Three Approaches to Projects

Networks, markets and psychology

Over the last decade a wide range of firms, organisations and industries have done or are in the process of restructuring themselves into some form of project-based production, following the lead of industries like construction, defence contracting, consulting and software that have traditionally used this form of organisation. At the same time the idea of what constitutes a project, using distinctions such as hard/soft, standardised/complex, mega/other and so on, has greatly expanded.

If project based production makes an important contribution to economic output that is a reason to study it, applying the methods and tools available. Given their multifaceted nature, it is obvious that ideas from many different fields of inquiry can be usefully applied to a range of issues found in projects and their characteristics. From economics there are interesting, relevant ideas that have come out of research across a diverse range of topics, including organisational and regulatory economics, property rights and contracts, governance and the principle-agent problem.

One way of harnessing this diversity is to use some of the characteristics of projects as a mechanism to group ideas together. The method used here is based on three broad approaches to understanding projects: projects as networks; projects as markets; and the psychology of projects:

1. Projects as networks covers fields including incomplete contracts and procurement, collusion and corruption, supply chains and sub-contracting, lean production, integrated teams and temporary organisations.
2. There is both a market for projects, and a project as a temporary market. Topics in this area include market characteristics and structure, market power and monopsony, auctions, bidding and information, Williamson’s fundamental transformation and asset specificity, and the ratchet effect in contracting and tendering.
3. The psychology of projects is based on recent developments in behavioural and experimental economics, in turn largely based on Kahnemann and Tversky’s work. Optimism bias, bounded rationality, incentives and Flyvberg’s delusion and deception view are examples. Underpinning these are the principal-agent problem, moral hazard and information asymmetry.

The fields ideas can be drawn from, that are outside the general project management literature, include management and organisation studies, psychology and behavioural economics, network analysis, lean production, legal and institutional research, and transaction cost economics. Economic theory can be applied to a range of issues found in the procurement and contracting of projects. Thus topics such as competitive and oligopolistic markets, auction theory, game theory and buyer and supplier power are relevant.

Another example is the economics of contracts. This field includes the role of incomplete contracts in self-enforcing relationships, the design of contracts, economic reasoning and the framing of contract law, and the contract as economic trade. It overlaps transaction cost economics and its application to property rights, agency theory, moral hazard and incentives. Other related topics are norms and the theory of the firm, allocating decision rights under liquidity constraints, authority and flexibility in contracts, and theories of contract regulation.

Many of these topics are also found in New Institutional Economics and work on the econometrics of contracts and markets. Because projects can be seen as a collection of contracts, written and unwritten, all this is clearly relevant. Another is the role of legal and regulatory structures in institutional economics, which emphasises the importance of a stable and predictable environment for entrepreneurs and businesses, here taken to be the clients and contractors involved in the business of delivering projects.

Where the study of how economic activity is organized fits is a grey area. It exists somewhere between micro and macroeconomics, and is primarily interested in imperfectly competitive markets, like those found in professional services. In these sorts of markets reputation, relationships, regulation and risk are major factors, all of which have been extensively studied.

What the diversity of ideas collected here provides is, in many ways, the overall context and framing of a project. In the same way as a business plan starts with a scan of the environment and a SWOT analysis, a project could have a context scan of the network, market and behavioural aspects. That’s not to say these factors are not all part of professional project planning. Obviously they are. Rather, the economic approach shifts the focus to questions about how best to design and structure a project from the point of view of organising production and fulfilling a social or economic role. It’s a functional approach that has a limited amount to say about managing production or specific PM decisions.

Projects as a Form of Production

How Production Theory Links to Project Management

In the previous post the idea that a project might be considered as an internal, temporary micro-market post was considered. An economic approach emphasises both the market for projects and projects as markets, and leads to a different approach to the analysis of projects. This different approach is quite well suited to the growing importance of the economic role of projects in the modern economy.

This post is concerned with another aspect of the economics of projects. The starting point is the idea of a project as a form of production, in the economic sense of combining a number of factors or resources to create output. Here, a representative firm selects the technology to use, organises and manages the production process to maximise efficiency and deliver output.

The economic theory of production that developed after the mid-18^th century was one of the main topics of classical political economy, firstly by the French physiocrats and their theory of agricultural rents and revenue, and later by Adam Smith and his analysis of the emerging factory system and profit. After the marginal revolution in economics in the second half of the 19^th century, production theory adopted Alfred Marshall’s framework of optimal allocation of scarce resources.

In the neoclassical theory of production, the starting point is a set of physical technological possibilities represented by a production function. The output of a production process is determined by the choice of technology and the flow of inputs used, the flows of capital services, labour services, and services from land, energy and raw materials. The task of a firm and its managers is to combine all these into a flow of output. 

This economic model of the firm as a black box, turning inputs into outputs, left many unanswered questions. Production processes vary widely within and between industries, and across regions and countries. Industry concentration and structure, and the regulation of market power, have become increasingly important. The data we get from the SIC (System of Industrial Classification) comes with many qualifications.

During the 20^th century answering these questions led to substantial new sub-fields in organisational and industry economics, investigating the boundaries and management of firms and industries. The single topic that attracted most theoretical research, however, was the choice and application of technology, as this had long been recognised as the driver of productivity and economic growth. Technology, in turn, is embodied in the capital used as a resource in the production process.

