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Abstract
Project and strategic management scholarship recognises the importance of project capabilities that allow firms to deliver projects. Although work on project capabilities is a fast-growing line of inquiry, little is still known about how clients assemble project capabilities to achieve operational outcomes in inter-organisational settings. This study seeks to apply theoretical work on project capabilities to the domain of infrastructure project delivery in order to understand how the assembly of project capabilities in temporary inter-organisational settings contributes to the delivery of operational outcomes. The empirical enquiry takes place in the context of the delivery of London Heathrow Terminal 2. Through an inductive theory building approach drawing upon semi-structured interviews with client-side project leadership, internal documents, publicly available data and ongoing engagement with the field, we identified three key capability-enabling mechanisms that help explain the genesis of project capabilities in inter-organisational settings: (1) reconfiguring project capabilities, (2) adapting project capabilities and (3) maintaining project capabilities. We discuss and expand these findings by engaging with theoretical ideas from project studies, and mainstream strategy, organisation, and management research to induce a dynamic model that can be helpful to guide future research, policy and management practices relating to the client side management of project capabilities.
Highlights
Project scholarship abounds with empirical evidence suggesting that projects can succeed in meeting their specified deliverables, but fail to meet the envisioned operational and use benefits (Morris and Hough, 1987; Flyvbjerg, 2009)
We discuss these findings along the lines of three overarching theoretical dimensions, which directly translate into key capability-enabling mechanisms: (1) Reconfiguring project capabilities, which was about the need for the project to learn from previous decisions made in the given organisational context; (2) adapting project capabilities, which is about the need and ability of the project to respond and adapt to the external environmental conditions while still adhering to its original brief; and (3) maintaining project capabilities, which we found to be an important mechanism in how project teams and leadership developed new routines that allowed them to improvise while continuing to work in face of uncertainty and change
Few of the project leadership representatives interviewed had worked on T5, it was clear that history mattered and in the high importance that was given to successful handover of the project to operations
Summary
Project scholarship abounds with empirical evidence suggesting that projects can succeed in meeting their specified deliverables, but fail to meet the envisioned operational and use benefits (Morris and Hough, 1987; Flyvbjerg, 2009) This should not necessarily come as a surprise, given that operational performance of business systems and benefit realisation are often defined over time-scales of a different order of magnitude from those in project planning, design, and delivery. In its extreme form, a failed delivery can lead to ‘a white elephant’ - a liability and embarrassment, rather than an asset for the client's business One example of such a project was the ‘Millennium Experience’ that was a year-long exhibition located ‘Millennium Dome’ in London to celebrate the year 2000, but had to be closed after only one year of being open to the public because of the failure to achieve the visitor numbers and income required to sustain the operations (NAO, 2000).
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