The Use of Video Data in Project Management Research

Abstract

In project management research, on site involvement is recognized as being effective practice for getting primary data, understanding the project tasks being examined and gaining context awareness. However, it is impossible for investigators to be present on site for every project they intend to investigate since project can be difficult to access, or may be undisclosed during the implementation stage, or may have been completed a long time ago. Reading the project reports and documents will provide a substantial amount of information, but there is always more to any project than written information alone; project practitioners are well aware of this fact. Advancements in technology since the beginning of the 20th century enable the film making of projects; possibly the main purpose of that film making is to produce documentaries. Based on the facts that the camera can capture a wealth of details and rich complexity that it is impossible or very difficult to capture by other means and the eye and ear can acquire a great deal of information that it is practically impossible to write simultaneously a question arises, can the use of video data be beneficial in project management research? This article reports the experience of the authors in employing video data in historic project management research. In researching British aviation projects during the period of the Second World War the authors uses the approach of content analysis to examine more than 250 hours of video data. A classification scheme of video data is presented in this paper. The advantages of and suggestions managing the usage of video are data also shown in this paper, in addition to caution concerning what may influence the effective usage of video data.