Purpose: The premise of this paper is that tension exists among participants and parties engaged in projects. The uniqueness of development virtually assures this. The purpose of this paper is to propose that tension is a product of the precursors of complexity, uncertainty and equivocality,...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at the underlying unit cost considerations in project conduct at the firm level and an established business unit concept is extended to multi‐project organizations. The approach and background are described along with apparent implications....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how individuals in projects learn from crises. Design/methodology/approach – The multiple‐case protocol described by Yin and his six sources of evidence were utilized. Observations were contemporaneous and somewhere between direct and...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the sequential nature that enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects tend to take and to describe how the buyer typically behaves concerning the need for control and learning in and in‐between ERP projects. Design/methodology/approach –...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the content, contributions and subsequent developments of the seminal paper by Barry Boehm, “A spiral model of software development and enhancement” written in 1988. The relationships of this paper to software development, agile projects,...

Purpose – This research note puts the role of transition back in the center of the temporary organization and lends to understanding the temporary organization as a transitory unit within the permanent organization. The purpose is to reactivate theory development within this field of research...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the role of requirement managers in new product development projects. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a case study of an industrial platform project. Sixty-eight persons were interviewed and project...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze service management practices within a project management context. Design/methodology/approach – This research supporting conceptual developments was both exploratory and qualitative in nature and utilized an in-depth case study...