project managment

“By far the clearest pattern to emerge from all the practitioner inputs to the Network is the sheer complexity of projects and programmes across all sectors and at all levels, encompassing all manner of aspects including the multiplicity of stakeholders, and the different agenda, theories, practices and discourses operating at different levels within different interested groups, in the ever-changing flux of events. Set the classical lifecycle model as ‘the’ conceptual representation of project management – the textbook story in much of the literature – against this complexity and one soon appreciates the need to enrich the current conceptual base in relation to the developing practice. However, this is not to say that we should abandon the project lifecycle concept, but that it cannot be perceived as an all-encompassing representation of actual practice” (Winter et. al., 2006:641). It is the life cycle that differentiates the project organisational form over other forms of organisation. It has become a ubiquitous feature in the organisation, governance and management of projects and seeks to “represent” the predefined ‘actions’ necessary to transition a temporary organisation through controlled stage gates [boundaries] that measure the performance of the organisation in achieving its pre-defined goals (Söderlund, 2012; Morris, 2013; Lundin and Söderholm, 1995; Winch, 2010; Cooper, 2008). Yet as the above quotation suggests, the “reality” of many projects is much more complex. For the project to succeed, processes have to be iterative rather than sequential, information is inherently incomplete, and interdependent actions need to be coordinated between multiple participants to deal with the inherent uncertainty in such temporary endeavours. It could be argued therefore that the question then becomes – “How does the project manager bridge the gap between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’?” Brief Your task is to: “Critically discuss the life cycle as a basis for organising construction projects. How might organising in this way influence, distort or limit the way project practitioners think about the work of managing projects”. You are required to submit a fully referenced analytical paper of 3,000 words (excluding diagrams, figures and appendices). Examples of the Harvard referencing system