Project relationships – A model for analyzing interactional uncertainty

Social Sustainability in Projects: Using Social Procurement to Create Employment in the Swedish Construction Sector

Social procurement can increase social sustainability by creating employment for marginalized people. This article investigates how project organizations perceive and handle the resources from and relationships with their main contractors and clients when implementing social procurement. Analyzing 20 semistructured interviews with actors working in Swedish construction projects, the findings show how resources are lacking and relationships are tenuous, but also that the innovative capacity of actors at the project level, in a bottom-up fashion, can overcome some of these issues. This article shows how sustainability initiatives are difficult to implement in projects, and what strategies actors use to cope.

Implementation of the Recovery Guide in inpatient mental health services in Sweden-A process evaluation study

Background

Involving service users in inpatient care and recovery planning has gained interest worldwide. Our purpose was to evaluate the process of implementation of a coproduced Recovery Guide (RG) intervention in 22 inpatient wards in Sweden, in terms of context, implementation process and mechanisms of impact over 12 months.

Methods

A mixed method design and a process evaluation framework were used to guide data collection and to deductively analyze perspectives and descriptive statistics of delivery from three stakeholder groups.

Results

Results showed that although initial contextual barriers were present (e.g., lack of resources, and interest, uncertainty in the organization, a dominant illness perspective), it was possible to implement the RG in 14 wards, where 53% of admitted service users received the intervention. Legitimacy of the intervention, engaged managers and staff, capacity of staff and ward organization, coproduction and continuous support from user organization were critical mediators. Mechanisms of impact concerned (1) a new perspective on mental health, well‐being and recovery, (2) capacity building of a recovery approach in inpatient settings and (3) a meaningful outlet for users' thoughts and feelings on recovery, sharing narratives and influencing care and goals.

Conclusions

The RG intervention has the potential to promote a recovery approach in inpatient mental health services (MHSs). Coproduction among stakeholders created trust and a sustainable implementation that made it possible for wards to resume implementation when contextual barriers had been resolved.

Patient and Public Contribution

The current study involved stakeholders including a service user organization, the public, first‐line managers and staff (including peer support workers) in inpatient and community MHS and researchers, who greatly contributed to the implementation programme, including codesign of the RG intervention as well as coproduction of the implementation in inpatient MHS. All authors have their own lived experiences of mental health problems as a service user or as a relative.

Housing developers' perceived barriers to implementing municipal sustainability requirements in Swedish sustainability-profiled districts

Swedish municipalities are taking an active role in shaping and implementing sustainability-related policies in urban development by initiating and governing sustainability-profiled district developments on municipally owned land. To drive sustainable development and innovation in these districts and develop future policies, municipalities use land allocation agreements to set project-specific sustainability requirements on housing development projects that go beyond the current national building regulations. Developers play a key role in implementing these municipal sustainability requirements. The purpose of this paper is to explore housing developers' perceived barriers to implementing municipal sustainability requirements in their projects, which ultimately constrain possibilities for municipalities to drive sustainable development. Findings are based on case studies of two sustainability-profiled district developments in different Swedish municipalities. Main barriers perceived by the developers could be categorized into: (1) increased costs when adapting to unforeseen changes that constrain project budgets and (2) conflicting interests and objectives between interdependent actors. These barriers are contextualised within the relationship between the developers and municipalities. Contributions are made to literature on developers' roles and perspectives in sustainability-oriented urban development. We illustrate how conflicting short-term and long-term interests between developers and municipalities complicate and impede problem solving in housing development projects. This calls for more research on these actors' interests, and how they align and conflict in these types of projects. Findings also illustrate how developers resolve issues through interactions with municipalities, indicating collaborative problem solving processes to investigate further.

Complex Interventions and Interorganisational Relationships: Examining Core Implementation Components of Assertive Community Treatment

Introduction:

There is increasing interest in implementing evidence-based integrated models of care in community-based mental health service systems. Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is seen as an attractive, and at the same time challenging, model to implement in sectored service settings. This study investigates the implementation process of such an initiative.

Methods:

Interviews were conducted with ACT team members, the process leader, steering group members, and collaboration partners. The “Sustainable Implementation Scale” helped to identify critical implementation components, and these were further explored using the qualitative interview data. The “Tool for Measuring Assertive Community Treatment” addressed programme fidelity, and the initiative’s sustainability was assessed.

Results:

High-fidelity implementation of ACT in a sectored service setting is possible. Prominent components that facilitated implementation were careful preparations, team members’ characteristics, and efforts by the process leader and the steering group to improve networking. Implementation was hampered by conflicting goals among the involved authorities and a mismatch between the ACT model’s characteristics and existing organisational traditions and regulations.

Discussion and Conclusions:

Reducing the uncertainty caused by conflicting goals is an important step in improving the implementation of ACT. In order to facilitate implementation, the goals, regulations, and availability of resources should be aligned horizontally and vertically through the involved organisations.

A Bibliometric View on the Use of Contingency Theory in Project Management Research

Contingency theory has influenced organization theory since the 1950s. Project management research has only recently started to consider context factors. In this area, applications of contingency theory still represent a fragmented field with a nonuniform use of terminology. Fully utilizing the contingency theory approach requires a systematic foundation. This article presents an overview of contingency theory in both permanent and temporary organizations. In a bibliometric study based on 1,622 articles from four academic project management journals, we identify dominating authors, prevalent keywords, and different focal areas in project contingency theory as well as the most researched project types.

International Projects Proposal Analysis: Risk Assessment Using Radial Maps

International projects are very attractive to companies seeking to expand their business horizons, and collaborative networks of international partners have created new work environments that differ from the conventional business structures of the past. This study provides scholarly research into the risks that inherently affect an international project's success and provides insight into the effective measures that project managers may employ to assist in analyzing and mitigating these multinational risks during the bid and proposal process. A new method of radial risk mapping assists management in graphing their risk findings to aid in their proposal analysis. These graphical representations provide firms seeking international markets with a method for selecting those projects with the least risk, thereby increasing their chances of success and maximum profit.

Inter-organizational collaboration projects in the public sector: a balance between integration and demarcation

For several years, the development of the Swedish public sector has been accompanied by a discussion about inter-organizational collaboration, which has been examined in several national experiments. The experience, however, indicates significant difficulties in implementing collaboration in local authorities' regular activities. This article argues that organizing inter-organizational collaboration in projects tends to be counterproductive, since the purpose of this collaboration is to increase the integration of local authorities. This article is based on case studies of three different collaboration projects. Each project is analyzed in relation to the way collaboration is organized within the project and how the relationship to the local authorities' activities is designed. The outcome of these studies shows that while collaboration projects increase integration between the responsible authorities, the integration stays within the projects. This is due to the fact that the projects were designed as units separate from the responsible authorities. As a result, the collaboration that occurs in the projects is not implemented in the local authorities' activities, and the viability of the increased integration of different responsible authorities does not extend beyond the projects.