Complex Project Development Processes
Infrastructure projects are characterized by lengthy and disorderly front-end periods, often degenerating into conflicts and protests, and resulting in projects plagued by cost overruns, execution delays, operating difficulties and lower-than-expected benefits. Most of these problems can be traced back to the way participants conducted project development activities. These activities transform an initial, often vague idea into detailed technical, execution and organization plans. At the same time, project sponsors obtain regulatory approvals and build a network of partners and contractors committed to design, build and operate the project, as well as to provide resources, authority and legitimacy for subsequent activities.
The aim of this study is to advance our understanding of project development as an unfolding nexus of social, economic, technical and material processes. We hope to grasp how project complexity, in particular the interactions between various processes, hampers development activities, and how these, in turn influence subsequent project execution and exploitation. Eventually, we hope to use these insights to make project development practices more effective and less conflictual.
Conceptual framework
Figure 1 presents, in a simplified form, the conceptual framework of our research. We consider a project as a network of actors, and project development processes as a continuous effort to create, maintain and recreate connections between these actors. These connections are built from inputs that combine representational aspects, such as knowledge, models, norms and legitimate practices, and volitional aspects, such as needs, interests as well as power and resources derived from the socioeconomic and material context of the project. Development activities integrate and transform these inputs to produce a series of outputs that essentially consist of relations between participants. These outputs also combine, on the one hand, representational aspects, for example plans, drawings and other documents that guide and orient participants relative to the project and to each other. On the other hand, volitional aspects also create a network of relations, such as mutual commitments and action constraints, most of which are embedded in the organization and the contractual arrangements of the project. This web of multiplex connections between participants enables and shapes subsequent project execution activities.
This distinction between representation and volition allows our conceptual framework to account for all relevant forces and conditions that influence development processes, the key activity strands that compose these processes, and the multifaceted relations that result from them. For example, our representational inputs include generic institutional, governance, organizational and technical models, along with cultural norms, legitimate practices and tacit assumptions. In turn, volitional inputs include the interests of concrete actors, their power and authority distribution as well as constraints and forces stemming from surrounding technical systems and material conditions. By stressing these heterogeneous influences and the continually shifting network of relations between actors, we hope to uncover hidden interactions that preclude convergence toward a final project form, and account for the observed temporal patterns of development, with their irregularities, delayed effects and unexpected consequences.
The main focus of our research is on development processes, namely on the concrete actions and activities that participants and stakeholders conduct. The central part of Figure 1 presents the main categories of activities that we decided to investigate. Categories on the left side of the figure mainly consist of input processing . For example, in the lower left quadrant, attracting and influencing activities attempt to extend the network of participants, backers and supporters of the project, while keeping at bay opponents and opportunists. Justifying and legitimating activities integrate various representational inputs in order to build a narrative that justifies sponsors’ intention to realize the project in a particular way.
Activities on the right side of Figure 1 are concerned with elaborating relational outputs. Thus, designing and planning activities prepare representations that project into the future the form of the project and the activities expected for its execution. With respect to designing and planning we want to understand, among others, how existing knowledge and models are used with the purpose of shaping expected outputs, but also how results enable other activities, such as attracting participants and convincing stakeholders, delimiting resource commitments and risks etc. In turn, organizing and contracting activities designate the efforts to regularize a dissonant, often contradictory set of needs and interests, in order to channel energies into a flow of execution activities for which actors are aware of responsibilities and risks, have enough resources when they need them, and have few occasions for aberrant, opportunistic and unlawful actions. We want to learn how these activities achieve a stable intertwining of interests around the project and how this arrangement impacts other volitional inputs, for example, by triggering contestations or attracting new actors.
The circular arrows in the central part of Figure 1 are not intended to suggest that development activities follow a regular sequence, but rather the fact that they constitute a highly iterative and perhaps irregular nexus of processes. We are interested in following the debates, controversies and conflicts that occur during these activities, the strategies, including rhetorical ones, which actors employ to promote their interests, and to build coalitions of actors that can advance the project. We aim to trace the evolution of projective representations, including the changes that result from failing to agree, discovering errors, learning about the unanticipated project aspects and interactions, improvising and tinkering, and so on. We do not expect to necessarily see a process driven by a small group of actors, but a series of distributed and perhaps uncoordinated activity strands. We aim to trace the separate and intersecting evolution of these strands. We hope that a detailed characterization of these diverse actions and events and of their sequence in time will allow us to uncover a series of overall development patterns as well as the logics that account for the emergence and distinctive nature of these patterns.
Methods
In order to achieve these goals, our research team will perform 12 longitudinal case studies of two kinds of projects: airports and land transportation infrastructure. We will conduct studies in North America, Europe and Asia, to ensure variety in institutional, political and cultural conditions. Data collection will rely on interviews, on-site observation, and documents. The case studies will be performed, as much as possible, in real time. To this effect, we intend to conduct on-site data collection twice for each project. During the first visit, researchers will interview between 10 and 15 participants and stakeholders, and will observe meetings and other development activities. A follow up visit will occur more than one year later and will involve a comparable number of interviews and observations, in order to understand the changes that occurred in the meantime and to understand how the project deviated from the path that was anticipated during the initial visit. Because development processes for major projects are typically longer than the duration of our data collection activities, we will select projects that are in different phases of the development process, some in earlier stages, and others, in more advanced ones.
Interviews will be recorded and then interview transcripts, along with observation notes and collected documents will be analyzed by relying on a combination of approaches:
- writing narrative case reports to build a global characterization of relevant processes, and of their context, inputs and relational outputs;
- analyzing the contents of interviews in order to uncover categories of relations, events and influences;
- tracing the sequence of events to detect and characterize intra-project development patterns;
- making inter-project comparisons in order to identify typical patterns and necessary conditions and mechanisms that create them.
Knowledge mobilization and participant benefits
All participants will receive a detailed case report on their respective project, which will include an assessment of the effectiveness of the development practices that were used. Moreover, participants will receive advance access to all research results.
In addition to diffusing our results through publications and presentations to the academic community we plan a stream of activities that would rapidly transfer the emerging knowledge towards practitioners, by using the following vehicles:
- three government-industry-researchers forums involving industrial partners and participants;
- the current website, designed for practitioners, which we hope to use for cultivating a community of practice on project development practices
- public seminars in collaboration with professional associations such as PMI-Montreal.
