized
firms.
To examine these firms, I performed a three-stage study.
During the first stage, I interviewed project leaders and proj-
ect team personnel and collected their observations during
group meetings and work interactions. These interviews
helped me to understand the specific nature and challenges
of the project work undertaken, prepare for the introduction
of the questionnaire, and design the follow-up interviews.
During the second stage, I collected data that were part of
management consulting or training assignments; I gathered
this information through questionnaires, observations, and
expert panels. During the third stage, I primarily conducted
in-depth retrospective interviews; these provided me with
the perspective and additional information I needed to clar-
ify and leverage the data captured during stages one and
two. Along with this three-stage process, I found data that
included other relevant source material, such as project
progress reports, company reports, design review memos,
committee action reports, financial statements, and infor-
mation from the public media. These sources helped me
design the questionnaires and interviews and validate my
observations.
This combined data-collection method enabled me to
leverage the information-gathering process to better identify
the drivers of — and barriers to — innovative team per-
formance and more fully understand the process of manag-
ing such teams. This method is particularly useful for new
and exploratory investigations, such as the study reported
here, which is considerably outside the framework of estab-
lished theories and constructs (Eisenhardt, 1989; Glaser &
Strauss, 1967). I previously developed and tested the format
and process used for the specific questionnaires and in-
depth semi-structured interviews in my prior field studies on
research and development (R&D) management. These stud-
ies (Kruglianskas & Thamhain, 2000; Thamhain, 1996,
2001, 2002, 2003; Thamhain & Wilemon, 1996, 1998) were
similar in context to my current investigation.
Data.
The unit of analysis that I used in this study is the project.
This four-year-long field study (as mentioned above, con-
ducted between 2000 and 2004) yielded data from 80 proj-
ect teams; the total sample population involved 895 project
professionals—engineers, scientists, technicians, and their
managers. This population included 16 supervisors, 76 proj-
ect team leaders, 18 product managers, 8 R&D directors, 7
marketing directors, and 11 general management executives
at the vice presidential level. Together, the data compiled
covered more than 180 projects in 27 companies. These
projects mostly involved high-technology product or service
developments, such as information systems, computer and
pharmaceutical products, and financial services. The average
project budget was $1,200,000. All project teams saw them-
selves working in a high-technology environment. I
obtained my data, as I mentioned in the previous section,
from three sources: questionnaires, participant observation,
and in-depth retrospective interviewing.
I developed my questionnaire to measure the character-
istics of the work environment, team’s leadership, and
team’s performance. Performance measures included overall
team performance, team effort, the team’s ability to deal
with risk, and the team’s commitment to agreed-on objec-
tives. These measures represent a select but field-supported
set of team performance indicators, such as those that I have
summarize in the appendixes of this paper. To minimize
potential biases that might result from the use of social sci-
ence jargon, I developed specific statements to describe each
of the 14 variables of the work environment and each of the
five team-performance measures. For characterizing the
project environment, I asked team members to think about
their work environment and to indicate their agreement
with a series of statements on a five-point Likert-type scale:
(1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) neutral, (4) agree, and
(5) strongly agree. For example, to measure the perception
of “Interesting, stimulating work,” I asked team members to
indicate their agreement with statements such as “my job is
interesting and professionally stimulating” and “I always
enjoy my work.” I measured the participants’ perception of
recognition and accomplishment with statements such as
“my work leads to significant accomplishments” and “my
efforts are being appreciated and properly recognized by the
organization.” Similarly, I measured team performance vari-
ables on a five-point scale: (1) poor, (2) marginal, (3) good,
(4) very good, and (4) excellent.
I also solicited performance judgments from senior
managers and obtained an independent set of scores on
each of the environmental and performance variables. My
research method enabled me to rank teams according to two
factors: the characteristics of their work environments in
each of the 21 variables; and each of the three performance
measures, which then became the input data for the rank-
order correlation I summarize in Table 1 below.
Furthermore, I captured data during 138 interviews with
team leaders and line managers. My interviews with product
managers, marketing directors, and general management
executives were designed to gain insight into the issues and
challenges of cross-functional integration that are necessary
for the successful transfer of technology. To provide readers
with an additional perspective, I have integrated my findings
into this paper’s Implications and Discussion section below.
Data analysis.
I employed standard statistical methods to summarize my
survey data, as Table 1 shows. I tested the agreement among
the various populations using the Kruskal-Wallis analysis of
variance by ranks. Furthermore, I measured the association
among the various sets of variables by using Kendall’s tau
rank-order correlation. Because the organizational and
behavioral variables that I studied do not necessarily follow
normal distribution, I deemed non-parametric statistical
methods as more robust and appropriate.
Many of the variables that I investigated as part of this
study contain ordinal measurements, such as “strong agree-
ment, agreement, disagreement, etc.” Although these meas-
ures can be rank-ordered, these do not necessarily follow a
normal distribution. Therefore, I did not think that para-
metric statistical methods were appropriate for this study. I
instead selected distribution-free, non-parametric methods.
I am still attempting to recognize the limitations of non-
parametric methods, in regards to this methodology’s capa-
bility to extract less information in exchange for more
flexibility. Anderson (1961) discusses at great length the
issues of methodological choice. In addition to the statisti-
cal methods for testing agreements among populations and
for determining correlations, I used content analysis to eval-
uate the qualitative part of the interviews, questionnaires,
observations, and action research.
Results.
I chose correlation analysis as the primary quantitative tool
in order to gain insight into the organizational influences
that best facilitate project team performance. I also used
data from my interviews and on-site observations to validate
my quantitative analysis and to extract findings that helped
bring my findings into perspective.
I used Kendall’s tau rank-order correlation to under-
stand the association between the organizational environ-
ment and project team performance, the results of which are
shown in Table 1 above. From the set of 40 variables that I
investigated in this field study, I found the 13 strongest and
8 weakest influences, which I have listed in order of impor-
tance (according to statistical significance) to overall team
performance. I measured the presence and strength of these
organizational variables on a five-point scale based on my
perceptions of project team members; I measured project
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 37
 Characteristics of Work Environment Team
Variables Mean Performance
Team Environment & and
Performance (_) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Project Team Environment*

[STRONGEST INFLUENCES]
1 Interesting, Stimulating 3.9 (.7) 1.0
Work
2 Accomplishment & 3.4 (.9) .38 1.0
Recognition
3 Conflict & Problem 2.8 (1.1) .27 .43 1.0
Resolution
4 Clear Organizational 3.1 (1.3) .17 .32 3.8 1.0
Objectives
5 Job Skills & Expertise 3.6 (1.3) .09 .39 .33 .32 1.0
6 Direction & Leadership 3.3 (1.1) .29 .37 .27 .40 .17 1.0
7 Trust, Respect, 4.1 (1.1) .29 .39 .43 .19 .09 .16 1.0
Credibility
8 Cross-Funct’l Coop & 3.5 (1.3) .20 .31 .38 .02 0 .22 .37 1.0
Support
9 Effective 4.2 (.9) .34 .23 .36 .22 .11 .13 .38 .47 1.0
Communications
10 Clear Project Plan & 3.1 (1.7) .38 .25 .36 .19 .08 .15 .17 .37 .29 1.0
Support
11 Autonomy & Freedom 3.1 (.8) .43 .18 .15 .12 .22 .20 .33 .11 .23 .05 1.0
12 Career Developmt/ 3.3 (1.2) .10 .19 .09 0 .38 .20 .16 .03 0 .09 .22 1.0
Advancement
13 Job Security 2.2 (1.1) .16 .16 .26 .10 -.1 0 .27 .15 .12 0 .15 .30 1.0
Project Team Environment*
[WEAKEST INFLUENCES]
14 Salary Increases and 2.6 (.7) .28 .38 .11 .16 .33 .05 .22 -.04 .04 .05 -.06 .10 .00 1.0
Bonuses
15 Compensatory Time-off 3.0 (.9) .05 .06 .00 -.08 .11 -.09 .00 .02 .17 .15 .00 .02 .10 .25 1.0
16 Project Visibility and 3.2 (1.1) .36 .36 .08 .39 .30 .27 -.05 .27 .30 .33 .15 .16 -.09 .14 -.14 1.0
Popularity
17 Team Maturity & Tenure 3.1 (1.1) .05 .07 .39 .07 .38 .17 .36 .37 .38 .39 -.05 .04 -.05 .38 .11 22 1.0
18 Project Duration 3.2 (1.7) -.10 .03 .15 .27 .13 .29 .25 .27 .23 .20 .09 .29 .20 .12 .07 .33 .30 1.0
19 Stable Project 2.3 (1.7) .13 .17 .38 .18 .27 .30 .10 .29 .08 .04 .16 .06 .19 .17 .15 .11 -.14 -11 1.0
Requirements
20 Stable Organizational 2.4 (1.7) .07 .12 .15 .15 .21 .25 .08 .32 .20 .15 .12 -.27 .38 .18 .18 .20 .09 .02 -.04 1.0
Processes
21 Project Size & 3.3 (1.8) .09 .25 .18 .30 .28 .04 -.18 .10 -.17 .00 -.10 .33 .25 .12 .16 .08 .21 .39 -.12 .09 1.0
Complexity
#
Project Team Performance
22 Ability of Dealing with 2.7 (1.6) .39 .27 .33 .21 .32 .27 .08 .37 .34 .38 .34 .10 .30 -.09 .04 .17 .11 -.16 .20 .14 .07 1.0
Risk
23 Effort+Commitment 3.6 (1.0) .43 .35 .30 .28 .15 .22 .40 .28 .27 .36 .36 .07 .12 .12 .09 .22 .11 .06 .05 -.09 -.10 .27 1.0
to Results
24 Overall Team 4.0 (.7) .45 .38 .37 .36 .36 .35 .30 .27 .27 .25 .23 .12 .12 .15 .15 .12 .10 -.08 -.10 -.12 -.18 .43 .47 1.0
Performance

All variables were measured with descriptive statements on a 5-point Likert scale: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) neutral, (4) agree, (5) strongly agree.
Statements were judged by team members [*] and senior management [#], as indic ated.
Statistical Significance: p=.10 (_.20), p=.05 (_.31), p=.01 (_.36); correlation of p=.01 or stronger are marked in bold italics.

Table 1. Most and least significant drivers toward project team performance (Kendall’s tau rank-order correlation)

