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REVISITING SHENHAR AND DVIR’S DIAMOND MODEL: DO WE NEED AN UPGRADE?
Abstract
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 free to capture a broad spectrum of projects. However, the model was built on military and commercial market product projects primarily in the United States and Israel, calling into question the validity of the model in other settings. This study addresses this problem and seeks to evaluate the Diamond Model in different settings. The study uses a mixed-methods approach and evaluates data from 62 projects in 16 project-based organizations. The study points to several ways to upgrade the model, such as splitting the pace dimension into two dimensions: pace (time) and impact. The study contributes to a broader discussion of the categorization of projects.
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Investments in information technology are significant and seem to follow an ever-increasing trend in modern companies in general and in the LEGO Group specifically. Projects take up a substantial amount of the human and financial resources spent on IT – and for good reason: the project portfolio is one of the most important elements of strategy implementation in any organization. From this follows that IT projects should be immensely interesting from top management perspective since projects are extremely resource consuming and significantly affect the organization’s chances of survival. Failing in managing IT projects is potentially catastrophic while succeeding with IT projects can potentially ensure organizational prosperity. Based on this, it seems obvious that any organization would monitor IT project success very closely. However this is neither the case in the LEGO Group nor in general. Instead, organizations tend to take a very unstructured approach to evaluating IT projects. This in turn render impossible comparison of projects and aggregation of information on project success, and as a consequence it is very difficult to learn from the past and predict the future of new projects.
This PhD dissertation remedies this issue by conceptually defining the concepts of ‘success’ and ‘IT project’ and normatively create a framework by operationalizing the definitions allowing for cross-project comparison of success of an IT project to a reference class, which enables both learning from the past and prediction of the future. Two frameworks are defined generically and then tested in practice in the context of the LEGO Group; the Extended Diamond Approach (EDA) for characterizing projects and dividing them into reference classes, and the 4x5 Framework for evaluating success in a standardized manner which makes cross-project comparison possible. The dissertation contributes on a theoretical level by conceptualizing and operationalizing the two key concepts, on an empirical level by adding to the academic discussion of IT project success rates by providing insight from the LEGO Group, and finally practically by illustrating how the LEGO Group can utilize the frameworks in the processes of predicting and learning. Evaluation of success in IT projects is with the EDA and the 4x5 still difficult, un-tangible, costly, complicated, and done with reluctance, but the dissertation gives evidence to why and how the outcome of the evaluation makes it worth it in the end.
It is found in the study that the sample of IT projects studied is quite characteristic for an internal IT department functioning as support to the primary value chain in a production company: the projects are on average of low uncertainty but high urgency. The study showed that the organization takes a structured approach to evaluating success and is relatively successful compared to the results reported in academia in general, but the study also revealed areas for improvement. The most fundamental is, perhaps, that the link between the organization’s overall strategy and the projects is weak. The two frameworks were additionally used in combination to illustrate how it is possible to predict the likely success of new projects based on the sample as well as test hypotheses about the organization’s project management practice.
Project management is a complex activity and it involves, among other things, an attitude, style and philosophy. The main proposition of this article suggests that different projects must be approached by different managerial philosophies. The article presents a conceptual managerial classification of projects based on their technological uncertainty — specifically the newness and complexity of the technology involved. It classifies all projects into four types: lowtech, medium tech, high-tech and super high-tech, and then proceeds to describe the major differences among them.Special attention is then paid to the ‘higher’ technology types — high-tech and super high-tech projects — and to the attitudes and tools that are needed for managing them. Such projects, if well executed and successful, may help improve competitive advantage and commercial position. They involve however substantial risk and high probability of failure. Several examples of super high-tech projects carried out in the past are described, and their management style discussed in light of the classification presented here. These examples include the SR-71 ‘Blackbird’ aircraft, the ‘Apollo’ moon-landing program, Data General's ‘Eagle’ computer and NASA's program of developing the Space Shuttle.
When important projects fail, the investigation is often focused on the engineering and technical reasons for the failure. That was the case in NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) that was lost in space after completing its nine-month journey to Mars. Yet, in many cases the root cause of the failure is not technical, but managerial. Often the problem is rooted in management’s failure to select the right approach to the specific project. The objective of this paper is to enrich our understanding of project failure due to managerial reasons by utilizing different contingency theory frameworks for a retrospective look at unsuccessful projects and perhaps more important, potential prevention of future failures. The evolving field of project management contingency theory provides an opportunity at this time to re-examine the concept of fit between project characteristics and project management, and offer deeper insights on why projects fail. After outlining several existing contingency studies, we use three distinct frameworks for analyzing the MCO project. These frameworks include Henderson and Clark’s categorization of change and innovation, Shenhar and Dvir’s NTCP diamond framework, and Pich, Loch, and De Meyer’s strategies for managing uncertainty. While each framework provides a different perspective, collectively, they demonstrate that in the MCO program, the choices made by managers, or more accurately, the constraints imposed on them under the policy of ‘better, faster, cheaper’, led the program to its inevitable failure. This paper shows that project management contingency theory can indeed provide new insights for a deeper understanding of project failure. Furthermore, it suggests implications for a richer upfront analysis of a project’s unique characteristics of uncertainty and risk, as well as additional directions of research. Such research may help establish new and different conceptions on project success and failure beyond the traditional success factors, and subsequently develop more refined contingency frameworks. The results of such research may enable future project managers to rely less on heuristics and possibly lead to a new application of “project management design.”
