Designing multi-project organizations: future research directions

It is a fact that in recent years more and more organizations have been managed through projects. Back in 1995, Midler claimed that ‘‘Nowadays, it is hard to imagine an organization that is not engaged in some kind of project activity. Over the past decade, organizations have been turning from operations to project management as part of their competitive advantage strategy''. It is not surprisingly then that organizational researchers have been devoting growing attention to this phenomenon, previously studied mainly with a practical tool-oriented mind frame. Theoretical reflections have hence begun to be abundant, and also their limitations in terms of actual understanding of the underlying organizational phenomena were put forward and discussed. In the wide debate, propelled by scholars endowed with heterogeneous background disciplines, few contributions have addressed the peculiarities, in terms of organizational design, of multi-project organizations. Such organizations rely on a set of many projects at one time, in which resources are allocated among projects. In these settings, considering each project in isolation could be misleading. In fact, research has been dominated by a reductionist perspective, whose major concern relied in structures and dynamics of individual projects, discussed mainly from project manager's perspective. Relationships with internal organizational context has been neglected for long. This talk will focus on organizational design issues of multi-project organizations, identifying in particular future research directions on how organizational control mechanisms are deployed and with the implications of different choices of such control mechanisms.