38 • Project Management Journal December 2004

performance as perceived by senior managers, which I dis-
cussed in the Objectives, Scope, and Method section of this
paper.
As I indicated by the two strongest correlations, I found
the factors that fulfill professional esteem needs as seem-
ingly having a particularly favorable influence on project
team performance. I recognize the five most significant
influences:
1. Professionally stimulating and challenging work
environments [ = .45];
2. Opportunity for accomplishments and recognition
[ = .38];
3. The ability to resolve conflict and problems [ = .37];
4. Clearly defined organizational objectives relevant to
the project [ = .36];
5. Job skills and expertise of the team members appro-
priate for the project work [ = .36].
I found that these influences appear to deal effectively
with the integration of goals and needs between the team
member and the organization. In this context, the more sub-
tle factors of these associations seem to become catalysts for
cross-functional communication, information sharing, and
ultimate integration of the project team with focus on
desired results.
In addition, Table 1 shows other favorable factors. While
statistically less significant (.01 < p < .05), these factors are
consistently associated with high team performance and
support the overall proposition of this paper: A work envi-
ronment and leadership style responsive to the professional
needs of the team produces high project team performance.
With reference to the variables in the left-hand column of
Table 1, these high-performance drivers are:
1. Overall directions and team leadership [ = .35];
2. Trust, respect, and credibility among team members
and their leaders [ = .30];
3 Effective and user-friendly business processes, as
reflected by cross-functional cooperation and support
[ = .27];
4. Effective communications [ = .27];
5. Clear project plans and support [ = .25];
6. Autonomy and freedom of actions (i.e. empower-
ment) [ = .23].
To a lesser degree, I found that opportunities for career
development and advancement [ = .12], as well as job securi-
ty [ = .12], seem to have a positive influence on team per-
formance. All associations are significant at p = .1 or better, with
the most significant correlations of p = .01 or stronger shown in
bold italics in Table 1. Interestingly enough, I discovered that
the same conditions that are conducive to overall team per-
formance also lead to a higher ability among team members for
dealing with risks and uncertainties; these conditions also lead
to a stronger personal effort and commitment among team
members to realizing the established objectives and to sup-
porting their fellow team members. These findings are statisti-
cally summarized with the correlation figures shown in Table 1.
Moreover, my field data analysis supports the expecta-
tion that project teams that are perceived as effective by their
managers are also looked upon by these same individuals as
creative problem solvers who can effectively utilize time and
resources. I have found that a high degree of cross-correla-
tion exists among the set of four of variables, as I measured
via a Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance by rank.
(This test helps determine whether a number of independ-
ent samples are from different populations. In this field
study, my test verified that managers perceive — in essence
— the same parameters in judging high team performance.)
This test shows that managers agree on the ranking of team
performance factors, as shown in Table 1, at a confidence
level of 98 percent. This means that managers who rate the
team’s performance as high in one category are likely to give
the team high ratings in the other three categories.
In addition to the 13 most significant factors reported
in Table 1, I find it interesting to note that many other char-
acteristics of the work environment that managers perceived
as important to effective team performance did not correlate
significantly to performance; I measured these other charac-
teristics using a p-level threshold of .10. Specifically, the vari-
ables 14 through 21 in Table 1 represent factors of lesser
influence to project team performance: salary; time-off;
project visibility and popularity; maturity of the project
team, measured in terms of time worked together as a team;
project duration; stable project requirements with mini-
mum changes; stable organizational structures and business
processes which result in minimal organizational changes,
such as those caused by mergers, acquisitions, and reorgan-
ization; and project size and project complexity, in that proj-
ect scope, size, and implementation challenges do not
necessarily translate into lower team or project performance.
I found that several of the weaker influences shown in
Table 1 have effects that are opposite to those perceptions
popularly believed by managers. For example, the negative
association of variables 19 and 20, along with variable 24,
indicates that stable project requirements or stable organi-
zations may actually lead to lower overall team perform-
ance. While these findings need further research to explain
this significance, this information sheds additional light on
the subtle and intricate nature of project team performance
and illustrates the wide spectrum of variables included in
the array of critical success factors (CSF) for technology-
intensive projects. From a different perspective, I consistent-
ly found that influences that support intrinsic professional
needs show a strong favorable performance correlation,
whereas extrinsic motivators (salary increases, bonuses, and
time-off, and metrics-related factors, such as team tenure,
project duration, changes, and complexity) only result in a
weak association to performance (see Table 1). This finding
is particularly interesting because it is contrary to the mana-
gerial perception that all of the influences listed in Table 1
are critically important to team performance.
During the exploratory stage of this field study, I sur-
mised the influence factors shown in Table 1 through inter-
views and discussions with over 100 managers by asking
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 39
them “what factors and conditions are seen to be important
to high team performance and ultimately high project per-
formance.” The discussions that ensued produced more
than 500 factors, variables, and conditions that are seen as
“very important” to effective team performance. From my
content analysis of the 500 factor statements, I developed 22
categorical factors — in addition to the correlation analysis
(shown in Tables 1) — that served as the basis for my con-
versations with 75 managers and project leaders.
I asked each person to rank the criticality of each of the
22 factors in regard to project team performance. The Likert-
type scale for these conversations offered the following
response options: (1) highly important, (2) important, (3)
somewhat important, (4) little important, and (5) not
important. This study showed that managers perceived 87
percent of the factors in Table 1 as “important” or higher in
relation to effective project team performance. This finding
suggests that managers are more accurate in their perception
of team members’ intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, needs. This
information also seems to present challenges in assessing
the impact of project parameters (such as size, duration, or
complexity), as opposed to the impact of human needs, in
regards to project performance.
This information offers additional insight into the cor-
relation among the variables influencing the team environ-
ment, such as professionally interesting and stimulating
work, clearly articulated plans and objectives, project visi-
bility, and stable, user-friendly organizational processes. All
seem to have a favorable influence on the team’s ability to
resolve problems, obtain cross-functional cooperation and
support, gain trust and respect among individual members,
and enhance the effectiveness of communications. The sig-
nificance of this finding affects two areas: all of these factors
are favorable to team performance, and we, as project pro-
fessionals, therefore welcome a strong presence of these con-
ditions; the cross-correlation also suggests that certain
conditions mutually support each other and gain momen-
tum as the team environment becomes more favorable.
Implications and Discussion
The empirical results presented in this article show that in
spite of the complexities, technologies, and the differences
among companies, specific organizational conditions appear
most favorably associated with team performance. These
conditions serve as bridging mechanisms that can help tech-
nology-based organizations enhance their overall team per-
formance, as supported by the correlations in Table 1.
Considering the exploratory nature of this study, I
have attempted to go beyond the obvious results of the
statistical data and to integrate some of the lessons I
learned from the broader context of this study. The inter-
views, observations, and follow-up discussions of the
action research I conducted were especially useful in my
gleaning additional insight into the processes and chal-
lenges of teamwork with implications for effective project
management. To provide focus, this discussion is divided
into five parts, consistent with the five sets of performance
40 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Business
environment Leadership
Managerial People
support
Organizational
support
Project Work
complexity
Tools &
Process
techniques
Figure 1. Influences to team performance
influences summarized in Figure 1: people, work, organi-
zational process, tools and techniques, and leadership.
Each of these five parts is affected by the project environ-
ment, such as project complexity, organizational support,
managerial support, and the general socio-economic busi-
ness environment.
People-oriented influences.
Factors that satisfy personal and professional needs seem
to have the strongest effect on project team performance.
I found that the statistically most significant drivers are
derived from the work itself, including personal interest,
pride and satisfaction with the work, professional work
challenge, and accomplishments and recognition ( = .45
&  = .38). Other important influences that I noticed in
the correlation analysis and observed during the action
research include: the ability to resolve problems, especial-
ly interpersonal conflict ( = .36); good team spirit; mutu-
al trust and respect ( = .30); effective support and
communications across organizational lines ( = .27); and
to some degree, opportunities for career advancement and
job security ( = .12). All of these factors help build a uni-
fied project team that can effectively leverage the organi-
zational strengths and competencies and efficiently
produce integrated results that support the organization’s
mission. These factors seem to foster a work environment
conducive to open dialogue and to dealing with ambigui-
ties, risks, complexities, and organizational conflict. All of
these influences help to ultimately transform the team
efforts into innovative business results.
Work- and task-related influences.
Team performance also has its locus in the work itself.
Highlighted by the correlations in Table 1, this study shows
that variables associated with the personal aspects of work
— such as interest, ability to solve problems, job skills, and
experience — significantly drive team performance. On the
other side, many work–related variables from the structural
side (such as project size, work complexity, and work
process) had little statistical significance on influencing
team performance. The importance of this finding is two-
fold: first, managers must have the ability to attract and
retain the appropriately skilled people needed to complete
the project work. Managers must also invest in maintaining
and upgrading the project team’s skill sets and work support
systems. Second, managers must effectively assign the work
to leverage their control over work allocation and results.
This means that while the total task structure and the devel-
opment process is fixed and difficult to change, the way
managers distribute, assign, and present the work is flexible.
This important finding has significant managerial implica-
tions: though promoting a climate of high interest, involve-
ment, and support might be easier to achieve than
redefining organizational structure or reengineering the
work process, it may have an equal or higher impact on proj-
ect team performance.
Organizational process-related influences.
These influences include the organizational structure and
technology transfer process that relies, by-and-large, on
modern project management techniques. While my
research did not favor specific project structures or process-
es, it pointed to specific work process-related variables as
important to team performance. Influences such as cross-
functional cooperation ( = .27), effective communications
( = .27), and effective project planning and support sys-
tems ( = .25) are seemingly important conditions for high
team performance. An effective project management system
will also maintain organizational processes for effective
functional support, including joint reviews and perform-
ance appraisals and processes for ensuring the availability
of necessary resources, skills, and facilities. Other crucial
components that affect the work process are team structure,
managerial power, command and control, the power shar-
ing among team members and organizational units, auton-
omy and freedom, and most importantly, technical
direction and leadership.
These findings provide top management with food for
critical thought. Many of these organizational process vari-
ables have their locus outside the project team organization.
These variables are often a derivative of the company’s busi-
ness strategy, which is developed and controlled by senior
management. Because of this, management must recognize
that these variables can directly affect the quality of the work
environment, as Table 1 shows. These results could affect
team member perception of organizational stability, avail-
ability of resources, management involvement and support,
personal rewards, stability of organizational goals, objectives,
and priorities. Since all of these influences are images of per-
sonal perception, management must understand the person-
al and professional needs of their team members and foster
an organizational environment that is conducive to their
needs. Management can accomplish this by properly and
effectively communicating the company’s organizational
vision and perspective to the team members. For example,
team members could perceive a company merger as an
opportunity or as a threat, as a stabilizer or as a de-stabilizer:
Their perception is influenced by the management’s ability
to communicate. The relationship of managers to the people
in their organizations and the people they specifically man-
age is built on mutual trust, respect, and credibility, all of
which are critical factors in building an effective partnership
between the project team and its sponsor organization.
Project management tools and techniques as influences.
While I found during field interviews that project team
members, in general, don’t show great enthusiasm for man-
agement tools and techniques, these tools are enablers of
the work process and have a strong influence on team per-
formance, as I discussed in the previous section. Specifically,
the overall team ambience and work process — including
the support to problem solving, communication, and tech-
nology transfer — is strongly affected by the management
tools and techniques that managers employ to support the
essential organizational systems, such as budgeting, sched-
uling, and reviews. The tools and techniques that managers
use help run the team’s efforts smoothly. As explained by
one team member with whom I spoke: “We really don’t
have time to come to all the meetings and to provide all the
paperwork required by management, but we do cooperate
because we hope that it will stabilize the funding for this
project and help in the cross-functional integration.” As
project work and business environments become increas-
ingly complex, project management tools and techniques
are adapting by evolving to meet this complexity; managers
are now also requiring greater team member involvement.
At the same time, modern project management is moving
further toward self-directed teams, high market responsive-
ness, and less formal structures and controls that are based,
to a large extent, on commitment, motivation, and team
leadership. This evolution has specific implications for man-
agers: Successful project leaders are making an effort to
apply management tools as an overlay to the project organ-
ization, with minimal interference to their teams and oper-
ations. For the team members to use the tools effectively, the
team must view these management tools as helpful instru-
ments in supporting and facilitating the project activities.
Leadership as an important influence.
Leadership is an essential component of project teamwork:
It is the art of creating a supportive work environment.
Many of the factors that influence project team performance
are derived from organizational processes and systems that
have their locus outside the team. Examples range from the
functional support units to work transfer processes—as well
as the project management system itself with its specialized
tools and techniques. Organizational stability, management
involvement and support, personal rewards, the availability
of resources, and the stability of organizational goals, objec-
tives, and priorities are all factors that influence team per-
formance, yet these are all controlled — by and large — by
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 41
general management. Therefore, team leaders must work
with senior management to ensure that they create an orga-
nizational ambience that is conducive to their teams’ needs.
In addition, team leaders can influence these organi-
zational systems via their management techniques and
their ability to create a team environment through their
leadership actions. While project support or work trans-
fer processes might be defined in terms of procedures and
management directives, the way that team leaders organ-
ize their plans, involve support function personnel, run
meetings, track projects, or recognize team performance
is under their own control. In exercising this control,
team leaders create and define the team environment
through their own actions to build a favorable image of
their projects and a team-friendly project environment
that is supportive of teamwork and integrated within the
overall enterprise system. In summarizing the criteria of
effective team management, I propose three concepts
that highlight the organizational environment and man-
agerial style that is most conducive to high project team
performance:
• Driving forces: The degree of project success seems to
be primarily determined by the strength of specific
driving forces related to leadership, job content, per-
sonal needs, and the general work environment, as
shown in Table 1.
• Team environment: The strongest single driver of team
performance and project success is a professionally
stimulating team environment, characterized by inter-
esting and challenging work, visibility and recogni-
tion of achievements, growth potential, and good
project leadership.
• Work challenge dividend: A professionally stimulating
team environment is also favorably associated with
low conflict, high commitment to project objectives,
high work and team involvement, effective risk man-
agement, good communications, innovation, and
overall team performance.
To be effective in organizing and directing a project
team, the leader must have the ability to recognize poten-
tial drivers and barriers and know when these drivers and
barriers will most likely occur during the project’s life cycle.
Effective project leaders direct preventive actions early in
the project life cycle and foster a work environment that is
conducive to team-building as an ongoing process.
The effective team leader is also a social architect who
understands the interaction of organizational and behav-
ioral variables and who can foster a climate of active par-
ticipation and minimal dysfunctional conflict. To
effectively perform their role, leaders must possess careful-
ly developed skills in leadership, administration, and
organization, as well as technical expertise. The leader is
also required to have the ability to involve top management
when necessary and to ensure organizational visibility,
resource availability, and overall support for the project
throughout its life cycle.
42 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Guidelines for Effective Team Management
In addition to the implications to project management dis-
cussed so far, several specific suggestions emerged from my
study. These suggestions focus on effective team manage-
ment in technology-based project environments. The result-
ing suggestions have been organized into 13 guidelines that
I have sequenced in chronological order of a typical project
lifecycle. It is further interesting to note that in spite of cul-
tural differences among organizations, a general agreement
exists among managers and project leaders on the type of
factors and processes that are critical to effective team man-
agement in today’s technology-based project environments.
These agreements have been qualitatively confirmed during
interview discussions, as well as quantitatively validated by
using a Komogorov-Smirnov analysis of variance by ranks,
at a confidence level of 95 percent or better.
Guideline 1. Ensure team involvement early in the project-lifecycle.
For most projects, effective project planning and early team
involvement is crucial to subsequent high project team per-
formance. This planning and involvement is especially
important for technology-based project work, where high
levels of complexity, uncertainty, and risk — along with the
need for innovation — make it nearly impossible for the
project leader to work out a project plan that is seen as real-
istic, unless performance is the result of collective efforts by
all stakeholders, including support departments, subcontrac-
tors, and management. Modern project management tech-
niques, such as phased project planning and stage-gate
concepts, plus established standards, such as A Guide to the
Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), pro-
vide the conceptual framework and tools for effective cross-
functional planning and for organizing the work toward
effective execution. Furthermore, the team’s involvement at
an early stage in the project life cycle has a favorable impact
on the team environment: Such involvement builds the
team’s morale, its enthusiasm toward the assignment, and its
commitment toward desirable results.
Guideline 2. Define the work process and team structure.
Successful project team management requires an infrastruc-
ture conducive to cross-functional teamwork and technolo-
gy transfer (see the correlations shown in Table 1). This
infrastructure includes properly defined interfaces, task
responsibilities, reporting relations, communication chan-
nels, and work transfer protocols. The tools for systemati-
cally describing the work process and team structure come
from the conventional project management system and
include:
• Project charter, which defines the mission and overall
responsibilities of the project organization, including
performance measures and key interfaces;
• Project organization chart, which defines the major
reporting and authority relationships;
• Responsibility matrix or task roster;
• Project interface chart, such as the N-squared chart;
• Job descriptions.
Guideline 3. Develop organizational interfaces and communica-
tion channels.
A result of the work process, overall project team success
depends on effective cross-functional support and integra-
tion (see 8 in Table 1). All team members should clearly
understand their task inputs and outputs, work interfaces,
and transfer mechanisms. Management can facilitate the
flow of information, both horizontally and vertically,
through workspace design, regular meetings, reviews, and
information sessions. In addition, modern technology —
such as voice mail, e-mail, electronic bulletin boards, and
conferencing — can greatly enhance communications, espe-
cially in complex organizational settings. In addition, team-
based reward systems can promote cooperation with
cross-functional partners. Quality Function Deployment
(QFD) concepts, n-squared charting, and well-defined
phase-gate criteria are useful tools for developing cross-func-
tional linkages and facilitating interdisciplinary coopera-
tion, alliances, and communications.
Guideline 4. Staff and organize the project team properly.
Project staffing, usually carried out during the project for-
mation phase, is critically important to project success.
However, time pressures and budget constraints often lead
to shortcuts in the staffing process. Teams that are hastily
organized with people who are poorly matched to the job
requirements are frequently subject to conflicts, low morale,
sub-optimum decision-making, and ultimately, poor project
performance. While staffing deficiencies will cause prob-
lems for any project, these are especially damaging for high-
technology environments with heavy reliance on
cross-functional teamwork, shared decision-making, credi-
bility, and mutual trust and respect. For best results, project
leaders should negotiate the work assignment with their
team members in one-on-one meetings at the beginning of
the project. Such meetings should focus on the overall task,
scope, and objectives, as well as on relevant performance
measures. Project leaders can often develop a thorough
understanding of the task requirements through personal
involvement in front-end activities, such as requirements
analysis, bid proposals, project planning, interface defini-
tion, or overall product planning. Such early involvement is
also conducive to the team’s agreement to project objectives,
plan acceptance, and unification of the project team.
Guideline 5. Build a high-performance image.
Project teams that have a clear sense of purpose and confi-
dence in the project mission perform better. The fact that
people who have a mission and high esteem perform better
has been long known. In my previous investigation of this
topic (Thamhain & Wilemon, 1998), my coauthor and I
found a strong correlation between the can-do image of a
team and its actual performance. Our study also found that
the team’s self-esteem is a perception that can be enhanced
by the visibility of the work, frequent recognition of accom-
plishments, management attention and support, and the
overlap of personnel values and perceived benefits with
organizational objectives. Creating such a high-esteem
image also leads to increased involvement, better commu-
nication, lower conflict, higher commitment, stronger work
effort, and higher levels of creativity.
This statement may seem out-of-phase with the correla-
tion shown in Table 1, that “project visibility and popularity
(16)” is statistically not significant to team performance.
However, a high-performance image is different from “visi-
bility and popularity:” A high-performance image stimulates
among the individual team members an interest in the proj-
ect, a pride for their participation, and a sense of ownership.
This image also builds professional confidence, a desire to
reach out, and the ability to think outside-the-box. To build
such a high-performance image, team members must have a
clear sense of the significance of their contributions. All
stakeholders must have a clear understanding of the organi-
zational goals and the mission’s objectives. A favorable proj-
ect image can help unify the team, build the team’s
commitment toward the project objectives, and establish a
high-level of project priority. Project leaders and senior man-
agers can help build a favorable project image by making the
project visible and stressing its importance through media
exposure, management involvement, and budgetary actions,
as well as by emphasizing critical success factors and profes-
sional opportunities and rewards. All of these factors help
create a sense of project ownership among team members
and encourage each member’s desire to succeed.
Guideline 6. Stimulate enthusiasm, excitement, and profession-
al interests.
Factors that satisfy personal and professional needs have
the strongest effect on team performance and overall
project results. As Table 1 shows, the statistically most
significant performance drivers are derived from the work
itself, including personal interest, pride and satisfaction
with the work, professional work challenge, accomplish-
ments, and recognition. Whenever possible, managers
should try to accommodate the professional interests and
desires of their personnel. Interesting and challenging
work is a perception that can be enhanced by the visibil-
ity of the work, management attention and support, pri-
ority image, and the alignment of personnel values with
organizational objectives. Interesting work leads also to
increased involvement, better communication, lower
conflict, higher commitment, stronger work effort, and
higher levels of creativity. While the overall project scope
and workload might stand as a fixed requirement, project
leaders usually have considerable freedom in dividing the
project and assigning the work packages. Well-estab-
lished practices, such as front-end involvement of team
members during the project planning or proposal phase
and in one-on-one discussions, are effective tools for
matching each team member’s interests and project
needs. These practices help — simultaneously — sell the
project’s benefits and support team leaders in their deal-
ing with the concerns, anxieties, and potential problems
of the project team.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 43
Guideline 7. Create proper reward systems.
Although salary itself seems to have no significant impact
on team performance (as shown by the relatively low corre-
lation 14 in Table 1), recognition, accomplishments, career
opportunities, and job security are strongly associated with
team/project performance (see Table 1). Therefore, team
leaders should develop an evaluation and reward system
that is designed to recognize both individual and team per-
formance. However, creating such a system, with metrics
that reflect the desired sharing of responsibility and power,
is a great challenge. Yet several models, such as the
Integrated Performance Index proposed by Pillai, Joshi, and
Rao (2002) and the QFD concept (where everyone recog-
nizes the immediate customer), provide some framework
for designing a reward system that balances both individual
and team rewards.
Guideline 8. Ensure senior management support.
The team’s perception of senior management support is crit-
ically important to project performance (Prasad, 1998,
2002). At the outset of a new project, the manager needs to
negotiate with the sponsor and support organizations for
the required resources; this individual must also obtain a
commitment from management that these resources will
become available when these are needed. An effective work-
ing relationship among resource managers, project leaders,
and senior management also favorably affects the credibili-
ty, visibility, and priority of the team, and ultimately, project
performance. This information supports the suggestions in
Guideline 5 in relation to building a high-performance
image.
Guideline 9. Build commitment.
Managers must ensure that the project team’s members are
committed to their project plans, objectives, and results. If
these commitments appear weak, managers should seek a
reason for the weak commitments and attempt to modify
any possible negative views that team members may have.
Anxieties and fear of the unknown are often a major reason
for low commitment (Stum, 2001; Thamhain, 2002).
Managers should investigate the potential for team member
insecurities, determine the cause, and then work with the
team members to reduce their anxieties and transform their
negative perceptions. Conflict with other team members
and a general lack of interest in the project are other poten-
tial factors that can negatively affect a team member’s com-
mitment to the project and its objectives.
Guideline 10. Manage conflict and problems.
Project management activities are highly disruptive to an
organization and conflict is inevitable. Project managers
should focus their efforts on problem avoidance. This
means that managers and team leaders, based on their expe-
rience, should recognize potential problems and conflicts at
the project’s beginning and deal with these before the con-
flicts become big and interpersonal, at which stage the reso-
lutions consume a large amount of time and effort.
44 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Guideline 11. Conduct team-building sessions.
A mixture of focus-team sessions, brainstorming, experience
exchanges, and social gatherings offer powerful opportuni-
ties for developing the work group into an effective, fully
integrated, and unified project team. Such organized team-
building efforts should occur throughout the project life
cycle, while intensive team-building efforts should probably
occur during the formation stage of a new project. Although
formally defined, team-building sessions are often conduct-
ed in an informal and relaxed atmosphere to discuss such
critical questions as:
• How are we working as a team?
• What are the project’s critical success factors?
• What is our strength?
• How can we improve?
• What support do we need?
• What challenges and problems are we likely to face?
• What actions should we take?
Guideline 12. Provide proper direction and leadership.
Successful project managers focus their attention on the
people — and the roles these individuals play — who are
involved with the project. Effective project organizations
have cultures that support multidisciplinary work. These
organizations have project managers who, by their own
actions, influence the attitude and commitment of people
toward the project objectives. The project manager’s concern
for the project team’s members and enthusiasm for the proj-
ect fosters a climate with high levels of motivation and
involvement with the project and its management. It also
promotes open communications and a collective focus on
desired results.
Guideline 13. Foster a culture of continuous support and improvement.
Effective organizations adapt to changing environments. By con-
tinually updating and fine-tuning established project manage-
ment processes and their people, team leaders ensure that their
organization is capable of confronting today’s business chal-
lenges. To accomplish this, team leaders could establish listening
posts — discussion groups, action teams, and suggestion systems
— to capture the voice of the customer and the lessons learned
from past projects. These listening posts could serve as a basis for
continuous improvement when combined with tools such as
project maturity models and the Six Sigma Project Management
Process, which provide useful frameworks for analyzing and
developing the project team and its management process.
Conclusion
There are two critically important and primary condi-
tions that exist to encourage teams to perform at high-
levels: professional interest and work support. Both
conditions are influenced by organizational environment
and team leadership. While nobody has a panacea that
guarantees high levels of team performance, project suc-
cess is not random! A better understanding of the criteria
and organizational dynamics that drive project team per-
formance can assist managers in developing a sharper
and more meaningful understanding of the organization-
al process and the critical success factors that drive project
team performance.
To achieve project success in our hyper-competitive world
of business, project leaders must understand all of the facets
of the project management system and its organizational
environment. This includes not only the latest tools and tech-
niques, but also the people, business processes, cultures, and
value systems of the organization. One of the consistent and
most striking findings from this field study is the need for
increased involvement from all project stakeholders—both
within the organization and among the external partners. The
managers with whom I spoke while I was conducting this
study pointed out that project success in today’s technology-
based environment is no longer the result of a few expert con-
tributors and skilled project leaders. Rather, project success
depends on effective multidisciplinary efforts involving teams
of people and support organizations interacting in a highly
complex and intricate relationship. Cooperation and com-
mitment are significant drivers to high project performance.
Both cooperation and commitment are greatly enhanced
when project leaders foster a work environment where people
see the purpose and significance of their projects. One of the
strongest catalysts to team performance is the professional
pride among organizational members who are fueled by visi-
bility and a desire for recognition. Cultivating a professional-
ly stimulating environment seems to lower anxieties over
organizational change and reduces communication barriers
and conflict, as its simultaneously enhances the desire of
those involved to cooperate and to succeed.
Effective project leaders are social architects who can fos-
ter a climate of active participation by involving people at all
organizational levels in the planning, formation, and execu-
tion of projects. They also can build alliances with support
organizations and upper management to ensure organiza-
tional visibility, priority, resource availability, and overall sup-
port for sustaining the team effort beyond its start-up phase.