A traditional categorization of innovation as either incremental or radical has often been mentioned in the theoretical literature of innovation. A similar distinction has not become standard, however, in the project management literature and many publications on the management of projects tend to assume that all projects are fundamentally similar. In reality, however, projects exhibit considerable variation, and their specific management styles seem anything but universal. As a step towards the development of a project management theory, we present here a two-dimensional typology to define the wide spectrum of today's projects and their various management styles. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods and two data sets, we identify a set of ‘ideal types’ and real-world variants of these types. We show that the framework of this research can be subjected to quantitative modeling and rigorous empirical testing, and that it meets most of the criteria of a developed typological theory. Furthermore, such theory will particularly be useful in predicting the dependent variable — i.e. project effectiveness.
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 project benefits are attained, and it analyzes why some projects were able to achieve benefits faster than others. The initiative functions as a major social experiment, where the same project methodology was implemented in several Danish project-based organizations. We analyze five of these organizations. We identified reasons for the differences and grouped them in a conceptual model: the ‘house of time to impact’ with three areas: valuing speed, owning speed and entraining speed in the organization. The paper's contribution is the bridge between the literatures on benefit and time management, bringing two pressing issues together. The contribution to practice lies in the considerations and stories of other organizations attempting to reconcile the increasing need for effectiveness
Although ordering and classification schemes play a crucial role in the project management field, classification as a topic of study has been undervalued in the literature. Accordingly, there is a semantic confusion and lack of uniformity about the definitions and theoretical implications of two commonly used terms in project management: classification and typology. We argue that this issue hinders project management field from developing middle-range theories and flourishing theoretically compared to other fields of research.
Mixed methods research is increasingly being used in business and management disciplines, in spite of positivist traditions. The aim of the study is twofold: (1) to examine the types of mixed methods approaches being used, and (2) to determine the quality of the reporting of mixed methods studies published in the field of project management. A retrospective content analysis of articles from three ranked project management journals was undertaken for a sample period of 2004 to 2010. Our findings suggest the field of project management is in need of capacity building in relation to the good reporting of mixed methods studies.
The classical literature has often used a low-high distinction between innovations as either incremental or radical. As product innovation is becoming increasingly important to organizational growth, this dichotomized categorization is probably too shy in capturing the diversity of existing trends. Similarly, the design literature has usually distinguished between the product as a whole and the product in its parts; however, here too, no clear hierarchy of products and their parts has evolved. In contrast to these simplistic models managers often emphasize the uniqueness of their product, finding most theoretical literature to be too general and conceptually ineffective. As part of our on-going research on product development and project management, and based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we use in this paper a two dimensional new taxonomy for the classification of products and innovations. In this framework, we classify innovations according to their initial level of technological uncertainty and products according to their level on a hierarchical ladder of systems and subsystems. This morphological typology exhibits the existence of substantial differences among product characteristics of various kinds and provides a basis for additional theoretical development of product innovations.
Organizations achieve project success by both doing the right projects and doing projects right. This article examines the relationship between using project categorization systems and achieving project success. In doing so, it defines the purpose of project categorization systems and describes the challenges in developing such systems. It also reviews the field's literature on categorizing projects. It then outlines this study's six-step methodology to develop a holistic project categorization system, a process that involved a literature survey, focus group meetings, and Web-based questionnaire. It analyzes the findings from both the focus group and the questionnaire; it evaluates the three multi-dimensional categorization systems that the studied organizations most use. It also explains why organizations and researchers use categorization systems; it suggests how organizations can evaluate and redesign their categorization systems. © Copyright Project Management Institute, 2006
In this study we attempt to answer two questions: Is there a natural way to classify projects and what are the specific factors that influence the success of various kinds of projects? Perhaps one of the major barriers to understanding the reasons behind the success of a project has been the lack of specificity of constructs applied in project management studies. Many studies of project success factors have used a universalistic approach, assuming a basic similarity among projects. Instead of presenting an initial construct, we have employed a linear discriminant analysis methodology in order to classify projects. Our results suggest that project success factors are not universal for all projects. Different projects exhibit different sets of success factors, suggesting the need for a more contingent approach in project management theory and practice. In the analysis we use multivariate methods which have been proven to be powerful in many ways, for example, enabling the ranking of different managerial factors according to their influence on project success.
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