Projects + Management = The Project-Management Blog

Jolivet, F.; Navarre, C.: Large-scale projects, self-organizing and meta-rules: towards new forms of management; in: International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 14 (1996), No. 5, pp. 265-271.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0263-7863(96)84509-1

This is one of the few articles dealing with the specifics of large-scale projects. Jolivet & Navarre argue that the traditional approach of pyramidal organisation, centralised control, standardisation of procedures, and reactive management are not suited to successfully execute a large-scale project.

Instead the authors recommend a new approach of autonomy, subsidiarity, and cellular division which is characterized by

• Maximal individualisation
• Differentiation of management styles and use of central meta-rules
• Use of autonomous, self-organising teams
• Central performance audits

They argue that large scale projects can regain speed if decision power is shifted to people on the ground and is not centrally bundled which creates a bottleneck around the central management team.  All  (sub)-projects in their case study are conducted along a specific and limited set of 12 principles which are all correlated with project success. In all other areas small scale teams have full decisional autonomy.

This entry was posted on Montag, August 11th, 2008 at 18:09 and is filed under Complexity, Program Management, Temporary organisation, Megaprojects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.