Tuomas Ahola

• Doctor of Science
• Professor (Associate) at Tampere University

Construction projects are inter‐organisational arrangements established to complete a large network of tasks characterised by complex interdependencies. This chapter focuses on the synchronisation of activities in inter‐organisational construction projects. Drawing on prior literature, it discusses the types of task interdependencies exhibited by s...

Multi-project management is typically considered an intra-organizational endeavor of implementing strategies through programs, portfolios, or lineages of change and development projects. Inter-organizational multi-project management takes place between project-based firms and other actors in project networks. The multi-project aspects in inter-orga...

Previous studies have paid scarce attention to engagement of various stakeholders in urban development projects. Therefore, this paper examines the possibilities of using digital tools to enhance stakeholder participation in urban development projects and how digital tools may be associated with value creation in the project planning phase. This qu...

The aim of this paper is to increase the current understanding of decision-making processes by considering the important elements of decision-making in a crisis during a megaproject. For this purpose, theInternational Islamabad Airport in Pakistan was examined. Data for this study were collected through interviews and archival data. A thematic anal...

Many firms simultaneously offer tailored projects and standardized equipment, creating a need to balance between two concurrent—and, at times, conflicting—sales logics. While it is known that larger firms may utilize several strategies to cope with sales logics’ conflicting demands, prior research has not adequately addressed how smaller firms addr...

Throughout the project life cycle, project-based firms (PBFs) rely on various agents, such as subcontractors and consultants, to carry out activities on their behalf. Although a considerable body of literature has discussed when and how PBFs use agents, little is known about the nature of the agency relationships between PBFs acting as principals a...

Previous research recognises the strategic role of vanguard projects in providing their initiators with avenues for entering new markets or gaining mastery over innovative technologies. This study makes a contribution to this research by focusing on the extent to which vanguard projects are under control and serve the interests of their principal i...

In 2018, the Construction giant Carillion went into compulsory liquidation costing the UK taxpayers an estimated £148m. According to our analysis performed on the case, the demise of Carillion was the result of accumulation of failures and normalisation of deviations from good practice. The purpose of this study is to better understand how deviance...

Earlier research has highlighted the dynamic nature of influencing in business networks, and shown that firms may vary considerably in their influence, defined as their potential to achieve changes in the activities, resources, or goals of other firms in the business network. There is, however, limited understanding of the specific means of influen...

In the current hyper-competitive economy, it is increasingly important to understand how firms can and should access and leverage external resources, such as customer knowledge or supply-chain partners' capabilities. In this paper, we report the results of bibliometric analyses on external resource management (ERM) research in nine representative j...

While earlier research stresses the integration of suppliers and their diverse technological capabilities as a core capability of systems integrator firms, research on ways in which this integration is achieved in practice remains scant and rarely considers the suppliers' perspective to integration. We analyse how ABB, a systems integrator, deliver...

Urban renewal projects involve several public and private stakeholders whose interaction during the project's early stage determines the scope of the project. Prior research has conveyed a somewhat ahistorical view of this early stage, based on the assumption that abundant design options are available to stakeholders. This study of a multi-stakehol...

The general question of how best to access and leverage resources that reside outside the boundaries of the focal firm has become increasingly important for companies during the last decennia, and scholars across management disciplines have responded with increasing research efforts. However, managers still seldom base their decisions on scientific...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding of the logic of business network formation among the co-located and external actors of a facility. Design/methodology/approach The research adopts a theory-building approach through developing propositions inductively from the empirical case study on four purposefully sampled modern se...

While the governance of Western megaprojects is indirectly influenced by governments through legislation and regulations, the Chinese state actively oversees and controls projects of societal importance. To provide clarity on the role of the state in Chinese megaprojects, we carried out a case study focusing on EXPO 2010 Shanghai. Our analysis reve...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to evaluate to which extent partnering practices observed in earlier research focussing on the construction industry are applied in offshore development drilling projects. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews earlier research on project partnering and the relationship-based procurement (RBP) taxonomy...

The development of business ecosystems in smart cities is currently hampered by the absence of established approaches for facilitating long-term value and sustainability. In our view, the underlying reason is the lack of collective action involving various organizations in the design process. Collective action for the good of the whole ecosystem do...

Because research focusing on sustainability in a project context is still nascent and fragmented, we carried out a systematic literature review covering all research published in five leading journals in the fields of project management and sustainable production prior to 2016. Our analysis revealed two distinct perspectives in the project sustaina...

