Per Svejvig

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Aarhus University

Purpose Project management as a field of practice and research is characterized by impressive amounts of normative literature and extensive collections of best practices promising to improve project performance. On the other hand, research proving the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed tools is limited. Project management methodology (PMM...

Since the 1950s, project portfolio management (PPM) has offered principles helping us to act in PPM-related situations. Our study integrates what we know by reviewing seven decades of PPM research. We identify 17 PPM principles in four categories that have shaped our thinking and show how these are embedded in a semantical hierarchy. By doing so we...

With this second special issue containing eight articles, we show the increasing importance of action research and its variants in project studies and project management. The response to the two calls for papers has been overwhelming and we thank all the researchers who sent papers to be included and the reviewers who helped review them. The decisi...

Denne formidlingsartikel præsenterer resultaterne af vores forskningsartikel om principper inden for Projektporteføljeledelse (PPL). Vi identificerer fire overordnede kategorier med 17 PPL-principper gennem et struktureret litteraturstudie baseret på 100 udvalgte artikler. Principperne omfatter blandt andet balancering af porteføljen, opbygning af...

In the quest to improve projects, project actors rely on sound project evaluation. However, project evaluation can be complex and challenging. This study aims to explore and define project evaluation and reveal how it can promote continuous improvements within and across projects and organizations. A review of extant literature finds four constitut...

Although project portfolio management (PPM) has been on the research agenda for at least seven decades (1950–2019), the number of contributions on the topic continues to grow. Literature reviews help us to integrate and build on what we already know and to understand where we came from. However, reviews proving a shared historical narrative of the...

A key characteristic of agileAgileprojectsProject is autonomy coupled with self-Self-organizationorganization. However, agile practicesAgile practices and decisions do not operate in isolation for projectsProject in a portfolioPortfolios. Decisions involve different stakeholdersStakeholder at various levels in an organization with different constru...

In 2017, Shenhar and Dvir released their Diamond ModelDiamond model as a typology for projectProject categorization with the following dimensions: novelty, technology, complexityComplexity, and pace. The Diamond ModelDiamond model is useful for uncovering the projectProject type at hand with a view to selecting a suitable management style. The obje...

Theory building is a central goal in most research disciplines, and it is difficult to overstate the importance of theory in a research endeavor. This paper builds on a study of theory building in several disciplines so as to: (1) synthesize it into a framework, and (2) support the development and evaluation of theory in project management research...

Purpose This paper reports on an action research study based optimization project related to healthcare IT implemented on the Faroe Islands. The aims were to study what constitutes value in the public healthcare setting by applying and activating existing resources in the organization, hence answering the overall research question: How can a resour...

This paper explores the role of value in decision-making for agile project portfolios. It investigates how agile portfolios function, particularly in decision making involving multiple stakeholders to maximise value at the portfolio level. This is important because agile practices do not operate in isolation for projects in a portfolio. Decisions i...

In 2017, Shenhar and Dvir released their Diamond Model as a typology for project categorization with the following dimensions: novelty, technology, complexity, and pace. The Diamond Model is useful for uncovering the project type at hand with a view to selecting a suitable management style. The objective of the model is to be universal and context...

During the last couple of decades, agile methods have spread from software development start-ups to large, established organizations across different industries. The traditional project portfolio management processes build on certain premises about agreed-on delivera-bles, resources and deadline. These premises are not applicable to agile projects....

This article reports on a four-year action research study, where the aims were to study benefits management at a detailed, practical level and to evaluate the benefits management practices applied. Synthesizing the insights from the study shows that the approach is dependent on the context and that the action research process was a challenging ende...

The publisher regrets that in the above referenced paper the second author had requested two affiliations be listed. The affiliations are now correct as shown above.

Accelerating time to impact is a serious and important challenge for today's organizations. This paper combines the literatures of project acceleration and benefit management to inquire into the possibilities of accelerating time to impact. Specifically, it explores a practitioner-driven Danish initiative targeted at increasing the speed at which p...

As projects constitute a major part of organizational budgets and strategic development, practitioners become dependent on project portfolio management (PPM). However, the existing knowledge on how to evaluate and improve PPM is rather fragmented and lacks empirical grounding. We ask: How can we develop a holistic and empirically validated PPM eval...

This study investigates the critical success factors for individuals' use of business intelligence (BI) in health care organizations. We also examine the organizational impact of BI. We develop a model that expands DeLone and McLean's IS success model to include task characteristics. To analyze the model, we used a mixed-method approach. First, a q...