Accomplishing these activities requires that project managers
possess carefully developed skills in leadership, administra-
tion, organization, and technical expertise. These activities
also demand that managers possess the ability to engage top
management and to ensure visibility for their projects by
using organizational media, management reviews, and cross-
functional networking throughout the project’s life-cycle.
The result is that technology-based projects can be man-
aged to accomplish the project goals when the project team
works in an environment that helps them thrive. This field
study shows that under the right conditions, project teams
can produce great results, in spite of tough requirements,
high project complexities, and difficult budget and schedule
constraints.
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46 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Appendix: Measuring Team Performance
Measuring team performance is complex and challenging. Its metrics are diffi-
cult to define. Yet team performance influences many organizational decisions,
from resource allocations and training programs to compensation and promo-
tion initiatives. Project managers struggle with relevant measures of team per-
formance, especially for technology-intensive undertakings. The intricate mix of
timelines, resource allocation, multidisciplinary contributions, value percep-
tion, and success criteria often makes it difficult for companies to establish
meaningful measures of project performance. Even more difficult is the application
of such metrics, which involve ensuring consistency and fairness across the
organization with implications to managerial control and making perform-
ance-based awards fair and equitable. These challenges exist especially in flatter,
hierarchically less-structured organizations, where the entire workforce is
engaged in project execution. This situation is also a challenge in organizations
where the project team contributes only a portion to the company’s overall suc-
cess or failure, such as for long-term product developments. Yet, in spite of its
intricate nature and the fluctuation of specific performance measures with the
cultural and philosophical differences among managers, departments, and
companies, some framework for measurability can be established by grouping
performance measures into five categories:
1. Schedule-based measures
2. Cost/Resource-based measures
3. Risk and contingency measures
4. Enterprise benefit measures
5. Stakeholder satisfaction-based measures
Managers commonly use a limited set of schedule-cost-deliverable based variables
to measure team or project performance. Risk, enterprise, and stakeholder satis-
faction measures expand the scope of team performance toward a more com-
prehensive measurement. However, it is also a very broad and fuzzy set of
variables that is often difficult to quantify, with many variables residing out-
side the direct control of the project team. Since project performance will be
judged at various points of its lifecycle, a mutually agreed-on set of perform-
ance measures will not only help in defining the responsibilities and criteria
for reward and recognition, but also establish guidelines for controlling the
project toward its ultimate success. Tools such as the Project Score Card and
Stakeholder Matrix can provide useful support in establishing meaningful and
agreed-on performance measures early in the project lifecycle, which also helps
in unifying the project team behind the project objectives and its ultimate suc-
cess criteria. The following measures are most frequently cited by managers as
indicators of project performance:
Schedule-based measures
• On-time delivery of partial results or end items • Time-to-market • Ability to
accelerate schedule over similar projects • Dealing with risks and uncertainties.
Cost/Resource-based measures
• Performing within agreed-on budget • Credibility and aggressiveness of cost
estimate • Cost reduction over previous/similar project • Dealing with risks and
uncertainties • Achieving a unit production cost target • Achieving a return-on-
investment (ROI) target.
Risk and contingency measures
• Anticipating and identifying contingencies • Preparation for dealing with risks
and uncertainties • Handling of risks and contingencies • Networking with
other risk stakeholders.
Enterprise benefit measures
• Learning from past project experiences • Developing self-directed teams •
Establishing a continuous improvement process ∑ Benchmarking of others—a
best-in-class analysis • Establishing project management norms, standards, and
reliable performance measures.
Stakeholder satisfaction measures • Overall quality and performance of proj-
ect deliverables • Flexibility toward changes in project requirements • Overall
benefits of project implementation • Handling of problems, contingencies, and
conflicts • Minimum organizational disruptions • Innovative project imple-
mentation • Dealing with risks and uncertainties • Satisfaction measured by
survey or other feedback • Repeat business • Referrals • Critics’ report •
Press/media coverage • Professionalism.
A BALANCED SCORECARD APPROACH TO PROJECT
MANAGEMENT LEADERSHIP
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we discuss ways that project
managers can use measurement (using a
tool such as the balanced scorecard) to
improve the operational performance of their
project teams. Project managers will see that
attaching measures to outcomes clarifies
project objectives and supports well-defined
and well-communicated links between the
project vision and business strategy. These
also enable project managers to more effec-
tively monitor and control project activities
for the purpose of improving project results.
This paper reinforces the importance of strat-
egy as an added dimension to the traditional
triple constraint.
We present this information through
our comparison and survey of two projects
undertaken by project teams at a large North
American global telecommunications organi-
zation. The results of our study provide early
evidence of the usefulness of the balanced
scorecard (BSC) as a tool for improving proj-
ect management effectiveness. Our study
also shows that balanced performance
measurement is an important technique for
establishing on-strategy project delivery. We
propose using this technique primarily as an
extension of current practices by adding a
strategic measurement dimension.
Keywords: balanced scorecard; leadership;
project management practice; measurement
theory; business performance management.
©2004 by the Project Management Institute
Vol. 35, No. 4, 47-56, ISSN 8756-9728/03
JAMES NORRIE, director, School of Information Technology Management, Ryerson University,
Toronto, Canada; and Doctor of Project Management candidate, RMIT University, Melbourne
Australia.
DEREK H. T. WALKER, professor of Project Management and program director for Doctor of Project
Management, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Introduction
There are numerous reports that document cases of projects, particularly infor-
mation technology (IT) projects, delivered substantially beyond the due date and
well above the outlined budget. One such project is the United Kingdom’s (UK)
notorious IT project Taurus. It was abandoned after it amassed UK£500 million
in costs and produced few results. Project reviewers found a lack of project lead-
ership and project definition as factors in causing Taurus’s failure (Drummond,
1998). Such failures are often publicly touted by the popular business press in
articles that frequently seem intent on vilifying the project management field.
Such attention gives the public a lingering negative impression of our field’s
strategic value.
Project management researchers, however, as the current literature shows,
widely recognize the important role organizational leaders play in envisioning a
preferred future that encompasses both general strategy and change management.
For example, Briner, Hastings, and Geddes (1996) state, "The most significant suc-
cess factors for project teams is that they have a common and shared idea of what
difference they are trying to make as a result of the project" (p. 89). To develop a
preferred project outcome through exploratory dialogue with various project stake-
holders, organizational leaders must have a clear picture of the strategy the com-
pany will implement to achieve the preferred outcome. The leadership’s purpose is
to define and scope a project so that its reason-for-being is well understood by
those who can influence the project’s successful execution. A leader’s vision helps
the project team articulate the project’s objectives, goals, and products.
As a solution to the dilemma of lacking a clear project vision, Baccarini
(1999) and Davis (1995) offer the Logical Framework Method (LFM) as a tool
for defining project success. We agree with the solution offered by these
researchers; but we argue that this method can be strengthened if organizations
implement it within a strategic measurement framework. Doing so enhances the
clarity of the objectives the team seeks to accomplish. And in doing so, organi-
zations could help project teams connect specific project objectives to current
strategic gaps. By linking the outcomes of a project with a measurable vision,
organizations can enhance the commitment of the individuals on its project
teams to their projects.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 47
 As far back as the mid-1980s,
Tuman (1986) and Cleland (1986)
concurrently recognized — and simul-
taneously presented findings — that
contradicted the then-common notion
that on-time, on-budget, and on-qual-
ity were the most strategically impor-
tant and valid measures of project
success. Yet now, almost two decades
later, professionals in our field remain
quite focused on this legacy and often
seem committed to only using this tra-
ditional triple-constrained model. This
dependency may indicate our field’s
lack of finding a definitive alternative
to the traditional model.
Our review of the current litera-
ture revealed that numerous projects
are perceived as failing because of poor
leadership and enfeebled articulation
of the project vision or a lack of mean-
ingful business impact. These percep-
tions show the ways that organizations
have failed to align their overall strate-
gic goals with the objectives of their
individual projects. This information
may also reflect how quickly business
strategies change and evolve in relation
to project timelines. Nonetheless, any
tool or technique that can help organ-
izations develop better-articulated
strategic goals and objectives and more
concrete project visions is a valuable
leadership tool. We assert that the bal-
anced scorecard (BSC) could serve as
one such tool.
In our ensuing argument we iden-
tify the challenges involved in provid-
ing project leaders with the tools,
methods, and information they need
to develop a clear intersection
between business strategy and project
goals. We also recognize that business
environments may be too dynamic to
permit the organization to continual-
ly articulate and update the intersec-
tions between its business strategy
and a particular project’s goals.
Hence, we see the potential for a pos-
sible gap in project management prac-
tices to emerge, one that arises at the
point where these intersections are
not well understood and where the
ill-defined project vision is internal-
ized by the project team’s members
and acted on to the organization’s
ultimate detriment.
48 • Project Management Journal December 2004
Best practice implicitly assumes
that project teams have a clear vision
of the project that evolves from a
process led by the executive sponsor
and a project leader. This is the process
used in project management’s tradi-
tional triple-constrained model, which
— as mentioned — focuses on time,
budget, and quality outcomes and pre-
supposes that all projects that are
approved are therefore strategic. To
negate this assumption creates com-
munication and decision-making chal-
lenges that are perhaps new to many
project managers. What if the projects
were not strategic? Or what if the strat-
egy evolves more quickly than the pro-
ject’s timelines? If over time a project
that was once a highly strategic imper-
ative devolves into a less strategic ini-
tiative, project managers may find
themselves lost: Traditional business
case methods do not provide guidance
on ways to confront this situation.
Such strategic ambiguity creates severe
leadership challenges.
In response, project managers may
try to create an illusion of tangible
progress by relying more heavily upon
traditional on-time, on-budget, and
on-quality measures—yet this tactic
fails to address the strategy ambiguity
or establish appropriate project goals.
Organizations accepting this approach
would divorce their projects, in regard
to an on-strategy measure, from critical
executive insight and leadership. The
centrality of this point is best illustrat-
ed with a diagram that creates a
quadruple constraint by inserting into
the pyramid of the traditional three
constraints an on-strategy dimension
central to managing project success.
A major premise of this paper is
that the on-strategy aspects of project
management are clearly the shared
On-Time
On-
Strategy
On- On-
Budget Quality
Figure 1. A quad constrained project
management model
responsibility of the project sponsor
and the project managers. This shared
responsibility demands that these indi-
viduals wrestle with this issue via an
ongoing dialogue in order to create a
process that resolves any ambiguities.
The traditional triple constraints, how-
ever, are more clearly the direct respon-
sibility of the project manager and
project team, once the project sponsor
agrees to the project. Figure 1 notes
that the connection of the newly
added on-strategy dimension is central
to the achievement of the other three
traditional constraints.
The problem of providing project
leaders with the tools and process
needed to resolve any potential gaps
when emerging strategy does not obvi-
ously or consistently intersect with
existing project goals is the focus of
our proposed change to the current
triple-constraint methodology.
To support our conclusions, we
are reporting on our previous study of
two projects. In this study we tested
our above-mentioned proposition.
Our research goal was to show that
when an organization uses a BSC
framework, it could improve the ways
it develops its project goals and objec-
tives because the BSC enables an
organization to create a better link
between project vision and business
strategy, which results in more success-
ful outcomes. We also wanted to learn
which areas of current project manage-
ment practice were impacted the most
by an organization’s use of a BSC. We
wanted to discover if the BSC actually
improved the project team’s ability to
make positive strategic decisions.
Project Leadership, Project Vision, and
the BSC
To better understand project manage-
ment, we believe practitioners must dis-
tinguish between the management of a
project (the day-to-day operations of a
project plan in pursuit of an agreed set of
outcomes—on-time and within budget)
and project leadership (the higher pur-
suit of the project team’s creating pur-
poseful, strategic action that will
augment the organization’s business
strategy and achieve results within the
norms and values of the organization).
 The current literature shows a gen-
eral agreement among researchers
about the differences between leader-
ship and management (Bennis, 1989;
Kotter, 1990; Zaleznik, 1977). There is
also an extensive body of literature
that has already explored this domain;
exploring these differences in this
paper has limited utility. What is
important to note is that, in general,
researchers agree that leadership must
exert itself most when the business
context is vague, dynamic, or challeng-
ing. (There is a lack of citations in the
literature indicating how to accom-
plish this in a project management set-
ting when these same conditions
appear.)
By definition, project manage-
ment is about implementing a change
program (Briner et al., 1996; Cleland,
1999; Turner & Cochrane, 1993) in the
form of system changes — as in IT
projects — or in building projects, new
automotive products, airplanes, or
weapons systems. This creates a dilem-
ma for project managers who, when
faced with a set of ambiguous circum-
stances, do not appear to have at their
disposal very many tools to address
these situations.
The project manager acts in many
ways as both a leader and a manager;
however, the project sponsor may,
depending on the project and person-
alities of the project sponsor and proj-
ect manager, influence the extent of
this overlap (Briner et al., 1996;
Cleland, 1999; Morris, 1994). We do
not wish to underestimate either of
these issues or the behavior and com-
petence of project sponsors and project
managers; rather, we want to provide a
more concrete method for addressing
this gap than simply relying on mana-
gerial competence.
Many leadership tasks relate to
developing a vision of the project out-
come that is practical and yet capable
of mobilizing and motivating team
members to accomplish the project’s
goals and objectives. This leadership
vision engages stakeholders who are
not actively involved in the project; it
also inspires them to maintain their
support over the project’s timeline.
This process of envisioning a preferred
future state, of taking a solution-build-
ing negotiation approach to defining
the scope of the project and then clear-
ly communicating this to the project
team and other stakeholders, defines a
strategy for realizing the vision, and
translating the strategies into opera-
tional plans and results.
A vexing problem particularly rele-
vant to our study is the organization’s
providing leadership to a project team
when the project context or business
strategy is either ill-defined or dynam-
ic to the point where there is not a
clear and measurable connection
between the project goals and out-
comes and the business strategy. The
latter problem could also involve team
members who do not necessarily agree
on the interpretation of the strategy in
relation to their assigned goals and
objectives. This problem has been
explored in the past, most notably by
Bennis and Nanus (1997), Bennis,
Spevietzer, and Cummings (2001), and
Turner and Cochrane (1993). The
existing literature contains both gener-
al team-based solutions (Katzenbach &
Smith, 1993; Robbins & Finlay, 1997;
Yukl, 1998) and specific project-based
solutions (Briner et al., 1996; Thite,
1999). In exploring this problem, we
found that the connection is either
ambiguous or understood by only a
few key stakeholders, rather than more
broadly accepted by everyone who can
influence the full range of project out-
comes. Many researchers, particularly
Senge (1990), have stressed in their
work that a narrowly held vision is
insufficient in most leadership con-
texts and fails to create purposeful
coordinated action among all follow-
ers. This problem has been so thor-
oughly studied and documented that
we agree with this conclusion.
We noticed another possible prob-
lem that arises when a corporate cul-
ture or a particular internal set of
values is incongruous with project suc-
cess. This topic is also well studied in
the change management literature (
Collins & Porras, 1996; Kotter, 1995):
The symptoms and causes of this kind
of discord at the corporate level are,
according to this literature, well under-
stood. More recently, researchers have
begun assessing the impact of this
topic in a project context (Yukl, 1998),
although primarily from a social-psy-
chological perspective. We propose
that researchers look at this problem
from the perspective of enhancing the
way project leaders use strategic meas-
urement.
For projects with a long time-hori-
zon, it would seem that the most like-
ly cause of a lack of strategic
connections is rapidly changing indus-
try or business circumstances. These
circumstances most likely occur in
mega-project settings; an example is
the implementation of enterprise
resource planning (ERP) or customer
relationship management (CRM) tech-
nology, where the time horizon for a
significant IT project may run into
years and impact upon all core opera-
tions of a company. It is critical —
especially in these types of projects,
where changed strategies can radically
influence a project’s goals and objec-
tives — that such projects are directly
connected, and remain connected, to
the company’s emerging and changing
business strategy. Unless project lead-
ers constantly and purposefully meas-
ure the on-strategy dimension of an
organization’s projects, they may fail
to successfully keep projects connected
to the organization’s evolving business
strategy. If these leaders rely purely on
the traditional measures of the triple
constraint, they could, quite possibly,
successfully deliver an ultimately non-
strategic project on-time, on-budget,
and on-quality!
Regardless of the originating rea-
sons for the problems identified above,
any gaps between vision and strategy
create potential challenges for the daily
operational management of projects,
especially when managed under
ambiguous conditions. While we do
not intend to minimize the efforts of
previous authors to address this prob-
lem, in general we found that the solu-
tions almost always focus on a desire
to present methods directed at the
behavior of the team leader or on
addressing aspects of the problem
resulting from the company’s culture
or values. There is often a heavy
emphasis on motivational theory as
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 49
the underpinnings of how leaders
influence team members. While use-
ful, these studies do not seem (based
on our experience) to address the core
problem: The insufficiency or instabil-
ity of strategy to properly develop and
express a project vision that is connect-
ed through measurement to tangible
business outcomes. In response to this
deficit of clarity, we set out a succinct
methodology that involves a BSC
framework — modified for the project
management context — to assist lead-
ers who are facing this dilemma.
Although our research used the BSC
framework, we believe that any appro-
priately defined and balanced per-
formance management system could
potentially be substituted and would
produce a similar effect.
A Balanced Scorecard Approach to
Project Management
We now turn our attention to the spe-
cific methods for operationalizing
business strategy. The BSC is one tool
— extensively developed, tested, and
demonstrated — that has proven its
value within corporate settings. This
instrument transforms strategy into
operational plans and strategic meas-
ures that enable the organization to
decide whether or not a project is oper-
ating on-strategy. This outcome occurs
regardless of situational ambiguity
about any one individual’s under-
standing of — or agreement with —
the underlying strategy that led to the
definition of these measures. One
major benefit of this approach is its
capability to take a very complex, often
ill-defined business strategy and
reduce it to a level of specific measure-
ments that shows stakeholders and
team members their particular and
expected contribution to its ultimate
achievement. This tool creates tangible
value from measurement and implies
taking vague notions of strategy and
turning these into executable plans.
However, while proven at the cor-
porate level, to the best of our knowl-
edge only a few researchers have
published papers (Stewart, 2001;
Stewart & Mohamed, 2001) about
applying this methodology to IT proj-
ects. These papers discussed extending
50 • Project Management Journal December 2004
the benefits of this approach to the
management of major projects.
Current literature in the strategy
domain suggests that organizations
should link planned outcomes to their
corporate strategy using a measure-
ment framework. This process is
referred to as performance manage-
ment and is common within corpora-
tions. We find it is also a critical
deliverable for project leaders interest-
ed in on-strategy project delivery and
that it is essential to link project out-
comes to corporate strategy using
measurement as the enabler.
To address this increasing need for
leaders to operationalize strategy
through projects, we hypothesized that
a project-level BSC might enable lead-
ers to use appropriate performance
measurement and leadership tech-
niques, which already exist in other
parts of most corporations, to help
project teams improve their under-
standing of their organization’s busi-
ness strategy.
Our purpose was to develop, test,
and apply a strategic measurement sys-
tem, based on the BSC methodology,
specifically for projects. We anticipated
that this approach would itself be
immediately valuable to project man-
agers and senior executives of large
corporations who are faced with
increasingly complex issues related to
ensuring a timely understanding of
business strategy among disparate and
dispersed global project teams—teams
that may have varying degrees of abili-
ty and interest in understanding the
company’s overall strategy. Using a
project BSC can help address a project
vision gap by making strategy easier to
understand in a practical rather than
theoretical form. The idea is that this
helps the company improve its com-
petitive position by ensuring that proj-
ect managers pursue the on-strategy
and on-quality aspects of project man-
agement with the same level of effort
and vigor they direct to on-budget and
on-time concerns. By making this exer-
cise easier to do and more visible at the
project level, this overall objective is
more readily achieved.
We found that successfully com-
pleted projects required a task manage-
ment focus and an appropriate empha-
sis on process as a method of tracking
and reporting tasks, usually in the
form of a project plan based on a work
breakdown structure (Project
Management Institute, 1996). An
understanding of the project manage-
ment process, its phases, and the
appropriate methods to manage deliv-
erables has clearly been the emphasis
of the early evolution of our discipline.
However, we must not over-emphasize
the management aspects without due
regard for the essentials of leadership
in a project management context.
We suggest that project manage-
ment professionals acknowledge that
the management of a project is the
easier of the two things to accomplish.
Task and process management is rela-
tively easy to learn and can be applied
routinely; leadership of a project,
however, is a different matter altogeth-
er. In their landmark work Project
Leadership (Briner et al., 1996, p. 67)
emphasize the role of a “sustainer” as
a key aspect of successful project spon-
sorship. They also stress the need for
project managers to orient themselves
towards alignment and away from
enforcement—an elusive concept of
trying to create congruence among the
team and with the project’s goals by
using a variety of activities and sources
of power to influence others to act in
accordance with the project leaders’
desired outcomes, rather than relying
on a traditional command-and-control
management orientation. We submit
that the use of a project BSC offers
organizations a powerful, additional
tool for accomplishing this critical
success factor and improves project
team alignment.
Our collective experience in work-
ing worldwide with corporate clients
has shown us that many project man-
agers are not fully schooled — either
in formal academic settings or
through on-the-job project experience
— to necessarily note the subtle but
important differences between per-
ceived power and actual power.
Learning to distinguish between influ-
ence and control to achieve results
often means the difference between
temporarily controlling an outcome
by forced compliance versus creating a
lasting change in people’s behavior
(Greiner & Schein, 1988; Kotter, 1999;
Loosemore, 1999; Pinto, 1998). Some
project managers, however, may not
see the two techniques as very differ-
ent. As a result, we often observe that
project managers eventually come to
the conclusion that they really cannot
be everywhere at once to vet every deci-
sion to ensure that the team appropri-
ately conducts itself in performing its
roles and realizing its project. As a
result, most managers revert to some
kind of exception-based or situational
leadership method to address ongoing
challenges, as recommended by estab-
lished theory (Hersey, Blanchard, &
Johnson, 1996). While somewhat
effective, this tactic does not complete-
ly address the issue.
Results from an earlier study
(Hersey et al., 1996) suggest that a
project level BSC can also become a
tool that provides an indirect form
of influence on daily decision-mak-
ing within a project team: This tool
is perhaps more powerful than other
methods of influence. By demand-
ing that project team members link
their own actions and decisions with
the overall intended strategy of the
project (which, in turn, is an exten-
sion of the corporate strategy, if the
BSC methodology was consistently
applied), can assist with on-strategy
project execution. It extends a virtu-
al leadership presence, which injects
itself into every critical project event
and decision. While this requires
additional exploration, this method-
ology could, if proven in future stud-
ies, represent a fairly significant
breakthrough in the decision-mak-
ing methods used for everyday proj-
ect operations.
The sequence that is used to
build a BSC, originally designated
by Kaplan and Norton (1998a,
1998b), is well documented. In the
literature, what this sequence pro-
duces is often referred to as a strategy
map, a form of causal model. If we
intuitively move to apply this exist-
ing methodology in a project con-
text, we must consider several
important changes:
1. In a project context, the role of
the BSC must change from
measuring the overall achieve-
ment of strategic objectives to
measuring the specific results of
the project and comparing these
to the project’s intended impact
on the organization’s execution
of its business strategy.
2. Instead of only focusing on
mapping business strategy, we
must map the intersection of
the project strategy and busi-
ness strategy and more closely
align these strategies as a result
of this review and use the proj-
ect BSC as a tool for leadership;
doing so tests this alignment
issue more directly.
3. We must modify our approach
to measure specific project-relat-
ed deliverables and objectives, as
opposed to higher-level business
outcomes, and appropriately set-
tle on project-based measure-
ments that link to strategy.
Once these discernible differences
are understood and applied, the basic
steps of the original methodology
remain the same and are applied simi-
larly. In the interests of brevity, we have
chosen to avoid a detailed discussion
of the specifics of the original BSC
approach in this article to instead
focus on its benefit in a project setting.
The hypothesis that we were inter-
ested in testing was whether or not the
BSC would have a discernible impact
on the project team’s understanding of
business strategy and the specific pro-
ject’s connection to strategy—a critical
point in project management leader-
ship. Therefore, the null hypothesis we
seek to reject (at a 95% confidence
level) is that the BSC has no significant
impact on project management out-
comes and does not positively impact
the project team’s performance.
The Pilot Study
We initiated our research while one of
us was providing strategic project man-
agement consulting services to a glob-
al telecommunications firm. The firm
has an extensive network and a partic-
ularly large presence in the United
States and Europe; it specializes in
business services and generates annual
revenues in excess of US$300 million.
The firm was a good research candi-
date because of its representative
nature and because it allowed us to ini-
tiate and follow two similar-scope and
similar-budget projects. These projects
gave us the opportunity to test the
impact of using BSC in a project man-
agement setting.
Each of the two candidate projects
(code names Blue and Pip) met the cri-
teria specified earlier in terms of each
being vital to the company’s business
strategy. The project teams were virtu-
ally identical in size: Between 40 and
45 full-time personnel teaming with
various consultants and contractors
that were required to provide key proj-
ect deliverables. A number of these
individuals were Project Management
Professional (PMP®) certified. Both
projects had estimated timelines —
from initiation to completion — of 9
to 12 months; both had multi-million
dollar budgets.
During the project period, we
closely monitored both project teams
and consulted with each team’s global
project managers and executive spon-
sors. The Blue team was managed using
the firm’s existing project management
methodology and according to existing
company practices. These methods and
practices were generally quite consis-
tent with — and compliant to — stan-
dard professional practices, as specified
in A Guide to the Project Management
Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)
(Project Management Institute, 1996).
Table 1 summarizes this project’s final
on-time and on-budget results.
The concept of the BSC was intro-
duced to the Pip team during initial
training workshops that preceded the
final project planning stages. These ses-
sions, which lasted two days, were held
on the company’s premises. The team
also learned, over a period of three
days, the process of extending and
integrating the methodology into the
company’s existing project manage-
ment framework. Pip (the group using
the BSC) showed actual final project
outcomes in the three key result areas
— on-time, on-budget, and on-quality
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 51
— that were better than those achieved During our post-project interviews compared individual results to
by team Blue. While it is not possible in January 2001, we gathered addition- respondents’ answers, in terms of
to categorically state that this is all due al anecdotal evidence about the quali- their job title and the length of time
to the use of this methodology, we tative impact of using the BSC. These — measured in months — that each
observed strong evidence that shows interviews involved both in-person and respondent served on a project
the BSC had a positive impact on proj- over-the-phone discussions with mem- team. The survey results do not indi-
ect performance. The use of this tool bers of the firm’s executive team who cate any meaningful variations
did create a higher degree of owner- were directly involved in this research. based on demographics or project
ship and involvement from the team tenure, which suggests that the
in the execution of the project than in Results and Discussion value of the methodology was con-
the non-scorecard project, as measured We applied a variety of statistical sistently experienced within our
by an executive assessment during on- techniques to our survey data. We small sample group.
site post-project interviews. The influ-
ence of this methodology on executive Specific key result Blue (non-BSC using Pip (BSC using Actual %
behavior is a significant finding in its group) group) difference
own right.
We surveyed each project team with On-budget delivery 112 % (US$9.6 million 98% (US$12.1 million 14%
a particular interest in measuring any actual vs. US$8.6M actual vs. US$12.3M
apparent differences between the teams budget) budget)
that we could attribute to the use of the
BSC. (Appendix A shows the question- On-time delivery +122% (11 months actual +110% (11 months 12%
naire that we used during this study.) versus 9 months planned) actual versus 10 planned)
This method closely follows the case
Completed 94% (36 of 38 deliverables 95% (18 of 19 deliverables 1%
study research method proposed by Yin
deliverables were 100% complete) were 100% complete)
(1994), which added a substantial
amount of qualitative insight to our
Table 1. Actual project results
study’s less-reliable quantitative results.
The sample of 34 returned surveys from
among the approximately 40 individu-
als who worked on the two projects,
while an excellent return rate, is not sta- ANOVA Analysis* for Sum of squares Sum of DF Mean F Sig.
tistically representative of the total pop- project results squares
ulation of respondents, and so it is a questions
limiting factor that could not be
addressed by an alternate research Questions 1 & 11: Between groups 7.912 1 7.912 13.975 .001
On-time delivery Within groups 18.117 32 .566
design in this instance. As a result, the
Total 26.029 33
reliability of the sample — measured
using Cronbach’s Alpha — is a low .63; Questions 2 & 12: Between groups 8.147 1 8.147 14.391 .001
this result is a function of the limited On-budget delivery Within groups 18.117 32 .566
variability in the responses to individual Total 26.265 33
items from such a small sample. This
meant that using statistical tests relevant Questions 3 & 13: Between groups 24.308 1 24.308 35.810 .000
for a small sample size inhibited mean- On-strategy delivery Within groups 21.722 32 .679
ingful reporting of extensive statistical Total 46.029 33
variations between or among groups.
The primary benefit of the sur- Questions 4 & 14: Between groups 48.074 1 48.074 63.671 .001
veys was to identify specific aspects of Executive/Sponsor Within groups 24.161 32 .755
traditional project management prac- Communication Total 72.235 33
tice that appear to be most influenced
Questions 6 & 16: Between groups 17.152 1 17.152 20.156 .000
by the application of the BSC in a
External communication Within groups 27.231 32 .851
project context (see Table 3). This
Total 44.382 33
knowledge may allow future
researchers to more specifically iden- *The two independent sample t-tests require that the difference between the two samples is distributed. This may well not
tify the best practices that can impact be the case here, so the Mann-Whitney test (which does not require this assumption) was also conducted, with similar
the various elements of traditional predictions for each difference tested.

