posted on 2017-06-08, 09:27authored byNaomi Brookes, Dan SageDan Sage, Andrew Dainty, Giorgio Locatelli, Jennifer Whyte
This paper examines the organizational phenomena of long-term projects. While research literature frames projects as “temporary organizations”, megaprojects have long initiation and delivery phases, lasting years sometimes decades, and deliver capital assets that are used for decades or centuries. Instead of short-duration activity within a fixed organizational context, these projects involve multiple temporalities, combining more and less temporary forms of organizing in the process of enactment. Using an example of a long-term infrastructural megaproject, a wind-farm, to illustrate the phenomenon, we contribute by articulating different temporalities associated with the delivery project, life-cycle; stakeholder organizations that set up the project; and special purpose vehicles through which it is delivered. Implications of these temporalities for project management research and practice are discussed with reference to understandings of risk and knowledge. We argue that focus on long-term projects and their multiple temporalities opens up new ways of thinking about projects as temporary organizations.
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the ESF
COST Action MEGAPROJECT TU1003 "The Effective
Design and Delivery of Megaprojects in the European Union"
(MEGAPROJECT).
History
School
Business and Economics
Department
Business
Published in
International Journal of Project Management
Volume
35
Issue
7
Pages
1213 - 1224
Citation
BROOKES, N. ... et al., 2017. An island of constancy in a sea of change: rethinking project temporalities with long-term megaprojects. International Journal of Project Management, 35 (7), pp.1213–1224.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2017-05-22
Publication date
2017-06-07
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal International Journal of Project Management and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2017.05.007