Morris (2013) calls for value creation for project stakeholders using project outcomes. This is an attempt to link the front end of the system lifecycle – the project phase – to the back end, i.e. the operations phase. Little is however known about how value creation occurs through developing project outcomes which have the capacity to continue val...

Although there is an ever-increasing discussion on governance in recent project research, the concept of project governance and its main origins remains ambiguous. In this paper, we examine project governance literature and contrast it to general governance literature published outside the domain of project research. Our analysis revealed the exist...

In recent years, the linkages between project management and organization theory have become stronger. In an attempt to address this development, this paper analyzes the research on temporary and project-based organizing. It especially discusses the development associated with the EGOS sub-themes on project organizing and the potential avenues for...

Crowdsourcing has been attracting the attention of both academics and practitioners over recent years. The aim of this article is to contribute to the current body of knowledge on innovation in networked contexts by systematically analyzing various crowdsourcing configurations available to industrial firms. We first develop a categorization of crow...

Project-based firms concentrate on their core capabilities outsourcing non-core activities. As project contractors increasingly use external suppliers to complement their own capability base, the importance of supplier selection is emphasized. Supplier choices should rely on accurate knowledge of the suppliers' capabilities. We examine the literatu...

Project marketing research has shown that project-based firms (PBFs) can favorably differentiate themselves from their competitors by developing a strong functional position and a strong relational position in a specific market milieu. Combined, these two interrelated positions constitute the market position of a project-based firm, and inter-organ...

Project-based firms that have traditionally focused on product-centric project deliveries as their core business are increasingly complementing their deliveries with different types of service offerings to create customer specific solutions. Such deliveries frequently encompass the design and delivery of a fully operational system with additional c...

Purpose ‐ The purpose of this paper is to increase understanding on stakeholder influence in large projects, using nuclear power plant projects and a governmental stakeholder that influences them as the empirical example. The authors focus on examining the means used by the stakeholder to influence the projects. Design/methodology/approach ‐ This p...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the influence of the highly cited Organization Theory and Project Management on consequent project research and to highlight the key contributions of the book, how it has affected consequent project research and to identify areas that could be further explored in future research. Design/methodolog...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present practical difficulties in attempting to implement a partnering approach. Design/methodology/approach The paper comprises empirical evidence from case studies in Norway and Canada and an extensive literature review on partnering. Findings The authors identified a lack of shared understanding of key p...

This article aims at increasing the understanding of a specific type of stakeholder, namely governmental stakeholders who have significant influence over projects and base their influence on a regulative framework. Various parties in nuclear projects create their own interpretations of the framework. To understand why there are differences in these...

We analyze governance in two contemporary nuclear power plant projects: Olkiluoto 3 (Finland) and Flamanville 3 (France). We suggest that in the governance of large multi-firm projects, any of the prevalent governance approaches that rely on market, hierarchy, or hybrid forms, is not adequate as such. This paper opens up avenues towards a novel the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess whether performance measurement literature and as a result, practical applications, models and frameworks drawing from this literature are compatible with the central features of extended enterprises. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a bibliometric study that is supplemented with an e...

Research on project procurement management has centered on identifying the right suppliers and managing contracts to allocate risks and responsibilities. However, working with suppliers requires continuous integration activities from the buyer during project execution. This paper asks how buyers integrate their suppliers to the project organization...

This paper evaluates how turnkey project deliveries create value for their customers and how the purchasing strategy of the buyer affects value creation. Literature focusing on the distinguishing characteristics of turnkey projects and the different strategies available for purchasing them is reviewed. The concept of customer value is opened up and...

The main focus of the development of performance measurement systems (PMS) has been at the individual firm level. In this paper our focus is on which type of PMS would support the effective governance of project business networks that consist of multiple independent organizations. We propose that such a measurement system should consist of three in...

Providing value for the customer organization through the realization of its needs is often difficult in bespoke B2B project deliveries. Delivering value becomes even more challenging in situations, where the customer organization is unable to clearly explicate its needs or possesses latent needs that it is not even aware of. The latter may often b...

In this paper a framework for assessing the role and value of collecting information related to customer satisfaction is presented. This paper aims to reduce the gap in the knowledge concerning the value and role of customer satisfaction surveys by using a theoretical background of institutional theory and a cognitive model of organizational cultur...

Project networks are temporary inter-organizational networks that exist only for the duration of the pro-ject at hand. Despite this clear short term orientation, project networks tend to be partially recon-structed from one project to the next implying that there is a need for a long term view, as generally applied to other types of inter-organizat...