How to prepare a project for unexpected events?
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2018-06-18
Department
Major/Subject
Operations and Service Management
Mcode
SCI3049
Degree programme
Master’s Programme in Industrial Engineering and Management
Language
en
Pages
76
Series
Abstract
A project is defined as a temporary endeavor to achieve something unique. To achieve something unique, a new path needs to be explored, which can be expected to be filled with unexpected events. The project management team cannot plan for these unexpected events occurring in the project because information about such events is simply not available, therefore, such events need to be managed as and when it occurs. This raises the obvious question - ‘how the project management team can prepare a project to manage unexpected events occurring in the project?’ This thesis attempts to find an answer to this focal question. The focus of this thesis is to identify the project characteristics that can help in managing unexpected events and discuss how these project characteristics can be strengthened. These project characteristics have been identified from the project management literature and can be classified in three broad categories, i.e. ‘cohesion between the project actors’, ‘Flexibility in a project’ and ‘resource availability and innovative capability’. Further, these characteristics have been analyzed with a two case empirical study. The two case projects selected for empirical study are infrastructure development projects, each with an overall cost of around 100 million euro. From the case projects, qualitative data were collected which include interviews, survey responses, and project-specific documents. The data analysis follows the qualitative abductive research approach. The empirical data has been collected and analyzed mainly with two objectives, first, to identify the project characteristics in the case projects which has emerged from established project management practices in case projects. And second, to identify management approach taken to the unexpected events occurred so far in the case projects. The key finding of the study is that a project can be prepared to manage unexpected events if identified project characteristics have been carefully introduced in the project. This is implicit from the analysis of case projects. The first case project possesses the identified characteristics and has demonstrated a better capability to manage unexpected events. On the other hand, in the second case project, the project characteristics that need to strengthen have been identified, in order to improve its preparedness to manage unexpected events. The study also proposes three business implications to enhance the infrastructure development project’s preparedness to manage unexpected events.Description
Supervisor
Artto, KarlosThesis advisor
Lehtinen, JereKeywords
project management, unknown unknowns, unexpected events, project characteristics