Back to the beginning: a critical investigation of major project initiation activities

This project will explore the challenges encountered during the initiating phases of major projects. This represents a significant practical and conceptual challenge and is a core feature of the UK Cabinet Office Infrastructure and Projects Authority Project X initiative (Theme B, led by Professor Lewis). The motivating assumption is that this ‘early’ phase represents a categorically distinct set of activities – not quite the policy phase, not quite business as usual and, critically, not quite the project. Although there is abundant research on various aspects of project delivery, there have been repeated – largely unheeded - calls for more research into the front-end (Edkins et al. 2013) - and back-end (Artto et al. 2016) - of projects. This assumption is motivated by the policy level concern that the initiation phases of (major) projects are far more complex and less well understood than conventional knowledge and prescriptive practice of project delivery suggests. There is a need to recognize and better understand the process of agreeing and establishing boundaries – what we might call ‘boundary organising’, alongside risks, processes, governance, and leadership, to manage the project from its margins.

Projects are traditionally defined as discrete ‘chunks’ of work in time (Lundin and Söderholm 1995) in temporary organisational settings that can be understood through a lifecycle lens (Morris 2013). Similarly, the discreteness of any project only makes sense if we create some boundaries around the object we are trying to distinguish from its surroundings (Artto 2013), to establish whether what we are looking at is part of the project or isn’t. Perhaps the most fundamental project boundaries are its bookends, namely the front-end and back-end. The project front-end is the time where different potential versions of the project are being discussed, in terms of intent, scale and scope until acceptable project goals and expectations are somehow ‘established’ (Edkins et al. 2013). The front-end is regularly identified as the greatest opportunity for value creation (Artto et al. 2016) where the “project will typically lock in many aspects of what will be the final project configuration” (Levitt and Scott 2017). Because many aspects of the project will here be ‘frozen’ as key requirements and taken forward into execution, it is also where the risk of not getting the right project done is greatest: as research has repeatedly shown, the ‘seeds of project failure’ are sown at the very outset (Morris 2013).

The Project X context allows for excellent access to a wide range of rich data that could support various methodological (e.g. interview, survey, case, RCT, experiments, etc.) approaches.

Anticipated start date: September 2019