From the Editors Isomorphism: A Challenge for the Project-Based Organization

Projects as Temporary Organizations—How Well do They Adapt to Differing Task Demands? Organizational design is a vivid topic among projectbased organization scholars (Manning, 2008; Bakker, 2010; DeFillippi & Sydow, 2016; Miterev, Mancini, & Turner, 2017; Aubry & Lavoie-Tremblay, forthcoming 2018; Gemünden, Lehner, & Kock, forthcoming 2018). Because projects are temporary organizations, organizing for the delivery of multiple competing projects is a continuous organizational challenge. So it is not surprising that organizational design is becoming an emerging stream of research in the project management field, with the attempt to bring some cohesion among the different terms currently used—such as the project-based and project-oriented organization— and the different levels it addresses in an organization. An important contribution to this discussion emphasizes the importance of context when considering organizational design (Engwall, 2003, Manning, 2008; Bakker, 2010; DeFillippi & Sydow, 2016). In this regard, Engwall (2003) showed how context should be taken into consideration in the structuring of a project. Others have also shown a diversity of project-based organizations (e.g., Whitley, 2006). This supposes the existence of some sort of rational processes of evaluation and decision-making regarding the best organizational design to support the temporary organization’s “projects” and the project-based organization(s) setting up projects. A typical assumption is that the organizational design of a project should fit the task demands and that a rational choice from a set of wellfitting equi-functional solutions should be made—one size does not fit all (Shenhar, 2001). This view has been challenged. Kieser (1997) argues that rhetoric and myth play big roles in decisions about organizational design. He observed that management concepts, particularly in organization design, come and go like fashion trends and do so with increasing speed and peaks. This process is driven by an arena of stakeholders creating a new trend; in other words, authors of best-selling management books, seminar organizers, business school professors, and consultants selling the new designs. The principles propagated by these stakeholders “prove useful in restructuring projects within organizations. They simplify the process of initiation and conceptualization as well as the coordination between parallel restructuring projects in a restructuring program. They are useful tools in political maneuvers during the implementation process and they help in making the organization appear rational after the completion of the restructuring process.” (Kieser, 1997, p. 49) We also observe such trends in the world of project organizing; for example, the word “agile” has become a buzzword for a more recent management trend. Thus, there is some evidence, that design choices are not only based on best fit of task demands and design characteristics but on other goals, such as achieving and sustaining powerful positions, and that the choices are not always well reflected. DiMaggio and Powell (1983) also challenge the assumption that organizational designs are chosen in rational processes. Based on an institutional theory, they describe three isomorphic processes—coercive, mimetic, and normative—which make organizations in an emerging organization field become more and more similar when rational actors try to change their organizations. In the first article in this issue Miterev, Engwall, and Jerbrant (2017) apply the framework of DiMaggio and Powell (1983) to the design choice of projects as temporary organizations. In their in-depth ethnography-inspired case study of a pharmaceutical firm, they find overwhelming evidence for Project Management Journal, Vol. 44, No. 6, 2–5 © 2013 by the Project Management Institute Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/pmj.21383 First, I want to share some very good news with the project management research community and all our readers interested in project management research. The deadline for the submission of papers to the PMI research conference has been prolongated to 13 January 2014. The PMI® Research and Education Conference, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: In Search of Theory and Evidence” will be held on 27–29 July 2014 in Portland, Oregon, USA. We welcome conceptual, empirical, or theoretical work using project, program, or portfolio management as the subject or context of the research. PMI also solicits papers and symposia on project management education; doctoral students are encouraged to submit their work to the pre-conference doctoral colloquium. For submission guidelines and instructions, please contact PMI.org/REC2014submit. Conference registration is scheduled to open March 2014 and details can be found on PMI.org/REC2014. The December issue of Project Management Journal® offers a rich variety of articles, each of which delivers a significant contribution to theory building in project organizing and new empirical findings with a high value of theory and practice. The first paper by Dietrich, Kujala, and Artto addresses a fundamental organizational design question in project management: How should the interdependencies between different teams in a multi-team project be managed? There are many different coordination mechanisms, but each of them has its advantages and drawbacks and they can be combined in different ways, which differ in terms of coherence and potential synergies. The organizational design reflections stated in this article can also be used for the management of programs consisting of an array of different projects or for the management of a project portfolio in which the management of interdependencies between projects is also a critical challenge. The management of interdependencies between projects is an issue that has been neglected in multi-project management. Very often the interdependence is restricted to resource conflicts between projects and the solution is to identify the bottleneck resources and the projects that conflict with one bottleneck resource. The solution to this problem is often a muddling-through approach that delivers an immediate solution, yet doesn’t acknowledge that typically there are too many projects occurring at the same time, and that an organization usually experiences a number of bottlenecks simultaneously. This bottleneck obstacle makes it difficult to assess the consequences of measures that have been taken to repair an immediate problem—a problem that may only be a symptom of a much larger and obscure problem. In addition, there are many kinds of different interdependencies between projects that have not been addressed systematically and simultaneously. Markowitz’s pioneering work showed that the risk of a portfolio of projects can be reduced if the project portfolio mixture combines projects, which in sum show a smaller covariance of cash-flow. Thus, managing risk interdependencies between financial investments, which could have been projects, in such a way that the overall risk of a portfolio of financial investments, which could have been projects, is reduced, has been an essential element of designing portfolios since long. Organizational design theory made the claim that the kinds of interdependencies matter; in other words, for pooled, sequential, or reciprocal interdependencies, different kinds of organizational coordination instruments—or more precisely, different kinds of coherent mixes of coordination instruments—should be used. Regarding project portfolio management, pooled interdependencies among scarce (human) resources during the development stage of a new product, process, or service, have been the focus of interest. But pooled interdependencies are not restricted to human resources in the development process or to financial resources in a more aggregated view. If potential users of a project can only cope with a limited amount of new products or product releases that are delivered to them, this creates a new, thus far, often neglected type of bottleneck. The ability and willingness of users or intermediaries may also create bottlenecks and thus “pooled” interdependencies. Transfer prices or prioritization systems have been proposed to solve the internal resource coordination problem, but do they also apply to the customer acceptance bottleneck problem? Taking a marketing perspective or a purchasing perspective, additional interdependence aspects have to be considered. If two projects share the same customer as a recipient, or the same supplier as a source, then these two projects need to be coordinated. (This may pertain to the following questions: When should which project be done? What should it deliver to other projects serving the same client?) Or: Do resource From the Editor