Identify project corporate behavioral risks to support long-term
sustainable cooperative partnerships
Abstract
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.