BUS603: Managing People

The company's competitiveness partly depends on the success of its projects. Project success is the closure of a project within scope, time, cost, quality, resources, and risk as agreed between project managers and top management. The first studies about project success considered the 'iron triangle', which includes factors related to project conclusion on time, on budget, and according to quality specifications as a measure of project success. In the course of time, people realized that this issue was far more complex; these factors were not enough to establish the success of a project.

Therefore, the creation of a new assessment mode that would include more than a traditional view to project success was considered relevant. In this sense, Müller et al. emphasized the importance of managing people in projects by suggesting a framework for understanding the interaction between person-centered leadership and team-centered leadership by individuals in the project team. Martinsuo & Hoverfält suggested that the subject of project management should analyze inter-organizational aspects of change programs, considering the needs of different stakeholders.

A number of researchers have identified important factors in project success. However, there is no consensus among researchers regarding which factors influence project success. Several studies have highlighted the organizational factors in the field of project management and the importance of these factors for the success of projects. Those organizational factors can be grouped into the following dimensions: top management support, communication, change management, organizational culture, and training.

Despite the prominence of these organizational factors in project management, and especially the importance of soft organizational factors in project success, few studies have addressed the integrated relationships among this set of factors and the measurement of success. That is, to the best of our knowledge there is no conceptual model that considers these organizational constructs in an integrated way to analyze the performance in projects. Previous work usually focus on only one of the dimensions selected in this study. For example, Wu et al. focused on the effects of communication-conflict interaction on the success of projects. Davis analyzed the relationship between project success and stakeholders, and Martens et al. verify the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and project success.

In view of these gaps, in addition to the lack of integrated literature with respect to this subject, the objective of this article is to address the influence of organizational factors on project success in automotive companies that operate in an emerging economy (Brazil). In this sense, this research aims to answer the following research question: What are the most important organizational factors for project success?

Hannevik et al. observed that organizational factors related to project success change according to different sectors. The context of the automotive sector was chosen because it is a diffuser sector for managerial innovation. The automotive industry has always been influential for management innovation - considers "Fordism", "Sloanism", and "Toyota Production System". Furthermore, the automotive industry is relevant in the country under study; Brazil has 31 assemblers, 65 auto parts, and a production capacity of 4.4 million vehicles per year, corresponding to 20.4% of the manufacturing industry's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

In this context, the Brazilian government has been aiming to encourage the growth and competitiveness of the automotive sector in Brazil in the past years; Inovar-Auto program was one of these relatively recent initiatives. Moreover, Brazil is one of the main markets among the emerging countries and, consequently, large American, European, and Asian firms (assemblers and suppliers) have invested in the country since the 1990s. Although the sector is usually a follower of the headquarters new product development projects, local design changes are usually necessary to adapt to situations such as the country's traffic and road conditions, consumer preferences, and market purchasing power, among others. The R&D effort in Brazil for the development of flex fuel technology (capable of using gasoline and ethanol at the same time) is an example of project efforts to meet local demands. For those reasons, it is relevant the study of project management and especially as organizational factors (soft skills competencies) impact on performance, specifically focused on the automotive sector in the country.

The next section defines the theoretical aspects investigated in addition to the hypotheses used for the field work. Section 3 describes the research design, followed by the results obtained from the survey responses in section 4 and discussion in section 5. The last section (6) draws the conclusions and limitations and outlines future research.

Source: Izabela Santos, Gladys Barriga, Daniel Jugend, Paulo Cauchick-Miguel, https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-65132019000100213
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.