Browsing by Author "Artto, Karlos, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Finland"

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Creating value through inter-organizational collaboration: A collective action perspective
(2019) Matinheikki, Juri
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Inter-organizational collaboration plays a pivotal role not just in creating business value but solving contemporary grand challenges on the societal level. However, collaboration has many barriers which are often social rather than technological. Existing practices, regulative pressures, social norms, beliefs, and other institutional mechanisms may come to hinder collective action among organizations. Thus, collaboration and collective action often require institutional change. The purpose of this dissertation project was to examine the empirical challenge of how multiple diverse organizations can jointly create value. The four published empirical articles form the basis of this dissertation by providing different conceptualizations of the empirically-grounded development processes towards inter-organizational value creation. To integrate and synthesize the findings of the four articles, the compiling part then adopts a collective action perspective, which is developed by combining the literatures of behavioral theory of collective action and neo-institutional theory of organization. The collective action perspective suggests that institutional change towards inter-organizational value creation requires actors to solve the second-order collective action problem, which means that establishing institutions that support collective action in fact requires collective action. As the outcome of the synthesis, this dissertation delineates the developmental process of collective action systems showing that solving this paradox requires strategic actions from elite actors with high social positions that grant them the reflexive capacity to deviate from existing institutional constraints. These actors act as mobilizers by forming the initial frame or vision of change, which is then, through a process of negotiations among multiple actors, refined into a system-level goal having a practical task-specific dimension coupled with symbolic representation of the more abstract, yet adherable, vision. The system-level goal becomes then to drive task-specific actions overcoming the second-order collective action problem by motivating actors to jointly change the localized socio-material environment (e.g. by developing a new technology or a physical asset). These changes connect informal rules with technological environment, redefining mundane patterns of organizing and setting governance mechanisms that further support collective action, thus solving the first-order collective action problem. The new settlement can then be sustained through active institutional maintenance. Findings also indicate that collective action systems are vulnerable to endogenous or exogenous shocks. However, such disruptions are necessary evils, permitting renewal and thus institutional change. Overall, the model provides new insights to a theoretical dilemma of the second-order collective action problem as well as to the important practical question of how organizations can engage in joint value creation.
External stakeholder engagement in complex projects
(2021) Lehtinen, Jere
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
Engaging external stakeholders, like authorities, communities, and non-governmental organizations, is an essential part of complex project management. The objective of this dissertation is to examine how project organizations engage external stakeholders in complex projects.The objective is approached with three research questions. (1) How do project organizations organize external stakeholder engagement in complex projects? (2) How do project organizations engage and disengage external stakeholders over project's lifecycle, and why? (3) How do project organizations communicate effectively in social media to engage external stakeholders? The overall research strategy is case research, and each research question is addressed with an empirical case study. The first study is a qualitative, multiple-case study, the second study is a qualitative, longitudinal single-case study, and the third study is a quantitative, embedded single-case study. Each case study forms an individual and original research article. The empirical data includes semi-structured interviews, project and organization reports, public documents, news articles, and social media messages from three infrastructure projects. The findings of this dissertation provide new understanding regarding stakeholder engagement in the following three ways. First, the findings indicate that three organizing solutions, governance-based, value-based, and dynamism-based solutions, facilitate organizing external stakeholder engagement. The three solutions divide external stakeholder engagement into appropriate activities, allocate the activities to relevant project personnel, and offer the required information and motivation to execute the activities. Second, the findings show that a project organization manages the interaction with external stakeholders based on four rationales: framing the project, legitimizing governance, maintaining interaction, and expanding governance, bound to project lifecycle phases and changing stakeholder environment. The rationales highlight the essential role of disengagement in value creation as the project organization constantly balances between activities to engage external stakeholders and activities to disengage external stakeholders over the project lifecycle. Third, the findings demonstrate that engagement effectiveness depends on a project organization's understanding of the target stakeholder, suitable discussion topics, and communication modes. A project organization's communication that offers information about sustainability issues, or is cooperative or entertaining, engages external stakeholders effectively in social media. Overall, the above-described findings offer novel insights into how project organizations engage external stakeholders in complex projects, contributing to stakeholder theory and complex project management research.