Many aspects of project management seem to be about resource allocation and delivery of a product (i.e. the project), the economic-orientated set of activities found in a production model. Although a wide range of management tools and methods are used in the course of a project, over the conception to handover cycle, the emphasis is actually on the way that the production process is managed. Thus the central role given to work breakdown structures, schedules and risk management. Further, the generic nature of project management supports this view. There is specific knowledge required for delivering construction projects, for example, but the broader set of PM skills are not industry specific and are about getting the various processes needed for a particular project right.

Also, many decisions in PM are often about the technology to be used. The substitutability of capital (how much equipment) and labour (how many workers) is apparent in any office and on every construction site. Economic theory gives technology the key role in determining efficiency, with management of the production process determining the level of efficiency. Thus a link between PM and the economic theory of production is found. These are both process-based and concerned with production technology choices.

Do Projects Have Internal Markets?

Projects As Micro-Markets

Can an individual project contain within it an internal, though temporary market? The definition of a market found in a standard economics text is “any arrangement in which the interaction of buyers and sellers determines the price and quantity of goods and services exchanged”. By this criteria the act of procurement, which is purchasing goods and services, is indeed a market transaction.

A market for a single project is created by the client as they go through the procurement process, regardless of the particular system or method of procurement followed. The client is the buyer of a bundle of goods and services from the contractor/s bidding or negotiating for the project, and their interaction on the scope (quantity) and price of the project is resolved when the agreement or contract is exchanged. In particular, the extent of market power held, gained or lost by participants as the procurement process goes through the stages of pre-bid, tender, final bid and negotiation, or some variation of those stages, is an important factor.

A distinction can be made between the market for a project, typically one of many similar types of projects, and the market for the supply of the bundle of goods and services required to deliver that specific project. Such a market is created by a project manager or lead contractor as they organize the work and subcontract the various specialized tasks. This could be called a micro-market, and it establishes within the project an internal market.

If procurement of a project creates an identifiable, though temporary, micro-market for goods and services, what are the distinctive characteristics of such a market? Clearly it is not like a conventional market described in a textbook. The characteristics of markets are the number of buyers and sellers, the distinctiveness and substitutability of products, forms of competition, barriers to entry and concentration ratio, and the information and mobility of customers. These market characteristics do not, however, neatly carry over to industries with extensive subcontracting, such as building and construction, for three reasons.

The first reason is there is only one buyer, and in such a market with a single buyer it is possible to gain market power through bargaining with potential suppliers. Bargaining power is found in the bilateral negotiations over terms and conditions of supply between trading partners. In a bargaining framework buyer power is the ability to extract surplus from a supplier, typically through individually negotiated discounts. However, because this bargaining power cannot be exercised when suppliers are competitive, it is a countervailing power and thus its use is constrained by circumstances.

Buyer power is the bargaining strength a buyer has with suppliers with whom it trades, where its bargaining strength depends on its ability to credibly threaten to impose an opportunity cost if it is not granted a concession. The traditional economic treatment of bargaining power uses the concept of outside options available to buyers and sellers. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission describes these as “the outside option is the best option that either the seller or buyer can achieve if they walk away from the negotiations.” Strong outside options for a buyer, or weak outside options for a seller, will be a major source of buyer power in a bilateral bargaining framework.

The second reason is that subcontractors are typically not engaged in a single transaction, as in the market-based trades of instant exchange and settlement envisaged in economics textbooks. The relationship between a large corporation and its subcontractors is typically more durable and intensive than a market relationship. This idea of ‘relational contracting’ has firms developing long-term ties with contractors, often with a degree of mutual understanding and trust that are not typical of market transactions. Instead of using the market, the firm will rely on a trusted supplier, especially when their relationship involves shared knowledge and learning.

Third, there are ‘hybrid’ concepts, where relations between a head contractor and the subcontractors are stable and continuous over fairly long periods of time and only infrequently established through competitive bidding. A form of-integration that largely makes the concept of relational exchange redundant. The hybrid concept does not survive the reality of contractual obligations, however. While there may be relational aspects to the organization of production/projects between firms, the legal distinction between firms, markets and other arrangements remains real, and the legal status of the firm has not been undermined. Conceptual boundaries are not contractual boundaries, and this distinction should not be ignored.

A different approach to these long-term or continuous relationships is the idea that a project creates an internal, temporary, micro-market for the goods and services supplied by subcontractors. This temporary micro-market, or internal project market, comes into formal existence after the procurement process has been completed, a contract signed and the project become a defined, deliverable building or structure (although there seems to be no good reason why this idea could not be applied to any type of project, such as software or equipment development).

In fact, all this takes us back to Ronald Coase’s original 1937 paper ‘The nature of the firm’. Coase was the first to argue that markets and firms are alternative governance structures for economic transactions. Importantly, the firm is a distinct legal entity, a ‘legal person’ that enters into written or unwritten contracts. He argued the firm is an organisation, rather than just a production function, and separated the market from the firm with the ‘price mechanism’ on one hand and its ‘supersession’ on the other.

For Coase the alternative to the firm was the coordination of self-employed individual producers by the market, each being his or her ‘own master’. In the case of subcontracting, this extended organization still coordinates production, but within the temporary market created by the project. Like any other type of market this internal, temporary micro-market created by a project will have a range of characteristics and dynamics.

The basic proposition behind this line of reasoning is the idea that project procurement is a mechanism for creating an internal market. If this is the case, we can utilise the elements of industry structure, competitive analysis and so on, that have traditionally been applied at the firm level, to better understand projects and their governance.