Advancing Digital Transformation through Virtual Project Management: An Evidence-Based Implementation Framework in the Built Environment Industry

This research was conducted to verify the impact of virtual project management in the construction industry on project cost with it associated project team productivity. Questionnaire were distributed for acquisition of primary data that were gotten from respondents basically of construction project management background. These data were analysed using statistical package for social sciences SPSS to find out the correlation between virtual project management and project cost reduction as well as correlation between virtual project Management and project Team productivity. The research results from statistical analysis shows that Virtual project Management was very helpful in construction project delivery during COVID 19 in line with project running cost reduction and increase in construction project productivity in the midst of global face to face onsite work restriction that created enormous difficulties in construction project execution and delivery, with its resultant effects on project cost overrun, project abandonment, project time overrun, low project productivity and output. Based on this research outcome, we recommend that virtual project management should be sustainably applied in project work places during periods of non-restriction of face to face or onsite project execution for construction firms’ economic development and achievement of good value for money. Furthermore, within these period of non-restriction, Hybrid Project execution framework, comprising of both virtual and onsite project management methods should be adopted for successful project delivery at budgeted project cost.

PurposeThis paper aims to demonstrate that virtual project management can be based on a common spirit and mutual trust to achieve project objectives, rather than the use of modern electronic devices to lower communication costs.Design/methodology/approachEvidence from the eighteenth-century files of Academies of Science and from astronomical literature is used to characterize the projects and to show how major elements of project management (such as identification of benefits to stakeholders, management of uncertainties, communication and data aggregation across related projects) were applied.FindingsThe analysis shows how the initiative to better measure the Astronomical Unit defined a megaproject, and how this was broken down at local Academies of Science into major projects or programs. This, in turn, resulted in individual expeditions. It demonstrates that innovations arose from the projects, and that learning from earlier expeditions resulted in the final success of the megaproject.Research limitations/implicationsThe literature used was not written to demonstrate project management. In this respect, both the original sources and the later reports may lack information with respect to the present topic. Today’s project management might learn from the study that coordination and communication can greatly benefit from a joint vision of the project if based on a common spirit and mutual trust.Practical implicationsPresent day project management might benefit from the finding that common values reduce communication costs in a similar way as recent electronic communication devices.Originality/valueThe author believes that this is the first paper to analyze the Venus transit projects from the project management perspective. This was a complex and global megaproject. The approaches taken to achieve the objectives relevant to different stakeholders provide lessons for today’s management of megaprojects.

The second decade of the 21st century has brought unprecedented challenges to traditional workplaces. The global pandemic has forced the advance of working from home and telework. Individuals with little or no background or training in e-leadership, virtual project management, or virtual team management suddenly found themselves in the environment of virtual work. Leading Virtual Project Teams, Second Edition addresses the challenges that today’s virtual project management environment poses to traditional methods of leadership and communication. Leadership for successful virtual team management is different from that for traditional, collocated project team management. Explaining appropriate e-leadership styles for virtual project teams and the transition toward new leadership styles, the book is filled with communication techniques for leading virtual project teams. It helps project managers develop e-leadership competencies needed to successfully deliver projects in today’s organizations. The second edition also examines: Virtual meeting techniques Inclusive language Managing virtual relationships Why virtual work is now more important The work-at-home environment By recognizing how virtual teams are different from traditional teams, those managing virtual projects may be able to offer benefits to their organization by providing positive, successful leadership and exceptional communications, resulting in better project deliverables and products. This book provides an approach that explores all facets of e-leadership—from how traditional leadership theories and models can be applied by 21st century leaders to providing methods by which the virtual project manager can enhance virtual project communications to meet the needs of our modern global business world. It features project management checklists and templates and includes business cases, best practices, and tools and techniques for virtual project management communications.

