Project governance is important in ensuring successful project delivery. In this article we conduct a systematic investigation of previous research to provide a content-driven review of the literature, and to provide future research direction. We use the textual data mining software Leximancer to identify dominant concepts and themes underlying project governance research.! Our findings indicate that agency and stakeholder theories have been adapted to the project governance context to a greater extent than other theories. Furthermore, we find differences in project governance research, published in project management journals compared to general management, IT and engineering journals. We conclude the paper by presenting a framework that links governance theories to the multiple organizational levels relevant to project governance.
This paper contributes to Rodney Turner's initiative to develop a theory of project management from practice. Organizational scholars studying strategy suggest that more attention needs to be paid to practices involved in organizing, as well as the institutional contexts in which these practices are embedded. Taking a cue from strategy-in-practice approaches, it is proposed that institutional theories can be used to address some questions that have not been answered adequately regarding megaprojects. Institutional theories also seem to be gaining the attention of scholars investigating large, global, infrastructure projects as reported in engineering, management and construction journals. Increasingly, it is evident that the problem areas attached to these projects stretch beyond technical issues: they must be considered as socio-technical endeavours embedded in complex institutional frames. The authors suggest that studying how to deal with institutional differences in the environment of megaprojects has both theoretical and practical implications.
■Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems are increasingly used in construction projects. Theoretically, these systems provide greater transparency and access to construction project information and, in doing so, should reduce the information asymmetry that commonly arises in construction contracting relationships. This typically occurs when suppliers of products and services opportunistically take advantage of the client due to the imbalance in information. The article therefore explores whether or not the high level of information content offered by BIM and the potential for sharing that information among contracting parties means that the information asymmetry can be alleviated using BIM. In order to investigate this, evidence was collected through three purposively sampled case studies of large principal organizations undertaking projects in Australia-each representing a different type of customer in the supply chain on construction projects. Our findings suggest a gap between the theoretical potential and practical application of BIM to reduce information asymmetry. The study found that, although BIM has the capability to reduce information asymmetry, it has not reached a mature enough stage in the Australian construction industry to clearly confirm that it actually reduces the problem. There is even a degree of evidence that, under certain circumstances, a reverse asymmetry may exist in which a client has the technical knowledge to more successfully analyze the BIM model (relative to the organizations they contract with) and then use the resulting information to their own opportunistic advantage.
Project success has always been an important topic in the project management literature. One of the main discussions is concerned with how a project’s success is evaluated and what factors lead to achieving this success. Traditionally project success has been measured at the point where the project outputs are handed over, after the close out phase. Recently, questions have been raised in the literature as to whether we should be evaluating project success beyond the close out phase, to better account for organizational and societal outcomes. However, not much has been published about how the long term impacts and outcomes are measured. This is of particular concern in megaprojects as they often attract a high level of public attention and political interest, and have both direct and indirect impacts on the community, environment, and national budgets. In this paper the authors review success factors and criteria that are applicable to projects in general and megaprojects in particular. They identify the significance of evaluating outcomes and impact and propose an ex-post project evaluation (EPPE) framework for megaprojects.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.