Limitations and future research - A project management office as a project organization’s strat

6 Conclusions

6.5 Limitations and future research

The common language between an interviewer (the author) and interviewees is likely to increase internal validity and reliability as one of the critical quality elements of constructivist research. For instance, a common language enabled objective discussion with the senior business executives, the PMOs, and project professionals during the research process.

However, my previous knowledge on the subject may have unintentionally led to biased results.

Interviewees may have aligned the answers with my opinions, resulting in poor objectivity. To avoid this challenge, this dissertation applied a constructivist approach and mixed-methods research that included data triangulation. The author intentionally distanced himself from the evaluation practices and evaluated the adapted constructs with project experts.

Conclusions 61

Furthermore, the small sample size may have had a negative effect on the generalizability and replicability of the results, which is a challenge of every mixed methods research project that focuses on abstract phenomena such as value contributions among PMO roles.

To explain these phenomena, the PMO was anchored into the premises of the Contingency Theory of organizations, strategizing process and fitness, as well as the Dynamic Capability View. Theoretical anchoring and testing improved construct validity, reliability, and overall rationales for this dissertation. For a future research, a strategy as practice (SAP) research area, practicing and structuration theories can provide the potential mainland for future PMO studies as strategizing comprises those actions and interactions of multiple actors and the situated practices.

X 63

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Publication I

Ville Otra-Aho

Selecting Success Criteria for the Customer Solution Projects

Reprinted with permission from

International Journal of Information Technology Project Management Vol. 9, No.4, 2018

ABSTRACT

Project firms are increasingly integrating tangible products and intangible services when building customer solutions aiming to increase firms’ competitiveness. On the other hand, the efficient customer solutions increase firms’ competitiveness only when the solution projects can utilize all of its performance potential. Efficient integration requires both the product and service oriented multi-dimensional success criteria and the context-specific performance measures. The purpose of this Publication is to evaluate the project professional’s ability to create and prioritize the multidimensional success criteria for the customer solution projects.

The results indicate that the project professionals are capable of prioritizing the success criteria for the customer solution projects. Conversely, the critical customer specific success criteria are not effectively used in the customer solution projects.

Keywords: Project Management, Customer Solution Projects, Success Criteria Selection SERVQUAL, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Project performance

INTRODUCTION

Firms are increasingly servicizing, as adding services components to the product offerings and creating customer solutions (Baines, Lightfoot, Peppard, Johnson, Tiwari, Shehab, & Swink, 2009). Adding services has a positive impact on the project firms such as increasing project delivery performance and improving the project firms' competitiveness (Artto, Wikström, Hellström, & Kujala, 2008). On the other hand, adding services to the projects and products increases project complexity and requires efficient methods to manage the integration from a performance perspective.

Performance has been characterized as a phenomenon including operational profitability, productivity, and the other non-cost factors (Tangen, 2004). Moreover, performance aligns with the multiple organization dimensions such as operational (e.g., Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1991; Westerfeld, 2003) and strategic dimensions (e.g., Norton & Kaplan, 1992) which make it hard to commensurate and measure. Performance can be characterized as a phenomenon or a relative outcome of a measurement process which operationalize different performance dimensions. For example, to create successful customer solutions firms are required to manage customer interaction and align the customer and the project firm value creation processes in a specific context (Vandermerwe & Rada, 1988).

Moreover, while projects shareholders’ interests and projects' operational environments differ significantly from each other (e.g., Turner & Cochrane, 1993) the generic frameworks such as the service quality framework (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1991) and the diverse project success criteria and measures (e.g., Basten, Joosten, & Mellis, 2011; Keegan, Eiler, & Jones, 1989; Turner & Zolin, 2012; Wateridge, 1995; Zwikael & Globerson, 2006) are required to fit tightly into a context.

The previous project business and customer solution grounded research has shifted focus from a tangible product and delivery efficiency to creating and measuring value and success created with the project product during the project process (e.g., Ahola, Laitinen, Kujala, & Wikström, 2008; Brady, Davies, & Gann, 2005; Kujala, Kujala, Turkulainen, Artto, Aaltonen, & Wikström, 2011; Kujala, Ahola, & Huikuri, 2013; Winter & Szczepanek, 2008).

At the same time, the operational project success criteria and performance measures have remained grounded mostly in the firm´s internal project processes and customers considered as opposite to the firm (Müller & Jugdev, 2012). Moreover, the researchers indicate that the success criteria and performance measures have remained generic or loosely interconnected to operations (e.g., Neely, Mills, Platts, Richars, Gregory, Bourne, & Kennerley 2000).