Towards a sustainable built environment industry in Singapore: Drivers, barriers, and strategies in the adoption of smart facilities management

This research study will focus mainly on the LNG sector. The objective is to determine, investigate, and seek the operability opportunity in a virtual environment’s project management, engineering, and construction. The researcher will tackle the importance and issues it addresses the virtual project management (VPM) platform demands without compromising the quality and safety of services during the execution of the project. This virtual platform simulated the model using conventional project management stated in PMBOKS. The researcher will randomly pick the possible solution and improve the existing project management consultancy (PMC) operation and processes, initially to virtualize the system to meet the technical personnel demand, lapses, and labor vacuum within the available time. The goal is to achieve this conversion, minimize face-to-face interaction, promote work at home, reduce operational costs, minimize technical human resource risk, and facilitate working space area capacity. This study divides virtual project management (VPM) into operational possibility, effectivity, and capability (OPEC). Operational Possibility and Effectivity are the primary concern in this research, and it discusses the elemental process attributes such as [1] Leadership Style, [2] Design Planning, [3] Functional Management, and [4] Performance Evaluation. However, conventional project management is the basis of this study’s viewpoint and is translated into virtual. Moreover, this study still shows the operational capability and discusses it in the logical analysis as part of the OPEC overall model. The gathered data, discussion, and analysis in two (2) groups, the possibility and effectivity of this virtual platform, and the respondent’s opinion, the virtual team from domestically is preferred by the experts in the field over offshoring or overseas. Moreover, the operational effectiveness with the two (2) highest attributes, as per the expert’s opinion, the VPM should focus on the virtual team’s Performance Evaluation [1st] and the Project manager’s (PM) Leadership Style [2nd]. The virtual team’s Performance Evaluation concentrates mainly on efficiency and completion of assigned product deliverables. PM’s Leadership Style focuses primarily on communication and personality. However, the other attributes of Functional Management [3rd] and Design Planning [4th] can be applied to the overall project execution concept. In this research, the highest recommended source of a virtual team (vT) and VPM operation effectiveness are preferred accordingly. However, the PM has fully responsible for this VPM operational effectiveness and outsourcing virtual teams in particular projects. In this regard, further verification is required for this research focuses on the implementation and application with collaborative software is needed.

This article gives a short introduction into virtual project management and it shows that virtual teams and virtual project management have significant advantages like adding special expertise to a project team even though the expert is not in the same geographic area or drastically reduce of travel time. The major differences between virtual project management and classical project management can be found in the project communication and in project team management. The introduction includes also a short overview of the papers in this special issue.

Multi-cultural virtual teams are important due to the increasing globalization of organizations and proliferation of new network technologies. Global Virtual Teams rarely meet in a face-to-face context and thus encounter challenging problems not associated with traditional co-located teams. To understand the complex issues in a virtual project environment in developing countries, we conducted a research study encompassing these aspects in various software houses in Pakistan. The research study explores and identifies the major cultural challenges and operational and technical complexities faced by virtual project management. We propose a model showing positive reinforcing relationship between various factors of virtual project management thus resulting in effective virtual project management.

Projects that operate in a virtual mode remain to be risky. Despite improving technology they fail more often and are less productive. This paper focuses on team collaboration and virtual project management in the search for solutions and argues that new research environments are needed to achieve results with higher external validity. One under-researched element of virtual project management is the link between the project team and its environment. This especially has an impact on the continuous (re-) structuration of the project and its team members. The paper discusses a living laboratory environment in which real-life situations are used to study technical and organisational scenarios to go beyond traditional close system control group experiment for the longitudinal study of virtual project team collaboration. As an example of research results from the living laboratory the paper presents a set of coordination routines, how they evolve within the team over time, and their impact on productivity. Such routines can serve as best practices for virtual project management.

With the dramatic advancement in information technology, organizations and institutions worldwide can now make much more effective use of virtual teams that employ distributed work patterns, rely on technology-mediated communications and take advantage of “around the clock” activity. For example, according to research conducted by the Gartner Group 137 million workers worldwide will be involved in some form of remote electronic work by 2003. By the year 2010 it is projected that employees will spend 40% of their time working with others who are in a different place and different time zone (Salamon 2001). In fact, in the project management arena 60% of all projects are already considered virtual (Guss 1998). However research on the effect of virtuality on project management processes and subsequent success is practically nonexistent. This paper concentrates on the role of leadership in virtual project management and focuses primarily on information systems (IS) projects.

In today's competitive global environment, projects in organizations consist of cross-functional teams that are formed to utilize individual expertise. A project manager whose primary responsibility is to achieve project objectives deals these individuals. Since the rational and emotional aspects of a project vary in complexity, the role of the project manager is critical to project success. The objective of this study was to demonstrate linkages between emotional intelligence and the challenges faced by virtual project managers. The study will also show that there exists a multi tier relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and challenges/elements of VPM.

