Successful management of different kind of changes is the heartbeat of every project. In today’s complex world changes of project scope are more the rule than the exception. Controlling budget, time and content in a project is becoming increasingly important, while project flexibility is needed to react on changes. Our hypothesis is that unplanned, unexpected changes commonly occurring in projects with novelty has negative outcome on project outcomes. To investigate this, we cluster influential factors pushing the boundaries from exploitational to explorational project based on Shenhars (1998) research in innovation, complexity and newness. This study concentrates on definitions of innovation, complexity and newness in the first step, before developing subcategories and testing these factors regarding their influence on project success.

To test our hypothesis, we developed and executed a survey with Norwegian manufacturing companies. The participants were asked about 25 factors belonging to innovation, complexity and newness, and their perceived impact on project success. The survey was performed in workshops with the selected companies during July 2019. The definition of the terms was initially distributed to the participants to secure a common understanding. The statements Q1-Q7 quantify the level of *innovation*, the ones Q8-Q15 are about the impact of *complexity*, and the ones Q16- Q25 cover the field donated *newness*. An important contribution of our work was to develop the representative statements for each area. We proceeded in three steps to find them.

Step 1: use a suitable framework based on current literature to development concrete topics for the survey for each considered area (innovation, complexity, newness);

Step 2: validate each of the chosen statements with senior program managers, leading development engineers and experienced professors to adapt to real-world situations and problems;

Step 3: redefine the topics with input from both academia as well as industry and merge them to the final 25 statements;

The attendees completed the surveys using a 7-point Likert scale. The average values was calculated for the samples 'successful'.

Analysis shows a clearly positive correlation between successful project outcome and innovation. Especially the topics ‘changing way of working’ (Q6), ‘innovative change in supply chain’ (Q7) and ‘innovations in productions processes’ (Q2) were recognised  to have a positive influence on project success. Complexity was rated less positive than innovation regarding project success. Particularly to ‘fulfil a number of various targets’ (Q8) and ‘working together with different cultures’ (Q15) were rated positively against project success. On the other hand, there was a clear negative correlation between successful project outcome and newness. Especially ‘late changes in supplier base due to cost reasons’ (Q20), ‘changes in production setups due to product deviations’ (Q24) and ‘unexpected changes in organization or business strategy of the company’ (Q25) were rated as particularly harmful to project success. The attendees perceived the 7 questions covering innovation to have a strongly positive impact on the success of a project. The 8 questions covering complexity was rated as less positive with an average difference of 0.89 points. Newness, showing a correlation of -0,29, was recognized to have an overall negative impact on the success of projects. Success in development projects seems to require a stable and repeatable development environment. However, innovations and newness are both intentional and unintentional parts of the daily business in real-world projects, which needs to be managed. This means that companies dealing with exploitational type PD projects need to enable their PD teams to deal successfully with changes. Active risk management is needed to identify threats and opportunities that can influence project success, and to take action to utilise opportunities and manage threats. The main practical implication of the study is new insights to addressing these key issues.

 


Influence of Complexity, Innovation, Newness and Learning on Project Success in New Development Projects: A Study in Manufacturing Industry

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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