Towards agile projectmanagement and sopcial innovation in the construction industry

Towards agile projectmanagement and sopcial innovation in the construction industry

Everts, P.
Pries, F.
Nijhuis, S.

2011-06-20

Is project management developing towards a more human- or culture-oriented discipline? Two recent studies of the Dutch construction industry dealt with this issue, and the results of these studies have led to the conclusion that project management has developed in the opposite direction over the past few years, towards a 'harder', more instrumental approach with an increasing degree of specialisation. This approach works well with relatively simple and repetitive construction assignments, but project managers have noticed that their environment is rapidly increasing in complexity, and that this development limits their effectiveness. Some of these issues include the project's immediate surroundings (for projects in the city centre), legislation, regulations, procedures, the number of parties involved and judicial matters. The highly instrumental management style described above is not entirely suitable for these increasingly complex construction projects. We have observed that these new construction assignments require new management paradigms, but that the existing paradigms are tenacious in their hold on managers' thinking. The dominant form of management today is still technical, Taylorian and instrumental, and the dominant management culture is still task- and results-oriented. And yet there are some new developments in the field; lean or agile project management is clearly gaining momentum (or so the trade journals would have it seem). Within this ‘movement', the human aspect takes precedence over the structure. The average project manager may be satisfied with his competencies in general, but he gives himself a low score on the 'human' or 'social' side of project management. That is also the facet he would most like to improve about himself; especially with regard to skills such as negotiation, conflict management and leadership. There is a general trend towards social skills and away from purely technical expertise. This implies that project managers do not necessarily have to be engineers. The project manager of the future will definitely have to have people skills, but according to the project managers themselves, they still have a long way to go.

social innovation
agil project management
lean manufacturing
project management competencies
project management careers
paradigm shift

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Conference proceedings

conference paper

(c) 2011 Everts, P.; Pries, F.; Nijhuis, S.