project management practice that

most companies use today. Table 2. ANOVA Analysis of responses between groups

52 • Project Management Journal December 2004

 Factor Analysis
(Our determination of significant factors was based on means-
between-groups, using ANOVA analysis at .05 confidence level
1. Clear project vision
2. Clear goals & objectives
3. Clearly communicating project status
4. Creating detailed project plans
7. Assuring adequate project resources
9. Assuring an appropriate project team structure
10. Status reporting
11. Project tracking & control
12. Executive/sponsor involvement
15 Implementing good risk management practices
Table 3. Project factors impacted by the balanced scorecard
While both projects ran longer
than initially planned, both groups
reported high self-report scores for
"On-time delivery" in the question-
naire. In our view, this is explained by
the tendency of this company to set
very aggressive timelines that project
teams often do not feel are realistic or
reasonable. Delivery times, as a conse-
quence, even close to these very aggres-
sive targets can be perceived as a
reasonable approximation of accept-
able on-time performance by the proj-
ect teams. While statistically this data
only weakly supports the impact of the
BSC on actual project performance, we
believe that it intuitively supports a
notional conclusion showing the
potential positive impact of the BSC
on project performance.
As previously noted, with the
small sample sizes available for this
research, we found it difficult to con-
duct reliable parametric analysis.
However, if we assume that the normal
mean of responses between the two
groups is the same (what we believe is
an intuitively acceptable assumption,
based on our knowledge of the com-
position of the project teams in ques-
tion), then it becomes possible to
conduct a basic analysis on each
group’s responses to key questions.
Even given the limitations of a small
pilot study, Table 2 shows how the
application of the BSC had a definite
impact on some key aspects of project
management practice.
On the basis of this additional
analysis, we find sufficient statistical
support in Table 2 to reject the null
F value P value
6403.765 .000
18158.824 .000
18158.824 .000
22162.824 .000
22162.824 .000
8562.071 .000
6403.765 .000
10094.374 .000
6403.765 .000
5798.118 .000
hypothesis and therefore conclude that
the BSC did have a positive impact on
the Pip team’s project management per-
formance in at least some of the antici-
pated areas we set out to investigate.
Summarizing the results above
into a simple enumerated list indicates
that the factors most strongly impacted
by the team using the BSC were:
1. On-time delivery (question #1)
2. On-budget delivery (question #2)
3. Executive/Sponsor communica-
tions (question #14)
4. External communications
(question #16)
The Pip team also felt that it had a
direct impact on on-strategy delivery;
however, this belief is biased on the
BSC method training they received,
which deliberately cultivated this
belief in order to gain the team’s com-
mitment to piloting the BSC approach.
Therefore, we have recognized this bias
and have not drawn this conclusion as
a result.
We expected this final outcome
because the entire purpose of applying
the methodology is to enable the proj-
ect team to directly connect their proj-
ect goals and objectives to measurable
strategic outcomes. The Pip team’s
ability to do this consistently improves
its capacity — both internally within
the team and externally to the team —
to communicate about project out-
comes more succinctly.
Most interesting was the Pip proj-
ect team’s belief that the specific fac-
tors (listed in Table 3 above) within
the generally accepted PMBOK® Guide
(Project Management Institute, 1996)
were positively impacted by the team’s
use of the BSC at the project level. This
is useful not only as a conclusion in
this study but also to help other
researchers facilitate future research
that confirms our initial findings. Our
analysis supports the ways that the BSC
measures appear to improve project
performance in areas such as project
communication, monitoring and con-
trol, status reporting, and resource
management.
While we, along with the project's
participants, observed meaningful qual-
itative contributions — during project
execution — in each of the 15 areas list-
ed in Table 3, our statistical analysis of
this data makes the differences mean-
ingful at the prescribed confidence
level, thus allowing us to also reject the
null hypothesis that the BSC had no
impact on project performance.
Therefore both quantitatively and qual-
itatively we find support for the value of
this approach in project management.
Conclusions
Our pilot study suggests that moving
beyond existing internal project com-
munication practices, and using a
BSC framework to make strategic
measures and connections clearer, can
possibly improve a project team’s
internal performance in traditional
deliverables: on-time, on-budget, and
on-quality. We propose that this is
because using the BSC in project set-
tings facilitates a wider perspective on
project management successes and
facilitates a team’s linking to a wider
range of strategic performance indica-
tors that it can use to appropriately
develop a clearer project vision and to
more clearly monitor and control
individual project goals and objec-
tives. Results from our research fur-
ther suggest that the BSC framework
provided project management teams
with additional benefits; however,
some of these benefits require more
attention and further study to draw
firm conclusions about the effective-
ness of this framework.
One of the most clearly cited ben-
efits of the BSC by the project team is
that it is a tool for communicating
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 53
with internal and external project
stakeholders. The scorecard itself is
less significant than the value of its
application so long as the process of
developing and using this tool
increases the effectiveness of commu-
nication between the project sponsor,
the project management team mem-
bers, and other project stakeholders.
This information was confirmed often
during our post-project interviews
with all of these groups. As a result of
having participated in the develop-
ment of the project scorecard, we pro-
vided each team member with a
common communication template to
articulate project performance meas-
ures and results. We argue that this
created a more powerfully committed
team that embodied a deep sense of
purpose and vision (the essence of
good project leadership).
We also argue that using the BSC
in the way we have indicated has the
benefit of making complex strategy
more understandable at the opera-
tional level in terms of specific oper-
ating targets for the project (project
management). The importance of
achieving this objective cannot be
underestimated since it is the essential
value-adding element of improved
project management practices within
an organization.
We therefore suggest that the
process of building a project BSC
brings added depth and reliability to
any project’s business case and to
management’s ability to provide
oversight for achieving the totality
of project benefits, the ultimate goal
of any well-formed project manage-
ment methodology. As in a corpo-
rate setting, the BSC adds value to
participants and promotes more reli-
able communication and more
effective decision-making. We pro-
pose that the BSC — with a demon-
strated ability to make a strong
connection between business strate-
gy and project vision through an
understanding of measures and met-
rics that guide coordinated and
deliberate action at the project level
— is a valuable tool for project man-
agement professionals to adopt and
make their own.
54 • Project Management Journal December 2004
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 Appendix A – Project Questionnaire

In our continuing quest to improve our methodologies and results with clients, we would appreciate you taking a few
minutes to complete the following brief questionnaire. It is designed to have you describe your experiences on this
project and your use of the Align360 Project Balanced Scorecard, if applicable. We are interested in understanding its
value as a project management tool. Please return this questionnaire immediately to your Align360 project manager.

