Christopher Biesenthal

WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management | WHU · Institute of Management Accounting and Control

Project portfolio management (PPM) bridges strategy and project management. Traditional research in PPM has primarily investigated the rational, top-down and structural aspects of strategizing. By doing so, it has failed to focus on the underlying practices that are triggered by the strategy and how these practices frame strategy implementation. Pr...

This study clarifies how dynamic capabilities work in modifying operational capabilities at different organizational levels. While there is good understanding that routines that make up operational capabilities possess ostensive and performative aspects, whether the same applies to dynamic capabilities is unclear. In addition, there is only a limit...

This paper contributes to Rodney Turner's initiative to develop a theory of project management from practice. Organizational scholars studying strategy suggest that more attention needs to be paid to practices involved in organizing, as well as the institutional contexts in which these practices are embedded. Taking a cue from strategy-in-practice...

The paper explores three texts in the field of megaproject management that intersubjectively, in terms of community sentiment, might be considered ‘classics’. We deploy four criteria for a structured analysis that determines if the status of the works in question may be considered classic. The works examined are Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of...

Introduction The management of value is an increasingly important process to meet stakeholder expectations on multiple organizational levels. Existing project management research focuses primarily on a single-dimensional perspective of value creation, such that value is either addressed from an organizational or project perspective. From a project...

Megaprojects are complex achievements of organization, sensemaking and management of power relations. Typically, engineering practice stresses rationality and linearity, exemplified in the nineteenth century roots of modern management in writers such as Taylor or Fayol. A concern with contingency theory and the emergence of project management stand...

Project success has always been an important topic in the project management literature. One of the main discussions is concerned with how a project’s success is evaluated and what factors lead to achieving this success. Traditionally project success has been measured at the point where the project outputs are handed over, after the close out phase...

Building Information Modeling (BIM) systems are increasingly used in construction projects. Theoretically, these systems provide greater transparency and access to construction project information and, in doing so, should reduce the information asymmetry that commonly arises in construction contracting relationships. This typically occurs when supp...

Project managers require temporal skills and the ability to improvise when linear assumptions confront the complexities of managing projects within a context of strategic calculation. While the management and organization (MOS) literature emphasizes the importance of temporal skills for managing uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity, a dearth of pr...

In this paper we introduce project-based organizations as multilevel entities that possess multiple operational and dynamic capabilities to manage organizational change and more precisely the stability- change paradox. In this study we focus particularly on two distinct, yet compatible and complementary dynamic project capabilities that facilitate...

Project governance is important in ensuring successful project delivery. In this article we conduct a systematic investigation of previous research to provide a content-driven review of the literature, and to provide future research direction. We use the textual data mining software Leximancer to identify dominant concepts and themes underlying pro...

Project management is complex and therefore a fruitful ground for creative, spontaneous and intuitive applications of particular theories to meet the stated objectives in a constantly changing environment. This form of work is defined as improvisation, which describes a pragmatic approach of applying existing theories in novel ways to deliver a suc...

This study investigates the variety of ethical decisions of project managers and their impact from corporate governance and project governance structures. The roles of personal trust and system trust as a mechanism to steer ethical decision making in different governance settings is explored. Nine qualitative case studies in Europe, Asia, and Austr...