Fire Risk and its Management in Cruise Vessel Construction Projects
(2014) Räisänen, Pekka
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
The purpose of this research was to identify and describe the project fire risk in the cruise vessel building industry, to assess the size of risk and to explicate responses. The theoretical approach was based on project management, general fire risk management and shipbuilding literature. The study was carried out with seven shipyards of four European shipbuilding companies, which represented 85 - 90% of the world building capacity. The research approach consisted of twelve improvement and benchmarking action cycles with the shipyards over three years, which produced extensive quantitative and qualitative empirical material. Many of the findings were used to improve building processes at the yards. The practical findings include 14 categories of contributing factors for ignition, three types of consequences, 27 key metrics for risk assessment and 141 responses to fire risk. The empirical data included a unique, very large set of fire incident statistics, which covered 221 fire incidents on 22 vessels. From the empirical material, it was derived that four out of five fires were due to hot work, and that most of the fires were extinguished by personnel on-board with portable extinguishers. It was estimated that large fires of over one million euros in damages occur every 100 – 200 fire incidents. The thesis provides new information to the discipline of shipbuilding fire risk management in risk identification, assessment and responses. In particular, hot work on-board, management of moveable fire load, personnel behaviour, detection and alarm, suppression, confinement of fire by closing all major openings, and evacuation were found to be important. Furthermore, unconventional commissioning of the ship's own sprinkler systems early in the building process was found to be especially important, and was estimated to reduce the risk of a large loss by an order of magnitude. The thesis contributes to general project risk management by demonstrating how data from complex construction projects can be used in setting up systematic risk management practices. The action research method was applied in mutual safety benchmarking of rival shipbuilding companies, which has been very useful in obtaining the results, and is recommended for similar problems in other industries. Further fire risk research is suggested in the effects of workforce, the effects of shipbuilding process, the benefits of automatic suppression and the analysis possibilities offered by the European fire incident statistics database.
Managing for knowledge creation in exploratory projects
(2019) Rekonen, Satu
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
During the last decade, there has been an increasing amount of research focusing on the management of exploratory projects in project management research. A characteristic of exploratory projects is that their goals are only broadly, if at all, defined at the beginning. This starting point is contrary to the traditional approach in project management in which a goal and plan for reaching the goal is clearly defined at the outset. Prior research has identified management principles and different strategies for handling exploratory projects, however, research on project managers' approaches and the challenges that they encounter in this context is still limited. Furthermore, the experiences of team members working on exploratory projects that require adopting an iterative (i.e. looping back in the process) development approach, in which developing knowledge through experimentation is a central activity, have also been hardly explored. With the overall objective of improving the understanding of the management of exploratory projects, this dissertation addresses the following research questions: 1) How do project managers approach exploratory projects and what types of challenges do they encounter? 2) How should experimentation be supported by the project manager in exploratory projects? The current dissertation is a compilation of five individual articles, each providing a complementary perspective on the two broader research questions. A qualitative research approach utilizing case study and action research approaches is adopted. The empirical data that appears in this dissertation was collected through semi-structured interviews and video recordings. In total, 81 interviews were conducted with project managers and practitioners novice to exploratory projects and experimentation, and 7.5 hours of video data was gathered on experimentation efforts. A critical realist perspective to the phenomenon was adopted by following an abductive process of data analysis. Through the longitudinal approach, the findings of the current dissertation provide new information about the dynamic nature of managing exploratory projects. Furthermore, by adopting a micro-level perspective in investigating how novice practitioners of the approach undertake experimentation, the findings of the current research offer valuable new insights into the management of experimentation, a key characteristic of exploratory projects. Finally, the findings suggest the central importance of process know-how in exploratory projects. The role of the project manager moves from managing the efficient execution of the project toward facilitating the iterative development process by ensuring that the project team does not converge (i.e. narrow the problem space by choosing the solution to develop further) too early and is able to extract learning from the experiments.
Organizational project management methodologies - Structures, contents, and use
(2015) Vaskimo, Jouko
School of Science | Doctoral dissertation (monograph)
This research investigates organizational project management methodologies – structured collections of project management knowledge and experience – by focusing on their structures and contents, and the specific reasons why organizations use them. This research comprises a mixed-method multiple case study among ten organizations: Qualitative data are first collected from 57, and then quantitative data from 53 respondents. The findings identify project management structure, cost and budget management system, time schedule management system, risk management system, and reporting, communications, and information system as the most important organizational project management methodology structures. Additionally, the findings recognize document templates, process descriptions and guidelines, role definitions and descriptions, project minimum and compliance requirements, and time schedule management materials and instructions as the most important organizational project management methodology contents. Further to these, the findings show that providing a common way of working, providing structure to projects, standardizing projects and providing consistency, providing a common project language and vocabulary, and enhancing quality of project management are the most important reasons why organizations use organizational project management methodologies. These results highlight the similarities among organizational project management methodologies, however, also unique features and differences among organizational emphases on methodology structures and contents, and reasons why such methodologies are used can be identified from the findings. The findings show that organizations use unique combinations of organizational project management methodology structures and contents to address the specific reasons why they use such methodologies. This suggests that there is no single best way to manage projects. The findings also suggest that the organizational project management methodology structures and contents, and the reasons why methodologies are used depend on project management challenges, which relate to organizational and project contexts. Furthermore, the findings suggest that organizations focus their organizational project management methodologies on the project management subject areas in which they find most room for improvement, and which they consider most likely to enhance chances of project success. Finally, the findings suggest that organizations adopt ideas for their organizational project management methodology structures and contents, and for reasons why such methodologies are used from public-domain and commercial project management methodologies, as well as from project management challenges related to organizational and project contexts.