Demographics
1. Project you are involved with:
____________________________________________________________________________

2. Have you been with the project since the beginning? YES NO

3. If not, please indicate in number of months you have been on the project: __________________ months.

4. Your title/level within the organization (optional): ______________________________________________

Your specific project results

Please tell us how well you think your project team did on this project. Using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being poor and
5 being excellent, please rate the following project outcomes.

QUESTION RATING

1. We delivered our project on-time. 1 2 3 4 5

2. We delivered our project on-budget. 1 2 3 4 5
3. We achieved our project’s strategic objective for the company. 1 2 3 4 5
4. Our project team understood how the project fit into the big picture. 1 2 3 4 5
5. We had clear goals and objectives for the project that all project team members understood. 1 2 3 4 5
6. We communicated well with others in the company about our project. 1 2 3 4 5
7. We understood and mitigated project risk as best as we could. 1 2 3 4 5
8. By our team standards, I would consider this project well managed. 1 2 3 4 5

9. Of the factors listed below, please circle any that you feel are critical to managing a project to its successful
conclusion (measured as on-time, on-budget, and on-strategy). Please circle all factors that apply.

1. Clear project vision 2. Clear goals & objectives 3. Clearly communicating project status

4. Detailed project plan 5. Detailed work breakdown 6. Detailed staffing plan

7. Adequate resources 8. Formal budget 9. Appropriate project team structure

10. Status reporting 11. Project tracking & control 12. Executive/Sponsor involvement

13. Contingency funds 14. Good project methodology 15. Good risk management practices

10. If you could identify only one of the 15 factors listed in question #9 that is frequently, in your experience, not
performed well on projects, which factor would you chose (please identify the number and the description):

# ______________ Factor Description: ________________________________________

December 2004 Project Management Journal • 55

 Pg 2/… (Note: Only respond to this section if your team used a project balanced scorecard.)

On a scale of 1 to 5, please rank your understanding of the impact that using the project balanced scorecard had on
the project you were working on. On this scale, 1 means virtually no impact or difference from other projects you have
worked; 5 means the scorecard had an immediate and measurable impact on the project’s results.
19. Of the factors listed below, please circle any that you feel were strongly impacted by your team’s use of the proj-
ect balanced scorecard (a measurable impact to on-time, on-budget, or on-strategy delivery, as a result of using this
tool for this project). Please circle all that apply.

QUESTION RATING

11. The project balanced scorecard improved our on-time delivery. 1 2 3 4 5

12. The project balanced scorecard improved our on-budget delivery. 1 2 3 4 5
13. The project’s strategic goals were clearer to me using the scorecard. 1 2 3 4 5
14. It improved my ability to communicate with executives about the project’s progress. 1 2 3 4 5
15. It improved my ability to communicate with my team about the project’s progress. 1 2 3 4 5
16. It improved our project team’s ability to communicate with each other. 1 2 3 4 5
17. It made us more aware of project risks. 1 2 3 4 5
18. It helped me manage the project better. 1 2 3 4 5

1. Clear project vision 2. Clear goals & objectives 3. Clearly communicating project status
4. Detailed project plan 5. Detailed work breakdown 6. Detailed staffing plan
7. Adequate resources 8. Formal budget 9. Appropriate project team structure
10. Status reporting 11. Project tracking & control 12. Executive/Sponsor involvement
13. Contingency funds 14. Good project methodology 15. Good risk management practices

20. If you could choose only 1 of the 15 factors for project success listed in question #19 that was most
impacted by your use of the project balanced scorecard, which one would you chose
(please note the number and the description below):

# ________ Factor description: __________________________________

21. Would you use this tool again for future projects? YES NO

22. Please write, in the space below, any additional comments about using the project balanced scorecard
that you wish to pass along to us:

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

JAMES L. NORRIE as an academic and a consultant, Mr. DEREK H. T. WALKER is a professor in the
Norrie has published and presented numerous papers School of Business at RMIT University and
on topics related to information technology strategy, the program director for that university’s
project management, and corporate leadership and Doctor of Project Management program.
governance. As director of the School of Information He is also the director of Research for the
Technology Management (ITM) at Toronto’s Ryerson CRC in Construction Innovation in
University (Ryerson University is one of the biggest of Australia. A graduate of RMIT, Aston
its kind in North America and the largest ITM program University, Swinburne Institute of
in Canada), Mr. Norrie teaches undergraduate ITM Technology, and the University of
courses in systems analysis & design, IT strategy and Glamorgan, Dr. Walker has written more
management, ethics and professional practice, and than 80 peer-reviewed papers and 17
project management at both the intermediate and book chapters on topics relating to
advanced levels. He is currently a Doctorate in Project project management.
Management candidate at RMIT University in
Melbourne, Australia and a current member of the
Project Management Institute.

56 • Project Management Journal December 2004

THE INFLUENCE OF A PROJECT PERFORMANCE
MEASUREMENT SYSTEM ON THE SUCCESS
OF A CONTRACT FOR MAINTAINING MOTORWAYS
AND TRUNK ROADS
ABSTRACT
This paper reports the attitudes and expe-
riences of project stakeholders working on
a contract in the United Kingdom (UK) for
the Highways Agency (HA). The agency
used these stakeholders to procure con-
struction services for maintaining its
roads. During the course of the project,
the HA changed its focus from a tradition-
al, compulsory competitive tendering-
type (CCT) strategy to one based on the
HA’s Construction Management Pilot
(CMP) scheme. Part of the change involved
the HA’s introduction of a performance
management system (PMS); this system
offers a multi-dimensional and multi-
observational perspective of success. This
paper discusses the benefits of the new
strategy and the issues and problems
encountered by the HA while implement-
ing the project plan. It also analyzes the
contribution of the new PMS to the project
strategy.
Keywords: performance; measurement;
stakeholders; strategy.
©2004 by the Project Management Institute
Vol. 35, No. 4, 57-65, ISSN 8756-9728/03
DAVID JAMES BRYDE, School of Management, Faculty of Business and Law, Liverpool John Moores
University, UK
DOMINIC BROWN, Mott MacDonald, UK
Introduction
Traditionally, the distinction between good and poor project performance was
defined by the project team’s meeting cost, time, and product quality-related cri-
teria, which researchers such as Atkinson (1999) have been described as the iron
triangle of project management. This iron triangle is still regarded as the measure
for gauging team performance on all types of projects. (The prevalence of this
notion was recently confirmed by White and Fortune (2002) in their survey of
236 project managers representing 88 UK-based private and public sector organ-
izations.) In the literature on the construction industry, other authors have
described iron triangle performance requirements as the need to predict project
costs, to confirm that projects will finish on time, and to verify in project docu-
ments that quality-related standards are met (Chan & Tam, 2000; Love,
Gunasekaran, & Li, 1998).
Using the iron triangle as their measure, these authors reported that poor per-
formance on construction projects typically causes significant cost and schedule
overruns; Gardiner and Stewart (2000) add that these types of projects also fail to
meet quality-related specifications. Lim and Zain Mohamed (2000) found in
their exploratory study of electrical transmission substation projects in Malaysia
that some of the factors causing cost and schedule overruns are not unique to
construction projects. These factors include the project team’s lacking experience,
lacking appropriate skills, and lacking knowledge; these, the study revealed, are
common and expected problems that recur project after project.
In contrast, White & Fortune’s research (2002), which reported that 41 per-
cent of the people they surveyed believed the outcome of their projects were a
complete success, reported that the interviewees recognized environmental char-
acteristics that are not present in all projects. The characteristics, said the inter-
viewees, contributed to the difficulty of ensuring project success in the
construction business sector. For example, Lim and Zain Mohamed (2000), in
addition to finding generic problems such as lack of skills, experience, and skills,
encountered construction project-specific problems, such as a lack of site super-
visors, unusual site conditions, and new project participants unfamiliar with the
industry. Likewise, in an analysis of the types of delays that affect the early stages
of construction projects, Yates and Eskander (2002) reported, in their study of 101
United States (US) engineering and construction industry professionals, 20 dif-
ferent types of project delays, some of which include changing the project’s
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 57
requirements and developing multiple
projects with higher priorities.
Yates and Eskander (2002) also
noted in their study that the two most
common causes for these delays are
constant changes to the project’s
requirements and a lack of communi-
cation among the various project par-
ties. These, however, are generic
problems that can affect the outcome
of all types of projects. The organiza-
tional fragmentation inherent in the
traditional client/contractor/consult-
ant relationship on construction proj-
ects — as reported by Berggren,
Soderlund, and Anderson (2001) — is
exacerbating generic project problems
experienced in other industries, such
as large-scale engineering. Because of
this, it is likely that these generic prob-
lems contribute to the project-specific
problems project leaders encounter as
they attempt to effectively and effi-
ciently manage construction projects.
Since the 1980’s, researchers and
practitioners have developed other
measures of performance beyond the
iron triangle. These measures have led
to a redefining of what constitutes
good and poor project performance. A
consensus has emerged in the litera-
ture that states performance is more
complex than merely measuring cost,
time, and quality. Performance, states
the literature, is measured using vari-
ous criteria, such as the perspectives of
different groups of people involved in
the project and the different stages of a
project’s life. Such a perspective of
measurement is described as a multi-
dimensional and multi-observational
approach (Shenhar, Levy, & Dvir,
1997). In taking this perspective, theo-
rists have identified two distinct com-
ponents for measuring project
performance: project management suc-
cess and product/project success. The
first focuses on the iron triangle and
on the criteria used to implement the
project; the second relates to the
longer-term results yielded by the pro-
ject’s final product (Baccarini, 1999;
Cooke-Davies, 2002; De Witt, 1988).
Given that a construction project
is not completed until after the project
delivery stage, when the facility is open
and operating (Munns & Bjeirmi,
58 • Project Management Journal December 2004
1996), project management success
and product/project success perspec-
tives suggest that in order for
researchers and practitioners to be able
to accurately measure the project’s per-
formance, their measurement must
incorporate criteria that considers the
project’s life beyond delivery. These cri-
teria may include meeting the long-
term financial objectives of the client
— such as internal rate of return —
and satisfying the objectives of cus-
tomers and users, such as their require-
ments for functionality and
operability. The criteria should also
gauge the project’s ability to meet the
objectives of external bodies, which
includes complying with statutory and
health and safety requirements
(Jaafari, 2000). These requirements
may also include the project’s satisfy-
ing psychosocial criteria (Pinto & Pinto
1991), such as gauging the client- and
subcontractor-satisfaction with the
way the project was managed.
Therefore, in assessing performance of
a construction project, project leaders
must judge the project both during
and after the operational phase. The
aim is to assess whether or not the
project met its objectives (Cox &
Townsend, 1998, p. 26; Morris &
Hough, 1987, p. 193). Using measures
that take the broader multi-dimen-
sional, multi-observational perspec-
tive, the literature often records
problems of performance. For exam-
ple, Lim & Zain Mohamed (1999) doc-
ument one client’s dissatisfaction with
the outcome of their construction proj-
ect, the project team that delivered
their project and the supplier organiza-
tions that serviced the project.
The history of poor performance
on construction projects, whatever the
measure used, is the backdrop against
which both the private and public sec-
tors have sought to identify alternative
project management methods. Such
alternative methods could enable these
sectors to more successfully realize
their project goals. The underlying goal
of this endeavor is to ultimately
improve project performance. The lim-
itations of the traditional project man-
agement methods were reported in UK
government-led reviews, such as those
produced by Latham (1994) and Egan
(1998); these reviews highlighted an
increase in pressure on public sector
construction projects to embrace new
ways of working. These reviewers
pushed project teams to the point
where they become examples of best
practice. However, the reviewers found
that the traditional methods caused
conflict and disputes between client
and contractor, disruptions which
resulted in many clients resorting to
litigation to resolve their differences.
Such behavior increased animosity
between clients and project teams and
raised mutual suspicion that each
party was trying to leverage advantage
over the other. Researchers have also
found that stakeholders working in the
construction industry recognize the
limitations of working under the tradi-
tional methods.
A study by Black, Akintoye, and
Fitzgerald (2000) surveyed 78 individ-
uals — construction clients, contrac-
tors, and consultants — and found
that these individuals generally agreed
about the specific failings that result
from using the traditional methods:
exploitation, rigid specification, deci-
sions made with limited knowledge,
and short-term focus. It is within this
context of external pressure to change
and internal recognition of current
failings that the construction industry
now seeks to respond to the challenges
set before it: to improve its perform-
ance in serving clients and in working
with organizations in the supply chain.
At the same time that the con-
struction industry has been facing up
to this demand for new methods,
researchers and practitioners in other
project domains (such as performance
management and quality manage-
ment) have adapted and applied to
the management of projects, as the lit-
erature documents, changes that are
moving the discipline of project man-
agement from a project-related per-
formance perspective to a
multi-dimensional and multi-observa-
tional perspective. For example,
Stewart (2001) developed an approach
to check the health of a project
throughout its life cycle using the bal-
anced scorecard (BSC) approach
which was developed by Kaplan &
Norton (1992). In my previous
research (Bryde, 2003), I, Dr. Bryde
also developed a model for distin-
guishing between different levels of
performance by using a Business
Excellence Model framework (British
Quality Foundation, 1998). Such ini-
tiatives are predicated on the belief
that multi-dimensional, multi-obser-
vational performance management
systems (PMSs) have a use in project
environments.
The wider literature on manage-
ment reports on the use of multi-
dimensional/multi-observational-base
d PMSs in a variety of business sectors:
Walters (1999) studied the case of the
Estates Management Department of the
Mass Transit Railway Corporation of
Hong Kong; Kald and Nilsson (2000)
surveyed 200 business units in
Scandinavia; De Toni and Tonchia
(2001) studied 115 Italian firms from
the mechanical, electro-mechanical,
and electronic industries; and Hlavacka,
Bacharova, Rusnakova, and Wagner
(2001) investigated the health care sec-
tor in Slovakia. All these studies confirm
the relevance of using PMSs. However,
one common theme to emerge from
these studies is the difficulty in estab-
lishing management processes that
allow for the practical implementation
of PMSs. This difficulty is partly caused
by the inherent complexity of the multi-
dimensional/multi-observational per-
spective, with its different stakeholders
using different success criteria (key per-
formance indicators, or KPIs) or differ-
ent competing values when defining
successful performance (Walton &
Dawson, 2001). Given that projects are
typically characterized as containing
diverse and vocal stakeholder groups, as
noted by Cleland (1986), it is likely that
such complexity and competing values
are present in many project environ-
ments, including those related to con-
struction projects.
The Research Context
Our literature review showed us that
project teams need to take a multi-
dimensional and multi-observational
perspective regarding performance in
project environments; our review also
showed that against both traditional
and current measures of performance,
the failings of project management
practices in many industries, including
construction, have historically resulted
in poor levels of team performance.
Our review highlights the way that new
PMSs have been developed in response
to the industry’s wanting multi-dimen-
sional and multi-observational per-
spectives; we also encountered the
practical difficulty of successfully inte-
grating a PMS that accurately reflects
the various perspectives of different
stakeholders into project management
practice.
From our research, we found that
by studying a project that changed the
team’s project management practice,
which included modifications to its
PMS, we could explore whether a
change in the way performance was
measured and managed would influ-
ence the team’s perceptions of project
management and product/project suc-
cess. In addition to this, we examined
the inherent complexity and compet-
ing values in the project environment
to see how, if at all, PMSs were success-
fully integrated into the project man-
agement system.
The Research Study
We collected data by investigating the
attitudes and experiences of project
stakeholders working on a four-year-
long Managing Agent Contract project
in the North West of England for the
Highways Agency (HA). This contract
involved the team’s providing con-
struction services for maintaining
trunk roads and motorways. The pro-
curement strategy for this project
changed from a traditional, compulso-
ry competitive tendering (CCT)-type in
its early stages to one based on the
HA’s Construction Management Pilot
(CMP) scheme.
Theoretically, CMP schemes differ
from CCT strategies in a number of
ways. In CMP, specialist contractors are
appointed to carry out work for the
duration of the project, rather than the
client bidding out each phase under
separate contract within the overall
project. And while several contractors
are appointed to each specialist trade
package, work under the CMP is
shared among the contractors. From
the client’s perspective, CMP has a
number of aims:
• Tighter control over the quality
of work produced by the con-
tractors.
• Better management of direct
relationships and through less
sub-contracting.
• Closer integration of both
design and construction skills.
• Improved flexibility in respond-
ing to client priorities.
• Less resources devoted to tendering
and contract letting procedures.
• More transparent costs to help
manage risk more effectively,
which subsequently reduces a
source of conflict.
• Shorter communication chains,
which improve financial plan-
ning, resulting in more reliable
outturn costs.
• Long-term relationships, leading
to a more highly skilled work-
force and ultimately to less prod-
uct defects as the team strives for
continuous improvement.
Likewise for contractors, CMP pro-
vides them with several advantages:
• Better prospect of winning
business based on quality and
ability.
• Prompt payment of accounts by
the client.
• Continuity of workload through
continuous involvement in the
programming of work.
• Higher profits.
• Influence over the client’s pro-
curement strategy.
There are also other differences
between the CCT and CMP. These are
related to the degree in which project
stakeholders are involved in the project.
Table 1 illustrates these differences.
The construction manager’s role in
CMP, which can be compared to the res-
ident engineer’s role in a traditional
procurement strategy, is pivotal
throughout the project life cycle (PLC).
This role links the stakeholders to the
project. In CMP, the design team project
manager and the specialist contractors
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 59
 Key stakeholders in the PLC under the traditional procurement strategy