Encouraged by resents years’ increased interest in project portfolio management (PPM), this paper conducts a review of two stocks of highly regarded publications on PPM — one stock representing most cited publications of all years, and the second representing the most cited publications from the last five years. Utilizing the theoretical lens propo...

Stimulated by recent years’ accelerated interest in project portfolio management (PPM) and reports of its shortcomings in practice, this paper proposes how we may diagnose and rethink exciting PPM practices by utilizing the rethinking project management framework, including two complementary analytical perspectives. One perspective, denoted as clas...

Encouraged by recent years' progress in agile project portfolio management (PPM), we investigate how these practices manifest themselves, thereby addressing ongoing discussions about what implementing agile PPM practices means for real life organizations. Our analysis utilizes the rethinking project management framework including two complementary...

There are many theoretical and practical reasons for evaluating projects-including explorative arguments focusing on expanding descriptive knowledge on project work as well as normative arguments focusing on improving prescriptive models of project performance. Despite the need for project management methodologies that work and combat project failu...

Top management support and the involvement of project owners in projects has been high on the agenda for a long time. Research suggests that this is more critical for project success than any other success factor. Studies show that the relationship between project owner and project manager is complex characterized by information asymmetry and poten...

Achieving success in enterprise systems (ES) implementations is challenging. The success rate is not high in view of the sums invested by many organizations in these companywide systems. The literature is charged with reasons for unsuccessful implementations, such as a lack of top management support and insufficient change management. Contrary to t...

Increased complexity in projects has forced new project management initiatives. In software development several agile methods have emerged and are today highly implemented in practice. Observations of general project management practice show how it has been inspired by agile software development, but very little research addresses the issue of agil...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the similarities and differences between the Danish rethinking project management (RPM) initiative named Project Half Double (PHD) and the RPM research stream. The paper furthermore discusses how PHD and RPM can inspire each other in research and practice. Design/methodology/approach This is an empir...

Departing from a longitudinal case study at a Scandinavian telecom, we seek to explore the shaping of IT governance mechanisms related to enterprise architecture efforts – here referred to as architecture governance. While empirically studying this subdomain of IT governance, we also contribute to IT governance literature in general. IT governance...

Project Half Double is an industry-driven initiative with the purpose to develop a new and radical project paradigm to increase the competitiveness of the Danish industry. The research part of Project Half Double will assess the degree to which the new project paradigm is more successful than traditional approaches, which calls for an evaluation an...

Departing from a longitudinal case study at a Scandinavian telecom, we seek to explore the shaping of IT governance mechanisms related to enterprise architecture efforts – here referred to as architecture governance. While empirically studying this subdomain of IT governance, we also contribute to IT governance literature in general. IT governance...

This paper examines the use of institutional theory as a conceptually rich lens to study social issues of enterprise systems (ES) research. More precisely, the purpose is to categorize current ES research using institutional theory to develop a conceptual model that advances ES research. Key institutional features are presented such as isomorphism,...

This paper aims to take stock of what we know about project value creation and to present future directions for research and practice. We performed an explorative and unstructured literature review, which was subsequently paired with a structured literature review. We join several research areas by adopting the project value creation perspective on...

Obtaining business value from IT is a recurring theme that has diffused into healthcare information systems (HIS) where stakeholders often question the value of IT investments. Having completed the implementation of an integrated HIS, the Faroese Health Service (FHS) has commenced discussions concerning getting value from their IT investment. In or...

Contrary to the existing literature and studies of large-scale IT projects, empirical data from a mega IT project in mid-sized Danish Bank, Jyske Bank, demonstrates a successful implementation of a highly complex IT platform transition. Linguistic representations and especially extensive use of metaphors by executive management to form and shape th...

Achieving success in enterprise systems (ES) implementations is challenging. The success rate is not high in view of the sums invested by many organizations in these companywide systems. The literature is charged with reasons for unsuccessful implementations, such as a lack of top management support and insufficient change management. Contrary to t...

The obtainment of value from IT is a recurring theme that has diffused into healthcare information systems (HIS). Having completed the implementation of an integrated HIS, the Faroese Health Service (FHS) has started discussions regarding the obtainment of value from its IT investment which is the subject of this paper. Based on an action research...

This paper presents the results of a structured review of the rethinking project management (RPM) literature based on the classification and analysis of 74 contributions and in addition takes a critical look at this brave new world. Through the analysis, a total of 6 overarching categories emerged: contextualization, social and political aspects, r...

