Projects can be seen as
the crucial building blocks whereby organizations execute and implement their
short, and long-term strategic vision. Projects are thought to solve problems,
drive change, satisfy unique needs, add value, or exploit opportunities, just
to name a few. In order to successful deliver projects, project management
tools and techniques are applied throughout a project´s lifecycle, essentially
to efficiently and in a timely manner, identify and manage project risks.
However, according to latest reviewed literature, projects keep failing at an
impressive rate. Although research in the project management field argues that
such failure rate is due to a huge variety of reasons, it highlights particular
importance to a still underexplored and not quite well understood (regarding
how it emerges and evolves) risk type, that may lead projects to failure. This
risk type, called as corporate behavioral risks, usually emerge, and evolve as
organizations work together across a finite period of time (for example, across
a project lifecycle) to deliver projects, and is characterized by the mix of countless
formal and informal dynamic interactions between the different elements that
constitute the different organizations. Understanding the extent to which such corporate
behavior influences project´s outcomes, is a breakthrough of high importance
that positively impacts two dimensions; first, enables organizations that
deliver projects (but not only), to increase the chances of project success,
which in turn is a driver of sustainable business, because it allows the
development and implementation of effective, and timely corrective measures to
project´s tasks and activities, and second, it contributes to the scientific
community (on the organizations field), to generate valuable and actionable new
knowledge regarding the emergence and evolution of such cooperative risks,
which can lead to the development of new theories and approaches on how to
manage them. In this work, we propose a heuristic model to efficiently identify
and analyze how corporate behavioral risks may influence project´s outcomes.
The proposed model in this work, lays its foundations on four fundamental
fields ((1) project management, (2) risk management, (3) corporate behavior,
and (4) social network analysis), and will quantitatively measure four critical
project social networks ((1) communication, (2) problem-solving, (3) advice,
and (4) trust) that usually emerge as projects are being delivered, by applying
the theory of social network analysis (SNA), more concretely, SNA centrality
metrics. The proposed model in this work is supported with a case study to
illustrate its implementation across a project lifecycle, and how organizations
can benefit from its application.
A Method of Partner Selection for Knowledge Collaboration Teams using Weighted Social Network Analysis