Stage Conception Feasibility Design Procurement Construction Handover Operational

Client PM Client PM – HA Design team Client PM – Client PM – Client PM – Client PM –

Key – HA Design Design PM – BG HA Design team HA Resident HA Resident HA Design
Stake- manager – BG manager BG Design PM – BG Engineer – Engineer – BG manager – BG
holders Design team manager – BG BG Main Main Contractor
PM – BG Contractor & Design
sub-contractors Manager – BG

Key stakeholders in the PLC under the CMP procurement strategy

Stage Conception Feasibility Design Construction Handover Operational

Client PM – Client PM – Client PM – HA Client PM – HA Client PM – HA Client PM –

Key HA Design HA Design Design manager BG Design team Design manager HA Specialist
Stake- manager – BG manager – Design team PM – PM – BG Specialist BG Specialist contractor
holders Design team BG Design team BG Specialist contractors contractor Construction
PM – BG PM – BG Specialist contractors Construction Construction Manager – BG
contractors Construction Manager – BG Manager – BG
Manager – BG

Key: HA – Highways Agency, PM – project manager, BG – Babtie Group

Table 1. Involvement of key stakeholders in the project

are brought in at an earlier stage of the
PLC than when using a CCT strategy,
whereas the client is involved at all
stages of the PLC. Suppliers only
become involved before the construc-
tion phase. CMP requires an on-going
interaction among the stakeholders
during the handover and operation
stages. Such interaction ensures that
the project will minimize disruptions
to motorists traveling on the road net-
work. And once construction is com-
pleted, the project team will review the
project’s performance, based on stake-
holder involvement. This review
ensures that the project team members
continually improve. Given CMP’s
emphasis on continuous improve-
ment, this review shows the differences
in PMSs between the two procurement
strategies: CMP has project manage-
ment KPIs beyond CCT, beyond the
team’s meeting cost, quality, and time
objectives. For example, one CMP KPI
measures the client’s involvement in
the project; another KPI measures the
extent to which consultants and con-
tractors have shared knowledge,
expertise, and resources during the
design stage; and yet another KPI
focuses on changes in the project man-
agement process. These changes
encourage the team to apply best prac-
tice and prevent their re-inventing of
the wheel.
Munns and Bjeirmi (1996) define
the project closedown stage as the
point when the project is dismantled
and disposed of—the point when the
project reaches the end of its useful
life. There is no closedown stage for
the HA project we studied because this
project involves ongoing infrastructure
maintenance. Adams and Barnd
(1988) and Spirer and Hamburger
(1988) have both found that other
PLC models consider closedown at the
end of the implementation (construc-
tion) stage.
To obtain our research data, we
conducted semi-structured interviews
with a sample population of the stud-
ied project’s stakeholders: project man-
ager (client), design manager
(managing agent), construction man-
ager (managing agent), design team
project manager (managing agent),
and specialist contractor (contractor).
These five individuals were involved at
each stage of the PLC.
Though the stakeholders we inter-
viewed held project management posi-
tions, each had different roles and
responsibilities. The construction
manager, which equates to the role of
resident engineer under CCT, manages
the specialist contractors on the
motorway network and co-ordinates
the designs by the managing agent.
The design manager — an individual
from within the managing agent’s
organization — manages the overall
design program and the budgets; this
individual also co-ordinates the pro-
ject’s progress and the amount of capi-
tal spent, in conjunction with the
client. The design team’s project man-
ager, also employed by the managing
agent, manages the design team’s work
and liaises with the client project man-
ager, the specialist contractors, and the
construction manager. Table 2 summa-
rizes the roles and responsibilities of
the stakeholders we interviewed.
Our research findings offered us
the opportunity to investigate the
influence that the project management

60 • Project Management Journal December 2004

 Project Stakeholder
s
Client PM – HA
Design Manager – BG
Construction Manager – BG
Design Team PM – BG
Specialist Contractor
Roles and Responsibilities
Project manages the Bridges portfolio on the Maintenance Area. This includes ensuring Transport policy is implemented and
financial targets are met within the demands of the Citizens Charter.
Liaises with all design project managers. Links with construction manager to ensure projects are successful. Main point of
contact with Client.
Co-ordinates the design and construction of work packages and overall work programme to ensure optimisation of design and
resources, including the negotiation of prices with specialist contractors.
Provides general office management over several schemes and technical input for the design. Convenes design reviews to
ensure progress is maintained. Ensures deliverables & budgets for whole programme are met.
Acts as contracts manager, ensuring all contracts are completed on time and to budget. Responsible for sub-contractors and
material orders. Ensures health and safety is in accordance with current legislation. Makes final decision on technical and
commercial matters.

Table 2. Project stakeholders – roles and responsibilties

KPI has in shaping a team’s percep- question. Finally, we passed back to strategy produced more successful
tions of project management success. each subject, for their verification, the project outcomes in comparison to the
All of our research subjects had previ- transcript from their interview. We traditional CCT procurement strategy.
ous experience working as managers included with this transcript a copy of The construction manager rated CMP
on projects that used CCT, which as the interview framework that we used. as “very good,” while the other four
previously mentioned is a cost-time- We then analyzed our data around the project stakeholders rated CMP as
quality project management KPI con- issues of PMS, project management between “good” and “very good.”
struct. Additionally, each interviewee success, product/project success, and None surveyed believed there was “no
had experience using the CMP-based project management KPIs, as outlined difference” or that CMP is “poor” or
procurement strategy, the multi- in the previous section. “very poor” in comparison to tradi-
dimensional, multi-observational tional methods.
project management KPI construct. To Findings In terms of the project manage-
better understand the roles, relation- All of the subjects we interviewed ment KPI construct, all of the stake-
ships, and interactions between the believed that the CMP procurement holders emphasized the importance of
subjects interviewed, we constructed a
context chart — shown in Figure 1 — Traditional
based on a model by (Miles & Procurement
Huberman, 1994, p. 102). Resident
Engineer
From our research, we noticed that
a direct relationship can create a for- Main
Client PM
HA
Client PM
HA
Client PM Contractor
mal contractual link or a direct com- HA
munications or reporting link; an Resident Design
Sub Engineer Manager
indirect relationship is where the rela- Design
Manager
Contractor BG
Client PM
tionship between the two parties is BG BG
Main
Sub
managed via a third party or through Contractor
Contractor
PLC
an informal communications link. Conception Feasibility Design (Procurement) Construction Handover Operation
To address the issue of construct
Conception Feasibility Design Construction Handover Operation
validity that can arise from using a case
study method, we used other sources Client PM Client PM Client PM
of evidence, as suggested by Yin (1994, HA Specialist
Contractors
HA HA

p.33). These sources included the con- Construction

Manager
Design
Manager
Construction BG BG
tract documents we accessed, the HA’s Design PM
BG
Manager
BG Design Design
CMP scheme manual, and our knowl- Manager
BG
Manager
BG
edge of the contract through prior Design
Specialist
Sub Specialist
Specialist
Manager Contractors
employment with the managing agent. BG
Contractors Contractors

The latter enabled us to obtain some

triangulation of data. We constructed a Construction Direct relationship Indirect relationship
chain of evidence by linking the litera- Management

ture findings to the research question

and to our analysis of the research Figure 1. Context chart of stakeholders in the project life cycle

December 2004 Project Management Journal • 61

client satisfaction and quality. This
emphasis was not affected by the
change from CCT to CMP, though we
saw evidence that CMP was enabling
the team to enhance its performance in
regards to these KPIs. This enhance-
ment resulted after the team recog-
nized that project satisfaction was
influenced by changes in the project
management process.
We did not see any evidence show-
ing that the team’s adopting a new pro-
curement strategy changed the
stakeholders’ interest in the KPIs of
cost and time. All interviewees regard-
ed these indicators as important and
essential to project management suc-
cess; but in relative terms, they rated
these indicators as subordinate to the
KPIs of client satisfaction and quality.
Despite the lack of change in empha-
sis, we noticed indications that the
team had improved its capacity to
meet the KPIs under CMP. For exam-
ple, the client’s project manager found
that project costs were better predicted
through the profiling of expenditure
on a bi-monthly basis. This profiling
improved the team’s ability to keep
better control of the project’s expenses
(which they kept within 5 percent of
the budget). This achievement, accord-
ing to the construction manager, is not
a project expectation when using the
traditional strategy. The client also
reported a reduction in time spent on
the network. Likewise, the view of cost,
time, and quality failures — such as
staying on the network too long and
the cost of remedial work after the
main work had been completed — had
not changed under CMP; however, the
team believed CMP provided them
with the methods needed to better
understand these issues and prevent
these issues from occurring in the
future.
We perceived that under the CMP
strategy, the team’s formal definition and
measurement of individual KPIs
enhanced the team’s performance for the
stakeholders’ benefit, as compared with
the results achieved with CCT. The
client’s project manager stated that
health and safety aspects were better
planned and managed when these were
formally defined as a specific KPI.
62 • Project Management Journal December 2004
According to our interviewees, having
KPIs linked to the way the project is
managed — such as encouraging inno-
vation, the sharing of ideas, and continu-
ous improvement — leads to
improvements in these areas. For exam-
ple, interviewees noted that one KPI
related to measuring the extent to which
consultants and contractors shared
knowledge, expertise, and resources on-
site or during the design.
The client’s project manager stated
that performance against this KPI would
be discussed at every closedown meeting,
thus allowing managers to identify
improvements and compare perform-
ance across schemes. In addition, the
focus on a wide range of both product-
and process-oriented KPIs fostered an
enhanced level of personal satisfaction.
For example, the design team’s project
manager noted that the team’s ability to
be involved in the decision to change
things on-site — and the fact that this
increased involvement, which subse-
quently led to designs being built in 3-4
months — resulted in increased satisfac-
tion. The construction manager
described a more satisfying working rela-
tionship as a result of the team’s obtain-
ing increased interaction with the client,
which in the manager’s opinion led to a
more open relationship and the sharing
of information and ideas. For the spe-
cialist contractor, the fact that there were
KPIs that focused on the need for long-
term partnerships — relationships which
establish a guaranteed future workload
and a continuity of work — proved a
source of personal satisfaction.
Our interviewees identified a num-
ber of critical success factors relating to
their project. These factors include:
• Establishing relationships based
on trust and mutual respect
• Having the right people in the
right place
• Enlisting competent people
• Developing a clear client brief
• Maintaining a high degree of
client involvement
• Establishing clear communica-
tion channels
• Ensuring the right information
reached the right people
• Gaining senior management
commitment.
The interviewees cited CMP as the
element that put these factors — which
were previously absent — into place.
In addition to PMS, which made possi-
ble the placement of critical success
factors (such as creating communica-
tion channels) during the project,
another tool that the interviewees rec-
ognized as valuable was a visual-
graphical output of performance. This
output was typically a one-page docu-
ment that showed stakeholders the
project’s measured results against the
KPIs broad groupings of customer sat-
isfaction, construction cost, prediction
of cost, prediction of time, supply base,
project time, quality, health and safety,
and productivity improvement. The
interviewees reported that each broad
grouping had two or three detailed
KPIs. The document also allowed
stakeholders to compare actual per-
formance and target performance
against benchmark schemes; addition-
ally, the document outlined the team’s
performance at comparable stages of
the project life cycle, such as during
design and in the final account.
We noticed evidence of problems
in reconciling the inherent complexity
and the competing values of diverse
perspectives held by the stakeholders;
we also saw evidence of problems in
aligning all the stakeholders to the
new way of working. The problem of
reconciling inherent complexity and
competing values was evident in the
responses from the client’s project
manager. For the KPI related to cost
effectiveness, the client was concerned
that having preferred suppliers would
ultimately lead to consolidation and
subsequently reduce competition. The
result would restrict the market to
those contractors fortunate enough to
receive appointments under the new
scheme. The design manager raised
similar concerns, stating that special-
ists who did not get on the preferred
supplier list would be marginalized,
which would cause them to lose out
on work over the next five years.
Other KPIs related to the project
management process: to the degree of
involvement of the various stakehold-
ers in this process and to the involve-
ment of the government as
stakeholder, which was looking for
the client to reduce the amount of
project time involved in a contract in
order to free up their staff’s time to
work on other things. The purpose of
this involvement, for the government,
was to engage this staff in its in strate-
gic planning activities as a network
operator. Yet the new scheme, and
indeed the industry best practice cur-
rently being developed by this project
team, called for increased involve-
ment as a measure of improvement
against this KPI.
We found that the problem of
aligning all the stakeholders to the
new way of working was highlighted in
the interviews with the design manag-
er, construction manager, and special-
ist contractor. All three subjects
identified the problem of getting the
experienced individual specialist work-
ing in the new way. In the opinion of
the construction manager, this was due
to the fact that working under the CMP
arrangement might typically represent
only one-or-two percent of the special-
ist contractor’s turnover. The specialist
contractor would, therefore, not realize
the amount of effort involved, in terms
of managing work to meet the
demands of the various KPIs. For
example, the turnover of the work
would not warrant the team’s commit-
ment to participating in all of the
meetings, such as the closedown meet-
ings described earlier. In addition,
there was some evidence of difficulties
in simultaneously achieving improved
performance across disparate KPIs. For
example, the design team’s project
manager described how the client had
estimated final design costs at 30-to-40
percent above the prescribed budget
on a particular scheme, due to the
changing of the project’s objectives,
which in part was caused by increased
client involvement. In terms of KPIs,
the scheme might show an improve-
ment in terms of stakeholder involve-
ment, but at the same time it shows a
decline in cost effectiveness.
Finally, the client’s project manag-
er raised the issue of the degree of
measurement required under the new
way of working. This individual high-
lighted the complexity of — and the
competing values in — the project
environment: striking a balance
between the wider requirements of the
Citizen’s Charter with its obligations
on minimizing network delays, while
also justifying prudent spending and
maintenance of a safe network. In this
context, we noticed, however, a danger:
too much measurement might be tak-
ing place, especially if the KPIs being
measured have not been carefully
developed to contribute to the organi-
zation’s overall goal.
Conclusions and Further Study
Our study of a four-year-long
Managing Agent Contract project that
changed its project management KPI
construct from a traditional CCT-type
procurement strategy to one based on
the CMP scheme highlighted that the
stakeholders’ perceptions of project
success shifted with the change of strat-
egy. All of the five stakeholders inter-
viewed believed that using CMP
schemes made it possible for the team
to realize more successful project out-
comes than when the team was using
CCT strategies.
Project Critical Success Factor
Right team in place
Peer Pressure
Proactive relationship between designer and contractor
Control of information
Use of Project Performance Management System
Senior management commitment
Clear, well-defined brief, budgets and design
Early involvement by designers & contractors in project
Knowledge of client’s overall constraints & strategic objectives
Figure 2. Project performance management system as a project critical success factor
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 63
This study also highlighted a num-
ber of factors that resulted from the
change in strategy, including earlier
and increased stakeholder involve-
ment and better team communica-
tions. These factors suggest that there is
not one influential factor causing proj-
ect success. Instead, project success is
determined by a number of interrelat-
ed factors. In this context, this study
suggests that a PMS constructed with
multi-dimensional and multi-observa-
tional project management KPIs may
be one such factor. On its own, a new
PMS might not have a significant influ-
ence on outcomes, but taken with the
other factors introduced through CMP,
it has — as Figure 2 shows — an influ-
ence on project outcomes.
In our case study, we found that
the PMS seemed to have an influence
in two ways. First, it formally defined a
broad range of KPIs, such as cost, qual-
ity, and health and safety; it also
focused on performance in the defined
areas. This focus gave stakeholders a
shared and common understanding of
the outcomes prioritized. Second, the
use of PMS-related tools — such as the
one-page visual communication tool
Project Success KPI
• Cost
• Time
• Quaility
• Overall Satisfaction
of Stakeholder
used to define and monitor perform-
ance against KPIs — provided the team
with an instrument for establishing
other critical success factors, such as
ensuring the right information reaches
the right people. This visual communi-
cation tool not only integrated the
PMS with other critical success factors,
it also helped the team successfully
integrate PMS into the project manage-
ment system.
This study additionally revealed
some of the problems linked to the
inherent complexity and competing
values in the project environment.
One such problem involves achieving
team consensus about KPI definition
and the frequency of measuring KPIs.
A second problem includes ensuring
that all stakeholders understand and
commit to the required new ways of
working to meet all the elements of
performance used by the PMS. A final
problem deals with any inherent con-
flict between KPIs: for example, achiev-
ing better performance on a
stakeholder involvement KPI might
lead to poorer performance on a cost
effectiveness KPI.
The changes in project manage-
ment practice that we investigated in
this case study are in the early stages of
implementation. Indeed, the introduc-
tion of CMP was being undertaken as a
pilot scheme. Likewise, the attitudes
and experiences of the project stake-
holders have been collected as a snap-
shot in time, captured at one stage of
the implementation of the scheme. To
gain a fuller picture, it will be necessary
to revisit the case at a later stage to bet-
ter understand the benefits and issues
of introducing new project manage-
ment methods that involve a change in
the nature of a PMS. Over time, it will
be possible to compare performance of
the CMP approach by benchmarking it
against similar schemes that used non-
CMP traditional methods. Given the
exploratory nature of this study, no
wider generalized claims can be put
forward in regards to our findings.
Indeed, our findings may be atypical
and may result from the specific nature
and environment in which this project
is occurring. Further work is required
to test the validity of the exploratory
64 • Project Management Journal December 2004
findings that we have reported in this
paper; such a study should look at
other project environments that have
adopted multi-dimensional and multi-
observational PMSs.
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Gardiner, P. D., & Stewart, K.
(2000). Revising the golden triangle of
cost, time and quality: The role of NPV
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Hlavacka, S., Bacharova, L.,
Rusnakova, V., & Wagner, R. (2001).
Performance implications of Porter’s
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5(1), 44-66.
Jaafari, A. (2000). Life-cycle project
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(1992). The balanced scorecard -
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17(3/4), 97-104. London: Sage.

