The praxis of ‘alignment seeking’ in project work

Abstract

Alignment seeking is the process of reaching agreement on what needs to be done and on the process that should be followed to complete the activity. This empirical study extends the scope of the current project-as-practice literature by providing descriptions of how project managers actually achieve alignment. Photographs taken by the research participants are used to trigger discussion in semi-structured interviews that explore the praxis of alignment seeking in project work. The practices found to enable alignment seeking include: creating a vision; storytelling; seeding ideas; identifying and using personal drivers, and appealing to stakeholders and team members' sense of a 'higher good'. This paper highlights how alignment seeking can be achieved 'in practice' by project managers.

Project Is as Project Does

“…Our findings suggest that in the project, microactivities such as sensing participants' moods during the process and allowing the free emergence of ideas were essential to the process. The findings contribute to the literature on alignment seeking in project management (O'Leary & Williams, 2013;van der Hoorn & Whitty, 2017). We argue that a play ontology approach offers novel insights into the emerging microactivities and their dynamics during the project.…”

“…The university was to cover the costs for new furniture, facility management services, and some research work. A project management team (PMT) was established to run the project and to ensure that the chosen modifications would bring the most value to the users and alignment (van der Hoorn & Whitty, 2017). The co-authors of this article served in different roles on the team.…”

Seeing the bigger picture: Conditions that influence effective engagement of project executives with visuals

“…This area of study is important, given that executive sponsorship and support is a critical success factor for projects (see, for example, Ahmed, Mohamad and Ahmad (2016); Englund and Bucero (2016); Fernandes, Ward and Araújo (2015)). Furthermore, the ability to bring stakeholders such as executives onto 'the same page' is a core competency for project managers (Oleary & Williams 2013;van der Hoorn & Whitty 2017b). The focus on engagement with visuals is timely, given the calls to ensure that exploration of organisational phenomena extends beyond the linguistic to include the visual (see, for example, Bell and Davison (2013); Meyer et al (2013)).…”

The process of social alignment and misalignment within a complex IT project

“…Project stakeholders are "individuals or groups who have an interest or some aspect of rights or ownership in the project, and can contribute to, or be impacted by, the outcomes of the project" (Bourne and Walker, 2006, p.5). As a result, project progress, and ultimately success, is much harder to achieve without agreement between the project stakeholders as to what exactly needs to be accomplished and how best to accomplish it (O'Leary and Williams, 2013;van der Hoorn and Whitty, 2017). While the benefits of socially aligning the project stakeholders are well-known (Bygballe et al, 2016;Cicmil and Marshall, 2005;Ika and Donnelly, 2017;Mok et al, 2015;Ravishankar et al, 2011;Tantalo and Priem, 2016), how exactly the social alignment process unfolds…”

“…Hartman and Ashrafi (2002) cited a lack of stakeholder alignment around performance and control metrics as one of the main reasons for IT/IS project failure. Although the Project Management literature has not examined social alignment per se, similar themes have been discussed such as shared understanding (Awati, 2011;Chang et al, 2013), alignment (Hartman and Ashrafi, 2002;Ika and Donnelly, 2017;van der Hoorn and Whitty, 2017), and coordinating (Bygballe et al, 2016;Koch and Thuesen, 2013;McKenna and Baume, 2015;Pilbeam, 2013). Ika and Donnelly (2017) found multi-stakeholder commitment, collaboration, alignment, and adaptation act as meta-conditions for international development project success.…”