The obtainment of value from IT is a recurring theme that has diffused into healthcare information systems (HIS). Having completed the implementation of an integrated HIS, the Faroese Health Service (FHS) has started discussions regarding the obtainment of value from its IT investment which is the subject of this paper. Based on an action research...

This chapter addresses how Opus, a modified SAP solution delivered as a cloud solution, is interpreted, diffused, and adopted by Danish municipalities. The chapter is based on a theoretical framework using the organizing vision and diffusion of innovation theories. The authors study four Danish municipalities and the vendor of the Opus solution. Th...

Whereas previous research provides a number of accounts of failure prone enterprise system (ES) implementations, empirical evidence of the re-implementation of an accounting system in a Scandinavian high-tech company shows how the system became highly integrated, accepted by its users, and well-aligned to the work processes. To learn from this case...

A total of 74 contributions concerned with rethinking and introducing new thoughts and perspectives to the field of project management were analyzed through a structured literature review process. This analysis showed that the rethinking stream has expanded in recent years, and that it can be seen as a pluralistic field consisting of a total of sev...

This paper seeks to describe some of the challenges in the implementation of IS in a non-profit organisation in a developing country. When people from developed countries assist in the process of making requirements specification, an understanding of local culture is essential for a successful collaboration. Cultural dimensions from Hofstede and ot...

Cloud computing is at "the peak of inflated expectations" on the Gartner Hype Cycle from 2010. Service models constitute a layer in the cloud computing model and Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the important service models. Software as a Service provides complete business applications delivered over the web and more specific when delivering...

Outsourcing is now a feasible means for enterprise systems (ES) cost savings, but does however increase the complexity of coordination substantially when many organizations are involved. We set out to study ES outsourcing in a large Scandinavian high-tech organization, SCANDI, a case setting with many inter-organizational partners, trying to answer...

Enterprise systems management (ESM) and business process management (BPM), although highly correlated, have evolved as alternative approaches to operational transformation. As a result, companies struggle to find the right balance when prioritising technology and processes as change drivers. The purpose of this paper is to propose a direction towar...

Virtual projects are becoming common with global competition, market development, and not least the financial crisis forcing organizations to reduce their costs drastically. Organizations therefore have to place high importance on ways to carry out virtual projects and consider appropriate practices for performing these projects. This paper compare...

Projects are everywhere across different sectors, industries and countries. Project management is no longer a sub-discipline of engineering and other rather technical disciplines, but is also used for many other purposes. Even though practice has changed dramatically over the years, the models and methodologies for project management have been fair...

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) can be classified into three generations, starting with the application-centric, moving on to the data-centric and then to contemporary thinking, which can be described as process-centric. The overall theme of CONFENIS 2011 was to re-conceptualize EIS. One way of re-conceptualizing is to start with a blank sheet...

Outsourcing is now a feasible means for enterprise systems ES cost savings, but does however increase the complexity of coordination substantially when many organizations are involved. We set out to study ES outsourcing in a large Scandinavian high-tech organization, SCANDI, a case setting with many inter-organizational partners, trying to answer t...

The chapter reports on an action research study with the aim to design a high level planning process in distributed and co-located software projects based on agile methods. The main contributions are the insight that high level planning process is highly integrated with other project disciplines and specific steps has to be taken to apply the proce...

Decommissioning of systems is a vastly overlooked and oversimplified process in IS research and the practices leading to painless abandonment of systems are not well understood. To better understand this process we investigate a case where a large organization implemented a new enterprise systems (ES) replacing an older one. We use institutional th...

Institutional theory has proven to be a central analytical perspective for investigating the role of social and historical structures of information systems (IS) implementation. However, it does not explicitly account for how organisational actors make sense of and enact technologies in their local context. We address this limitation by exploring t...

This paper sets out to examine the use of institutional theory as a conceptually rich lens to study social issues of enterprise systems (ES) research. More precisely, the purpose is to categorize current ES research using institutional theory to develop a conceptual model that advances ES research. Key institutional features are presented such as i...

This conceptual paper is based on an informal literature review of enterprise systems (ES), and describes two contrasting perspectives of ES: The first is "the managerial or technical understanding of ES" focusing on economic efficiency and improved financial performance where ES are broadly viewed as transformative technologies with universal logi...

Institutional theory has proven to be a central analytical perspective for investigating the role of larger social and historical structures of Information System (IS) adaptation. However, it does not explicitly account for how organizational actors make sense of and enact IS in their local context. We address this limitation by showing how sensema...