DAVID JAMES BRYDE is a senior lecturer in operations management at Liverpool John Moores University in the United
Kingdom (UK); he is also a research correspondent in — and the acting head of — Research and Doctoral Studies in the
university’s School of Management. An experienced researcher and teacher at the executive, masters, and undergraduate
level, Dr. Bryde has published his research in various journals, including The International Journal of Operations and
Production Management. Along with his research pursuits, Dr. Bryde is currently working with the Riverside Group on a
program to regenerate deprived areas in the UK’s North Cumbria that are worth in excess of UK£20 million. Prior to
joining Liverpool JMU, he worked in a variety of technical support roles for Metier Management Systems, which are the
suppliers of Artemis project management software. After leaving Metier, he joined ICI PLC, working as a project manager
in a group specializing in infrastructure and information technology-related projects. Dr. Bryde is a member of the Project
Management Institute.

DOMINIC BROWN is a principal project manager working on various private finance initiative/public private partnership
(PFI/PPP) projects in the UK for Mott MacDonald. His responsibilities involve the provision of project management and
providing technical, commercial, and financial input to sponsors, lenders, and other stakeholders on large capital and
PFI projects, including procurement advice. A trained civil engineer, Mr. Brown is experienced in working in the highways
sector: to date, he has served as a designer, site engineer, technical adviser, and project manager on a range of both
new and renovation road and bridge projects. He has also worked on building and development projects and contract
procurement strategies, oftentimes within his clients’ organizations. Prior to joining Mott MacDonald, Mr. Brown was
employed by with the Department of Infrastructure in Melbourne, Australia, for which he developed procurement
strategies and quantified construction and project risk costs for a Melbourne development. Prior to this position, he
worked on Highways Agency (HA) contracts in the UK where he used various procurement strategies — such as
construction management and partnering — to deliver large capital bridge and road maintenance schemes.

Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation

1. Publication Title: Project Management Journal 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security
2. Publication Number: 8756-9728 Business office of the Publisher: Project Management Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of
3. Filing date: 12/01/04 Institute, Four Campus Boulevard, Newtown Square, Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other
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16. This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the December 2004 issue of this publication.
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December 2004 Project Management Journal • 65

 COVER TO COVER
Kenneth H. Rose, PMP, Book Review Editor
LEADING HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS
BY RALPH L. KLIEM
he importance of leadership on proj-
T ects is documented eloquently in
many texts and in the Project
Management Institute’s (PMI) A Guide to
the Project Management Body of Knowledge
(PMBOK® Guide), 2000 edition, where it is
highlighted under General Management
Skills. While the PMBOK® Guide notes that
project managers are expected to be leaders,
the truth is that everyone on a project team
can and should demonstrate leadership
skills as appropriate to the project’s needs.
As project professionals, we must continually enhance our peo-
ple skills and leadership ability.
In his book, Leading High-Performance Projects, Ralph L.
Kliem uses his own experiences, coupled with references to cur-
rent literature, to present the key principles of project leadership.
He begins by stating that there is no universal description of
leadership and then presents the eight different definitions
noted in the literature. He reviews leadership theories along with
a discussion on the importance of leading in project manage-
ment. Kliem concludes the opening chapter by noting that if
there is any agreement among theorists in the leadership field, it
is that “leadership influences, rather than commands, people to
achieve some goal.”
Kliem’s literature review provides the background for the
remainder of the book. He describes ten key areas that distin-
guish project leaders from project managers. Each chapter then
addresses lessons learned in these 10 areas, which he calls pat-
terns of action: shift, visualize, integrate, understand, decide,
motivate, team, trust, communicate, and respond. Although
these patterns may not occur at the same level, detail, or
sequence, Kliem points out that these are significant and can
lead to project success if these patterns are applied in the appro-
priate situation.
Leaders must rely on their judgment and experience to help
them select the appropriate pattern and determine when to use
each pattern. As Kliem explains, leaders who apply these pat-
terns of action represent a paradigm change for project managers
from an emphasis on tools and techniques to a focus on the sub-
jective factors in effective leadership. The people side of project
management is often overlooked, and leading is required to
restore the balance. He further explains that with this new para-
digm, a multidisciplinary view of project management is
required: one that shifts emphasis from components of a project
towards a project’s interrelationships, especially in regards to
performance, product, and people, with people playing the piv-
otal role. For Kliem, a project is not only a temporary and
66 • Project Management Journal December 2004
unique endeavor, it is also a human endeavor that is “a result of
people using their energies to produce something,” using tools
and techniques as a means to an end.
Kliem explains each of the ten patterns of action by explain-
ing why each one is important. To accomplish this, he references
the current literature and his own experience. Each of his expla-
nations of a pattern concludes with a short case study that
describes the reasons the pattern was selected and the specific
results that occurred through its implementation. Arranged for
reading in any desired order, the case studies provide readers
with insights and guidelines to consider.
Throughout the book, however, there were several ques-
tionable references. For example, The Managerial Grid, pub-
lished originally in 1964 by Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton,
is instead credited to Robert Blake and Anne McCanse in their
book, Leadership Dilemmas – Grid Solutions, published in
1991. And considering John Kotter’s work in this field, including
his definition of leadership in the PMBOK® Guide, it was dis-
turbing to find that he was cited only once in Kliem’s book—
and then not until page 212, rather than in the first chapter,
where Kliem discussed the different perspectives of leadership.
Clichés, such as “analysis by paralysis” and “shooting from
the hip,” frequently appear throughout the book. While these
make for interesting reading, Kliem’s use of clichés is overdone;
he also uses acronyms such as WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) and
TANSTAAFL (There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch). What
is interesting to note is that while Daniel Goleman’s book,
Emotional Intelligence, was discussed in a section titled
“Exercise Poor Emotional Intelligence,” it was not Goleman’s
ideas on emotional IQ that were featured, but rather his discus-
sion of the use of body language that Kliem cited as a way to bet-
ter understand one’s feelings.
Nonetheless, Leading High-Performance Teams provides
project professionals with insights and guidelines on improving
leadership capabilities in an easy-to-read format. The summary
of the ten patterns of action of leadership at the end of Kliem’s
book shows that while one’s performing these actions does not
guarantee success, these actions are each key ingredients in
achieving project management success as one moves from a
management function into a leadership role.
Reviewed by Ginger Levin, DPA, a project management consultant
based in Lighthouse Point, Florida who specializes in maturity
assessments, the PMO, and metrics. She is an adjunct professor
and the program specialist in Project Management for the
University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
J. ROSS, 2004, ISBN: 1-932159-10-X, HARDCOVER, 278 PP.
FIELD GUIDE TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT, SECOND EDITION
BY DAVID I. CLELAND
new edition of an existing text
A should offer more than just a
new cover and a new copyright
date with minor revisions of content
and citations. It should provide new
value that meets needs that have
matured or emerged since the previ-
ous publication. David I. Cleland’s
Field Guide to Project Management,
Second Edition exceeds the expecta-
tions of readers who share this latter
view and stands as an example to
those authors who mistakenly adhere to the first.
A quick comparison of the second edition to the first
reveals five updated chapters and nine new chapters. This is
not a book tweaked to accommodate current markets;
rather, it is a book that has been carefully crafted to meet the
needs of today’s project manager. In doing so, Cleland deliv-
ers the best of what he previously published and combines
it with contemporary content.
As before, the book is divided into five sections that
address areas of primary concern to project managers: gen-
eral project management, project planning, project leader-
ship, project oversight, and team management. In all, 36
chapters address individual topics of importance that range
from basic reasons for using the techniques of project man-
agement to the means and methods of terminating projects.
One new chapter, “Implementing the Project-
Management Process” by Lewis R. Ireland, is a welcome
addition. He presents and explains a simple four-phase proj-
ect life cycle model of definition, planning, execution/con-
trol, and closeout that will serve just about any project
manager working in just about any domain.
Three revisions and two new chapters are among the 10
chapters in Section II, Project Planning Techniques. One of the
wisest updates is “Putting Together a Work-Breakdown
Structure” by Paul Warner and Paul Carras. In the previous
edition, this article used a wedding as an example of build-
ing a work breakdown structure. The updated version takes
a more normative view, providing theory and practical guid-
ance that is generally useful to all.
Kenneth O. Hartley, chair of the 2004 PMI Board of
Directors, addresses a matter of timely importance in a new
chapter titled “The Role of Senior Management on Projects.”
This piece addresses the results of a PM Network reader sur-
vey (published in the July 2003 issue) that indicated that a
lack of executive support was the second most significant
factor in delivering projects on-time and on-budget. Hartley
lays out senior management responsibilities and describes
23 specific tasks across the project management life-cycle
phases of conceptual/planning, execution, and closeout.
In Section II, Project Oversight, Frank T. Anbari also pro-
vides a new chapter: “Effective Project-Management
Information Systems.” Anbari says that effective project man-
agement, even overall project success, depends on an effec-
tive information system. The first step, he writes, is
comprehensive planning that considers the spectrum of proj-
ect information: who needs it, what is needed, when and
how often is it needed, what format and what media are
used, and who delivers it. He then briefly describes the expec-
tations and mechanics of project performance reporting in
relation to progress, schedule, resources, integrated cost and
schedule, quality, procurement, and risk management.
Earned value management (EVM) is a de rigueur ele-
ment of any project management guide. In “Implementing
Earned-Value Project Management in Ten Easy Steps,”
Quentin W. Fleming and Joel M. Koppleman present a sim-
ple framework of specific actions that remove the mystery of
the acronym soup traditionally associated with EVM; the
result makes this technique more accessible to the masses.
The number and variety of available published books
on project teams may suggest to some that all that can be
said about teams has already been said. Not so. In an updat-
ed chapter, “Energizing Project Teams,” in Section V, Team
Management, authors Gwenn C. Carr, Gary L. Engelhardt,
and John Tuman, Jr. bring a new view to an old problem:
how to get the most from teams. And although team organ-
ization is an ingrained part of the project paradigm, imple-
mentation, as experienced project professionals well know,
does not always follow intent: teams may comprise inexpe-
rienced members, become jaded or stale, or become frag-
mented over time—all factors that may limit or prohibit
success. The authors describe and discuss a five-step pro-
gram for rebuilding and energizing project teams that is aug-
mented by the three essential steps of aligning project teams
and management sponsors, developing a project process,
and creating a knowledge base for the teams.
When it first appeared, Field Guide to Project
Management was a unique addition to project management
literature. And it remains so today, but now with enhanced
value. The second edition offers an unmatched collection of
best-of-the-best articles that address the broad range of proj-
ect management knowledge in ways that are immediately
useful to readers on the job. This book is one of the critical
few resources that should be on every project manager’s
bookshelf.
Reviewed by Kenneth H. Rose, PMP, director, Peninsula Center
for Project Management in Hampton, VA, USA.
Wiley, 2004, ISBN: 0-471-46212-8, paperback, 648 pp.,
$71.25 Member, $75.00 Nonmember.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 67
QUANTITATIVE METHODS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT
BY JOHN C. GOODPASTURE
n Quantitative Methods in Project
I Management, author John C.
Goodpasture is primarily con-
cerned with calculating a project’s
value, establishing project metrics
and measures of success, and evalu-
ating risk. For Goodpasture, the proj-
ect manager’s mission is to “manage
project capability and capacity to
deliver expected value, taking meas-
ured risks to do so.”
In applying quantitative meth-
ods to project management, Goodpasture begins his book
by discussing three value models: Balanced Scorecard,
Treacy-Wiersema, and Kano. He then builds a framework for
value, risk, and capability called the project balance sheet,
which, he writes, is intended to connect business and proj-
ect and relate the sponsor’s view and understanding of the
project with that of the project manager. He adds that the
project balance sheet and value models are then integrated
to form the higher level framework; this integration is the
basis of this book.
The framework setting of Chapter 1 is followed by a
primer on probability and statistics and then by two chap-
ters on work estimation and decision making that apply the
primer material. The focus then shifts from probability and
statistics based methods to financial statement and expense
accounting based approaches in the application of quantita-
tive methods to project management knowledge areas. This
financial and accounting perspective is then applied to risk
and earned value in the next two chapters.
Following his discussions of risk and earned value is a
chapter on time management. In this chapter, the author’s
approach is more sweeping and the topics range from basic
networks and critical-path-through-rolling-wave and criti-
cal-chain approaches. Time management is followed by a
special topics chapter that looks at interesting areas related
to project management or areas that examine the periphery
of project management and don’t seem to have a place in
the preceding chapters. Goodpasture’s final chapter focuses
on project contracts and the math associated with the vari-
ous types of contracts.
The overall perspective of the book is one of value, met-
rics, numerics, accounting, finance, budgeting, and the other
quantitative factors that can be associated with the manage-
ment of projects. As such, this book can serve as an excellent
complement to other project management works that are
process-oriented and hold more closely to a structure, such
as the PMI matrix.
68 • Project Management Journal December 2004
In the chapter on organizing and estimating work,
Goodpasture follows an exhaustive discussion of work
breakdown structures (WBS) with four estimating methods
that are applied to the WBS and incorporate risk, figures of
merit, and confidence intervals. He provides numerical
examples and tables illustrating the application of each of
the four estimating models. This format is followed
throughout the book, with each of the selected project man-
agement knowledge areas being addressed from a numerical
and value standpoint that refers back to the value frame-
work and quantitative primer found in earlier chapters.
The quantitative decision-making chapter concentrates
on decision trees and tables with a heavy dependence on the
probability material cover in the primer. Though interesting
and thorough, it only refers to projects and their use of deci-
sion tables in a superficial way.
The core of the book appears to be in two complemen-
tary chapters: one on risk-adjusted financial management
and one on expense accounting and earned value. This
accounting and balance sheet approach to quantitative proj-
ect management is apparently the author’s forte and one
where he has made some previous contributions. Here the
expense statement is mapped to the WBS, as is the balance
sheet and the trial balance to show, quantitatively from an
accounting perspective, how business needs are met and
value is delivered while considering risk.
In special topics, the author extends the statistics primer
by adding regression analysis and hypothesis testing. The
book also features short discussions of risk, Six Sigma, and
Quality Function Deployment. The final chapter covers con-
tract types with scenario style examples of the return-and-
ratio math associated with each.
At first glance, Quantitative Methods in Project
Management appears disjointed, covering one topic after
another, often without clear connections. However, when it
is viewed as a collection of quantitative methods that is
intended to complement more conventional PM knowledge
area- and process-oriented books, Quantitative Methods may
very well deserve a place on the project manager’s bookshelf.
It also offers some new ideas and fresh perspectives on the
valuation of projects and contains numerous quantitative
nuggets that could prove useful to practitioners.
Reviewed by Bob Lewis, PhD, PE, PMP, knowledge manage-
ment chief technologist for Lockheed Martin. Dr. Lewis also
teaches graduate courses at Johns Hopkins University and
The George Washington University
J. Ross, 2004, ISBN: 1-932159-15-0, hardcover, 288 pp.,
Members $61.70, Nonmembers $64.95.
 Guidelines for Project Management Journal Book Reviews
Selecting Books for Review
Project Management Journal welcomes recommendations from project managers and others regarding
books that may be of professional value to fellow PMI associates. Areas of potential interest include:
new ideas about the theory, concepts, and techniques of project management; new approaches to
technology and management; getting business results; competing in today’s complex workplace; and
global changes. Recommendations should include the title, author, and publisher, and a brief state-
ment as to why the book should be considered for review. The Journal will select books for review and
identify a reviewer. Individuals recommending books for review may also volunteer to write the review.
However, individuals should not submit a review before the Journal has selected the book. The Journal
receives many books from publishers and authors and cannot review them all.

Guidelines for Writers

Reviews should begin with a strong, brief opening paragraph that identifies the book and author, and tells
the reader why the book is important. The review should not only describe the content of the book, but also
what the content means; that is, why it is a contribution to the project management body of knowledge.
Reviewers may include the following elements:
■ A summary of key or unique concepts
■ Favorite quote, graphic, chart, etc.
■ Important tips or guidelines
■ New terms or phrases, such as “knowbots” or “teamocracy”
■ Message from the book that should be remembered for future use, or should have been disclosed
years ago.

Reviews should include the book’s strong points and any weak points if this information will be useful
to the reader. Reviews should be written in a conversational style that maintains academic rigor.
Reviewers should avoid use of the first person (“I”) and focus on the book and its contents. Reviewers
should also avoid use of extensive lists as a means of describing or duplicating content. Instead, focus
on what the content means to readers. Reviews should be no longer than 750 words (please use your
computer word count to verify length of the review).

Reviews should include complete publishing information, if possible: title, author(s), publisher (city and
state), year published, ISBN number, total pages, and price in U.S. dollars. The Journal will add any infor-
mation that is not available to reviewers.

Reviews should be prepared using MS Word and may be submitted by e-mail (preferred) or on CD. Submissions
should include the name, title, company, address, phone/fax/e-mail, and brief (one or two sentence) biosketch
of the reviewer. Reviews should be submitted to Natasha Pollard at natasha.pollard@pmi.org

or via mail to:

Project Management Journal
Book Review Editor
c/o PMI Publishing Department
Four Campus Boulevard
Newtown Square, PA 19073

PMI reserves the right to edit all material submitted for publication.

