Studying the Management of Project Networks: From Structures to Practices?

Abstract

Although certainly of a much older (or even ancient) origin, during the last two decades or so project networks have become an established object of management and organization research in general and project management studies in particular. While projects are a common, if not the most common form of a temporary organization, project networks are typically conceived as being more than an only temporary form, combining – like other forms of project-based organizing – the temporary with the permanent in a specific manner. For in the case of project networks, the coordination of the temporary is enabled (but also restrained) by the more permanent networks of past relationships to other critical actors and their resources on the one hand. On the other, however, the prospects to maintain or re¬activate these relationships for future collaborations have an influence on respective coordinative practices in the present. As a consequence of coordinating relationships in the shadow of the past as well as in the shadow of the future, project networks are strictly speaking of a semi-temporary rather than a merely temporary nature. While there is still some debate about how exactly to define and conceptualize this particular organizational form, project managers have always known that in many if not most settings there is more to managing projects than managing just the temporary. Respective management tasks indeed even go, as will be shown shortly, beyond having an eye on the interface to the surrounding, immediate and more permanent structures of the organization, the inter-organizational network and/or the organizational field and how they support or constrain temporary organizing.