Addressing this gap and this paper position the following research question:

How can the project firms integrate the product-based and the service-based success criteria into a coherent set of the multidimensional success measures for the customer solution projects?

Rather than just introducing a new performance framework and a vast number of new performance measures, this interdisciplinary research adopts a known framework, a simple method and standard set of criteria which focus on the supplier – customer interaction context.

The findings of this research indicate that the project professionals can select and prioritize the project and service-based success criteria in the customer solution context using Service quality (SERVQUAL) framework and analytic hierarchy process method (AHP). The findings also indicate that that the project organizations and project professional are not actively using the customer-centric success criteria in the customer solution project deliveries. This paper is organized into the three sections. The first section introduces customer solutions projects from

the both product and service perspectives. During the section, the relevant project and service-based success criteria for the customer solution projects were reviewed and the SERVQUAL framework was adapted. In the second section, the interviewees convert the multidimensional success criteria into the performance measures and evaluate the seven customer solution projects using the AHP method. Finally, the study closes with concluding remarks and future research avenues.

LITERATURE REVIEW Customer Solution Projects

Projects produce a unique product with a novel project process (Turner & Keegan, 1999) in the uncertain project operational environment (e.g., Turner & Müller, 2003). The actuality of successful project can be defined as “doing thigs right” measured with the project efficiency criteria and “doing right things” measured with the project effectiveness criteria (Crawford &

Bryce, 2003). Moreover, the complex products, such as customer solutions in a turbulent project environment require special attention of management and control to be able to utilize the whole project performance.

The unique project products such as solutions can be divided into a continuum between tangible good led deliveries and intangible service led deliveries (e.g., Oliva & Kallenberg, 2003) depending on the dominance of tangible or intangible components in the product. On the other hand, drawing a line between product or service dominance in a solution is difficult without understanding a role of both product and service also in a delivery process. For example, the complex products and systems (CoPS) are characterized as the high-technology, capital-intensive tangible products (Davies & Brady, 2000), such as the radio base stations, including several interconnected and tailored product components (e.g., Hobday, 2000). In the CoPS deliveries, a role of service rather acts as a platform for the engineering product delivery.

In the other end of the product service continuum is the service led customer products such as service offerings (e.g., Edvarsson, 1997) in which the core intangible service is structured to meet the primary customer needs and the supplementary intangible and tangible products to fulfill the customer's secondary needs. The both primary and secondary needs of the offerings are associated with customer value creation processes (e.g., Grönroos & Gummerus, 2014) and the tangible product act as a platform for the delivering the intangible service products. The service offerings can be categorized into four main categories according to a role of service in a product and delivery process as 1) component services (for example elevator maintenance service), 2) semi-manufactured services (for example outsourced operations supporting the core operations or product for example elevator assembly service), 3) instrumental services (for example elevator assembly and maintenance related training services), and 4) consumable services (for example elevator cleaning services) (Wynstra, Axelsson, & Van Der Valk, 2006).

In the component service delivery process, performance is a balance between quantity and quality aspects of the production process. On the other hand, the semi-manufactured service emphasizes the customer implementation phase and configuring the service as part of the customer internal value creation processes. Furthermore, the instrumental services itself support and align with the customer's core value creation processes, while the role of the consumable service is to support the core customer processes. The common denominator for the service service-dominant project deliveries and service performance is the service firm's ability to integrate the product into the customer value creation processes during project delivery process (Wynstra et al., 2006).

The both complex products and service offerings have similar characteristics such as a configurable product structure which adapt to customer environment. For example, Kujala et al. (2013) concretize the customer solutions strcuture as a “union” including a core project

delivery of the intangible or tangible product surrounded by the additional tangible and intangible product layers. This modular approach has similarities with the approach of Oliva and Kallenberg (2003) in which the both tangible and intangible products supplement the core solution as add-ons. As such, the supplementary layers of the core solution can be categorized as the facilitating and supporting products depending on the additional product role in relation to the core delivery product (Kujala et al., 2013). In the modular product structure, the facilitating products are used as a platform for delivering the core product functionalities and the supporting products are used to deliver additional functionalities which enable to create extra value for the core product delivery. This paper follows this “union” structure approach to the customer solution projects (e.g., Kujala et al., 2013; Oliva & Kallenberg, 2003) and defines broadly the customer solutions projects as the customer specific tangible and intangible solutions delivered with the unique customer-centered project process, and in which both product and process create value for the firm and customer.

In document A project management office as a project organization’s strategizing tool (sivua 61-181)