December 2004 Project Management Journal • 69

 INDEX OF 2004

PROJECT MANAGEMENT
JOURNAL PAPERS AND AUTHORS
1. A Balanced Scorecard Approach to Project Management
Leadership. James Norrie and Derek H.T. Walker. December, 47-56.
2. A Simulation Approach to the PERT/CPM Time-Cost
Trade-Off Problem. Wayne A. Haga and Kathryn A. Marold.
June, 31-37.
3. Early Warning Signals for R&D Projects: An Empirical Study.
Angel Martínez Sánchez and Manuela Pérez Pérez. April, 11-23.
4. Knowledge Management in UK Construction: Strategies,
Resources and Barriers. Patricia Carrillo, Herbert Robinson,
Ahmed Al-Ghassani and Chimay Anumba. April, 46-56.
5. Knowledge Management to Improve Project Communication
and Implementation. Kaj Koskinen. June, 13-19.
6. Managing the Impact of Customer Support Disruptions
on New Product Development Projects. Robert C. Ash and
Dwight E. Smith-Daniels. April, 3-10.
7. Multi-Project Scheduling and Control: A Process-Based
Comparative Study of the Critical Chain Methodology and
Some Alternatives. Izack Cohen, Avishai Mandelbaum, and
Avraham Shtub. June 39-50.
8. New Insights into Effort Estimation for Incremental
Software Development Projects. Oddur Benediktsson and
Darren Dalcher. June, 5-12.
9. PERT Scheduling With Resource Constraints Using
Qualitative Simulation Graphs. Ricki G. Ingalls and Douglas J.
Morrice. September, 5-14.
10. Project Benefits Management in IT Projects – An
Australian Perspective. Peter Bennington and David Baccarini.
June, 20-30.
11. Project Success: A Cultural Framework. Korin Kendra
and Laura J. Taplin. April, 30-45.
12. Project Troubleshooting: Tiger Teams for Reactive Risk
Management. Alex Pavlak. December, 5-14.
13. State-of-Art and Development Prospects of E-Procurement
in the Italian Engineering & Contracting Sector. Enrico Cagno,
Augusto Di Giulio and Paolo Trucco. April, 24-29.
14. The Effective Project Management Application Model
Based on the Team Leadership Effectiveness in Technology-
Based Project Environments. Hans Thamhain. December, 35-46.
15. An Effective Project Management-Based Application
Model for Sustainable Urban Renewal in Hong Kong. Dennis
Heung-Fu Mui and Shankar Sankaran. December, 15-34.
16. The Impact of Owner Representatives in a Design-Build
Construction Environment. Denis R. Petersen and E. Lile
Murphee Jr. September, 27-38.
17. The Influence of a Project Performance Measurement
System on the Success of a Contract for Maintaining Motorways
and Trunk Roads. David James Bryde and Dominic Brown.
December, 57-65.
18. Through the Looking Glass: Examining Theory
Development in Project Management with the Resource-Based
View Lens. Kam Jugdev. September, 15-26.
19. Understanding the Role of “Vision” in Project Success.
Dale Christenson and Derek H.T. Walker. September, 39-52.
20. Why Monte Carlo Simulations of Project Networks Can
Mislead. Terry Williams. September, 53-61.

Authors Haga, Wayne A. (2) Sánchez, Angel Martínez (3)

Al-Ghassani, Ahmed (4) Ingalls, Ricki G. (9) Sankaran, Shankar (15)
Anumba, Chimay (4) Jugdev, Kam (18) Shtub, Avraham (7)
Ash Robert C. (6) Kendra, Korin (11) Smith-Daniels, Dwight E. (6)
Baccarini, David (10) Koskinen, Kaj U. (5) Taplin, Laura J. (11)
Benediktsson, Oddur (8) Mandelbaum, Avishai (7) Thamhain, Hans (14)
Bennington, Peter (10) Marold Kathryn A. (2) Trucco, Paolo (13)
Brown, Dominic (17) Morrice, Douglas J. (9) Walker, Derek H.T (1);(19)
Bryde, David J. (17) Mui, Dennis (15) Williams, Terry (20)
Cagno, Enrico (13) Murphree Jr., E. Lile (16)
Carrillo, Pat (4) Norrie, James (1)
Christenson Dale (19) Pavlak, Alex (12)
Cohen, Izack (7) Pérez, Manuela Pérez (3)
Dalcher Darren (8) Petersen, Denis R. (16)
Di Giulio, Augusto (13) Robinson, Herbert (4)

70 • Project Management Journal December 2004

Notes for Authors
SCOPE
Project Management Journal is the professional
journal of the Project Management Institute. The
mission of the Journal is to advance the state of
the art of the knowledge of project and program
management. The Journal presents useful infor-
mation on both theory and practice in the field
of project management. Authors are encouraged
to submit the following types of original manu-
scripts: descriptions of innovative practices; sum-
maries of research results; reviews of current
literature; surveys of current practices; critical
analyses of concepts, theories, or practices; devel-
opments of concepts, theories, or practices;
analyses of failure. Manuscript length should not
exceed 12,000 words. The selection of manu-
scripts for publication is based on the extent to
which they advance the knowledge and under-
standing of project management. PMI neither
approves nor disapproves of any data, claims,
opinions, or conclusions presented.
MANUSCRIPT REVIEW
Project Management Journal uses a double-blind
review process. The first review of every manu-
script is performed by two anonymous referees
(usually members of the Editorial Review
Board). The manuscript is then either accepted,
rejected, or returned to the author for revision
(with reviewer comments furnished to the
author). Revised manuscripts are sent to the
Editor, who makes a final disposition in con-
sultation with the Publisher. The Journal strives
to respond to all authors within three months
of the date the manuscript is received at the
PMI Publishing Department. Accepted manu-
scripts are subject to editorial changes. The
author is solely responsible for all statements
made in the manuscript, including editorial
changes.
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION
It is the policy of PMI to be the sole, original pub-
lisher of manuscripts. Manuscripts that have been
submitted simultaneously to other magazines or
journals will be rejected outright and will not be
reconsidered. Republication of a manuscript,
possibly revised, that has been disseminated via
conference proceedings or newsletter is permitted
if the Editor judges there are significant benefits
to be gained from publication.
COPYRIGHT
Upon acceptance of a manuscript, authors will
be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the
publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest
possible dissemination of information. This
transfer of copyright enables PMI to protect the
copyrighted material for the authors, but does
not relinquish the author’s proprietary rights.
The copyright transfer gives PMI the exclusive
rights to republish or reprint the manuscript in
any form or medium as well as to grant or refuse
permission to third parties to republish all or
parts of the manuscript.
SHORT ITEMS
Short items do not need rigorous academic
scrutiny and are not refereed. Upon receipt, how-
ever, these items become the copyright property
of PMI.
■ Opinion presents thoughtful discussion of
project management issues.
■ Correspondence pertains to the project and
program management profession, including ref-
erences to literature, practice, and scholarship as
well as discussion and replies related to articles
published in the Journal.
■ Book Reviews express opinions about books
related to the project management profession, or
about general management or technical books
that cover topics of particular value to the project
manager.
■ Calendar of Events offers notices of forth-
coming meetings and calls for papers.
SUBMISSIONS
All manuscripts must be submitted electronical-
ly either by e-mail to natasha.pollard@pmi.org
or on CD and sent to: Project Management
Journal, Attn: Natasha Pollard, 4 Campus Blvd.,
Newtown Square, PA 19073 USA. If you submit
your manuscript on CD, please include a print-
out of the manuscript, including all tables and
figures, on 8-1/2 x 11 inch paper, double spaced
throughout, and printed on one side only.
Manuscripts should include the following in the
order listed:
■ A title page that includes the title of the
manuscript and each author’s name, affiliation,
mailing address, and phone, fax, and e-mail
address. Correspondence will be directed only to
the first author listed.
■ An abstract of 100 words or less that out-
lines the purpose, scope and conclusions of the
manuscript, and selected keywords.
■ Text (use headings and no more than two
levels of subheadings). To permit objective
reviews by two referees, the abstract and first
page of the text should not reveal the authors
and/or affiliations, but only the manuscript title.
■ References.
■ Illustrations and Tables. These should be titled,
numbered (in arabic numerals and captions), and
each on a separate sheet, and the preferred location
indicated within the body of the text.
■ Biographical details of each author.
Upon manuscript acceptance, authors must also
provide a black-and-white passport-style photo-
graph and a signed copyright agreement.
COMPUTER-GENERATED
TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS
Authors are requested to submit the final text
and illustrations via e-mail or on CD. As with the
requirements for manuscript submission, the
main text, list of references, table and illustration
captions, and author biographies should be
stored in separate text files with clearly identifi-
able file names. Keep the layout of the text as
simple as possible and save text in its original
applications and/or Rich Text Format (RTF). It is
essential that the name and version of the word
processing program and format of the text files are
clearly indicated (example: Word for Windows
2000 doc). The electronic version should only be
sent with the final accepted version of the paper to
the Editor. NOTE: The hard copy and electronic
files must match exactly.
Upon acceptance of the manuscript for
publishing, authors will also be asked to provide
illustrations placed or embedded within their
chosen word processing program. If this isn’t
possible, please submit illustrations in their
native programs. Be sure to include a hard copy
as well. PMI now recreates all illustrations, fig-
ures and tables electronically for publication. By
doing so, the publication is ensured a consistent
look thoughout. Although this makes electronic
versions of illustrations less important, a hard
copy becomes crucial for re-creation purposes.
Contact PMI’s Publishing Department for fur-
ther details.
STYLE OF TEXT
You should write in clear and concise English.
Spelling should follow Webster’s New World
Dictionary. Authors whose native language is not
English are assured that in-house editorial atten-
tion to their manuscript will improve clarity and
acceptability to readers. For questions regarding
style and format of text, refer to the Publication
Manual of the American Psychological Association,
Fifth Edition.
REFERENCES
For questions regarding reference format, refer
to the Publication Manual of the American
Psychological Association, Fifth Edition.
References used in the text should be identified
by author name and publication date in paren-
theses, e.g., (Cleland & King, 1983), and listed
alphabetically at the end of the manuscript.
Page numbers should be cited for all quota-
tions. Follow the format example shown below:
Baker, Bud. (1993). The project
manager and the media: Some les-
sons from the stealth bomber pro-
gram. Project Management Journal, 24
(3), 11–14.
Cleland, David I., & King,
William R. (1983). Systems analysis
and project management. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Hartley, John R. (1992).
Concurrent engineering. Cambridge,
MA: Productivity Press.
Please ensure that references are complete, that
they include, where relevant, author’s name,
article or book title, volume and issue number,
publisher, date and page reference.
The use of page footnotes should be kept
to a minimum. Footnotes should be numbered
consecutively and listed at the end of the text
as endnotes.
December 2004 Project Management Journal • 71
 KEYWORDS
Keywords categorize your manuscript. They cover project management methodologies and processes, tools and techniques, PMBOK® Guide
knowledge areas, industries, types of projects, geography. Please list three or four keywords that best categorize your manuscript. Choose
from the following list of suggested keywords (this is not a comprehensive list) or you may use your own.

Accounting Multiproject Planning CHECKLIST

Activity Duration Estimating Negotiating ■ Manuscript via e-mail or on CD
Agriculture Networking ■ 100-word abstract
Arrow Diagramming Method New Product Development ■ Illustrations
Baselines Organizational Planning ■ Author biographies
Benchmarking Organizational Structure ■ Black and white author photographs
Benefit/Cost Analysis Parametric Modeling (upon acceptance)
Budgeting Performance Reporting ■ Signed copyright agreement
Change Control Pharmaceuticals (upon acceptance)
Communications Management Procurement Management
REVISIONS
Concurrent Engineering Productivity
Correspondence and files for revision will
Configuration Management Project Life Cycle
be sent to the first-named author unless
Conflict Resolution Project Management Software otherwise indicated. Copyediting of
Constraints Project Plan Development manuscripts is performed by PMI staff.
Construction Quality Assurance The authors are asked to check edited files for
Contingency Planning Quality Management typographical errors and to answer queries
Contract Closeout Reengineering from editors. To improve publication times it
Cost Estimating Resource Planning is important that revised files be returned
Cost Management Responsibility within three days. Excessive turnaround time
Critical Path Risk Management may jeopardize publication of papers.
Delegation Risk Response Development
Deliverables Schedule Development COPIES AND REPRINTS
Design Schedule Control Authors will receive 10 copies of the Journal
Documentation Scope Management free of charge. Additional copies of the Journal
Earned Value Scope Definition and/or article reprints can be ordered at any
Engineering Scope Change Control time from PMI.
Environment Simulation Project Management Institute
Estimating Staff Acquisition Publishing Department
Fast-Tracking Stakeholders 4 Campus Blvd.
Feedback Standards Newtown Square, PA 19073 USA
Finance Statistical Sampling Tel: 610/356-4600 ext. 1135
Float Team Development Fax: 610/355-1633
Funding Time Management E-mail: natasha.pollard@pmi.org
Human Resource Management Tools
Information Systems Training
Integration Management Transportation Variance
Large Project Utilities
Leadership Virtual Organization
Life-cycle Costing Work Breakdown Structure
Manufacturing Work Packages
Management Skills
Matrix Organization
Milestones
Mitigation
Monte Carlo Analysis

Index of Advertisers

PMBOK® Guide–Third Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .C2

2004 Component Awards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .C4

72 • Project Management Journal December 2004

CALENDAR OF EVENTS
DECEMBER 2004
2-16 December
eSeminarsWorld. E-Business Rapid Application Development
(RAD) Strategies for Project Managers. For more information,
please contact elearning@pmi.org
2-16 December
eSeminarsWorld. Human Factors and Team Dynamics.
For more information, please contact elearning@pmi.org
2-16 December
eSeminarsWorld. Managing Multiple Projects.
For more information, please contact elearning@pmi.org
7-10 December
PMI SeminarsWorld®. San Diego, Calif., USA.
For more information, please visit SeminarsWorld Homepage
9-10 December
PMI São Paulo, Brazil Chapter—IV International Seminar.
Topic: “Maturity in Project Management.”
For more information, please visit www.pmisp.org.br/
9-10 December
Managing Small Projects. Hosted by Watermark Learning, at the
Tech One Facility, Phoenix, Ariz., USA. For more information,
please visit www.watermarklearning.com
JANUARY 2005
18-21 January
Managing Projects Successfully Using SAP. Birmingham, UK.
For more information, please visit www.tacook.co.uk
20 January-4 February
eSeminarsWorld. Managing Multiple Projects.
For more information, please contact elearning@pmi.org
27 January-11 February
eSeminarsWorld. Human Factors and Team Dynamics.
For more information, please contact elearning@pmi.org
27 January-11 February
eSeminarsWorld. Essential Skills for Managing Projects.
For more information, please contact elearning@pmi.org
31 January-3 February
Mega SeminarsWorld San Francisco, Calif., USA
For more information, please visit www.pmi.org
FEBRUARY 2005
2-18 February
eSeminarsWorld. eBusiness Rapid Application Development
(RAD) Strategies. For more information, please contact
elearning@pmi.org
3 February-11 March
eSeminarsWorld. Project Management Fundamentals:
An Intensive Program. For more information, please
contact elearning@pmi.org
6-11 February
Certified Project Manager and IT Certified Project Manager
Boot Camp Program. Dallas, Texas, USA. For more information,
please visit www.pmlg.com
10-25 February
eSeminarsWorld. Effective Project Communications and
Control for Virtual Teams. For more information, please
contact elearning@pmi.org
21-23 February
PMI Global Congress 2005—Asia Pacific Singapore.
For more information, please visit http://www.pmi.org
MARCH 2005
3-18 March
eSeminarsWorld. Building Teams, Commitment and Culture
for Virtual Teams. For more information, please contact
elearning@pmi.org
3-18 March
eSeminarsWorld. Human Factors and Team Dynamics.
For more information, please contact elearning@pmi.org
6-11 March
Certified Project Manager and IT Certified Project Manager
Boot Camp Program. Atlanta, Ga., USA.
For more information, please visit www.pmlg.com
10 March-15 April
eSeminarsWorld. Project Management Fundamentals:
An Intensive Program. For more information,
please contact elearning@pmi.org
14-18 March
Program Management Mastery (PMM) Program. Atlanta, Ga.,
USA. For more information, please visit www.pmlg.com
 These awards recognize and honor those PMI Component organizations that have made
significant contributions to the project management profession and to the
Project Management Institute.

Congratulations to these PMI Components, leaders and members for extraordinary efforts
in 2004 to help make project management indispensable for business results!

COMPONENT OF THE YEAR AWARD

Aw a rd e d i n t h r e e s i z e c a t e g o r i e s f o r C h a p t e r s ; o n e S I G c a t e g o r y.

Chapter Category I SOUTHERN NEVADA CHAPTER Chapter Category III MONTREAL CHAPTER
Chapter Category II SOUTH FLORIDA CHAPTER SIG Category II INFORMATION SYSTEMS SIG

HONORABLE MENTION
Chapter Category I NORTHERN WISCONSIN CHAPTER
Chapter Category II CHICAGOLAND CHAPTER
Chapter Category III SOUTHERN ONTARIO CHAPTER

C O M P O N E N T C O L L A B O R AT I O N A W A R D C O M P ONENT INSPIRATION AWARD

S O U T H E R N O N TA R I O C H A P T E R MILE HI, DENVER CHAPTER

C O M P O N E N T V O L U N T E E R P R O G R A M A WARD
S O U T H E R N O N TA R I O C H A P T E R

COMPONENT VOLUNTEER LEADER AWARD C O M P ONENT LEADERSHIP AWARD

Nicole Orendain, PMP Martin C. Van Der Schouw, PMP
CHICAGOLAND CHAPTER MILE HI, DENVER CHAPTER

PMI Component (Chapter, Specific Interest Group (SIG) and College) memberships range from 30 to over 14,000 members.
The Component of the Year Award differentiates components by the size of their membership.
Chapter Category I 25 - 300 members SIG Category I 25 - 1000 members
Chapter Category II 301 - 1000 members SIG Category II 1001 or more members
Chapter Category III 1001 or more members

© 2004 Project Management Institute, Inc. All rights reserved. “PMI”, the PMI logo, and “Making Project
Management Indispensable for Business Results” are marks of Project Management Institute, Inc.

061-032-2004 (10-04) Making project management indispensable for business results.

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