Organizations conduct Virtual Project Management (VPM) to increase productivity, improve operational efficiency, reduce costs or for talent acquisition. In this research, we attempt establish the degree to which the technological tools adopted by organizations for communication and collaboration prove effective for enhanced project team performance and operations in VPM. We statistically analyze the dependency of collaboration tools in small size organizations operating in a virtual environment, and the level of disruption of the tools on PM processes, degree of usage for social networking, and level of data management. Various virtual team structures, platforms for meeting and group collaborations are evaluated. The study has shown that collaboration tools rarely create disruptions in project management processes and are often used by constituent members for social networking and information communications between those members.

The study compares virtual and in-person project management based on major dimensions such as communication, team cohesiveness, flexibility, work-life balance, and efficiency. With the shift to remote work, understanding the dynamics of communication, team cohesion, flexibility, and productivity in these environments has become crucial for organisations. The study employed a cross-sectional comparative research design to administer a questionnaire to 420 participants in Germany. The study used Mann-Whitney U Tests to test the two environments. The Mann-Whitney U Test found a statistically significant difference between the in-person and virtual groups (U=329, p = 0.002), showing that in-person teams communicate more often than virtual groups with a large effect size (r=−0.536). The analysis of team-building activities found that virtual teams engage more frequently than in-person teams, with a much larger effect size (p=0.024, r=-0.830). Moreover, the results regarding privacy show a statistically significant difference between the virtual and in-person project management environments (p = 0.002, r=0.534), implying that in-person project management environments provide a higher level of privacy than virtual environments. The study concludes that structured communication and team-building activities in a virtual environment enhance trust and collaboration among team members. Organisations are recommended to promote greater communication in virtual teams, address methods for forming virtual teams, address privacy issues in virtual workplaces, encourage work flexibility to reduce working pressure and work on schedules and collaboration of traditional in-person teams.

This paper investigates the broad subject of project management organizations as they enter a new era of organizational arrangements. Practitioners and academics often refer to these arrangements as globally dispersed or as virtual project enterprises. This paper focuses on four related areas of virtual project organizations and their project teams. The paper presents a brief history about approaches to project management theory and practice and defines virtual project organizations. The paper addresses challenges concerning communication and technology for virtual project organizations. The paper then summarizes four key organizational structures that form the basis of project-based organizations. This context is necessary in showing why some of the problems in understanding organizational structures are related to how well this information is communicated through models. An evolution of management approaches necessitates a modification in the types of project management models and communication tools. The paper introduces a new model that is capable of educating practitioners about the importance of focusing on people-centered project management tools for virtual project organizations. The final section of the paper examines one strategic and operational planning and communication tool: the roundtable road-mapping method. The tool is simple yet it is important in understanding the level of personal involvement that may be required for successful communication and planning in nontraditional virtual project structures. The following paper is the winner of the 1997 International Student Paper Award. Sponsored by the PMI Educational Foundation, the International Student Paper Award recognizes excellence in student development of original concepts in project management. Mrs. Guss was presented the award at PMI '97 in Chicago, Illinois.

This paper explores the relationship of social intelligence and leadership style for effective project management in projects with varying degrees of virtuality. In the present study, the author determines what leadership style is preferred in virtual projects and analyzes the differential effects of varying degrees of virtuality on social intelligence and leadership style. The author tests hypotheses with data collected from virtual project management professionals working on information technology projects in five countries. Results show that social awareness and relationship management are positively related to concern for task and concern for people and are found to be higher in more virtual than less virtual project team members. The findings have significant implications for leadership skills and behaviors as well as the role of social intelligence for effective virtual project management. The article adds to the understanding of effective management of virtual projects, suggesting new options to consider for project management and HR professionals.

The management of virtual projects is fundamentally different from that of traditional projects. Furthermore, the research in this area comes from different reference disciplines and perspectives, and a unified view or theory of best practices does not yet exist. Being able to combine perspectives in a seamless way with skills and technology could provide integrative blueprints for best practices in virtual projects. We use the theoretical frame of patterns to propose such a view. We focus on three concepts as the underlying theoretical elements for identifying patterns of effectiveness in virtual project management: (1) coordination, (2) communication, and (3) control. As a first step in the identification of specific patterns, we conducted a series of virtual focus groups with participants from industry who had real experience with virtual projects. The brainstorming data from the focus groups was analyzed to develop an initial set of patterns. The study represents a first step in an iterative and evolutionary process.