Page 212 - Global Project Management Handbook

CHAPTER 10

MANAGING HUMAN ENERGY
IN THE PROJECT-ORIENTED

COMPANY

Pernille Eskerod
University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg, Denmark

Pernille Eskerod holds a M.Sc. in business administration (1192) and
a Ph.D. (1996). In 1990 she completed, among other courses, an
MBA-course in project management at Oregon State University. She
was a visiting researcher in 1997 at the Umea School of Business,
Umea University, Sweden, and in 2001 at the Vienna University of
Economics and Business Administration, Austria. In 2005 she taught
project management at the Vienna International Summer University
at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.
Since 1993, she has been a member of the Danish Project
Management Association. Since 2001, she has been chairman of a
research and education group in the association and conducts three
annual seminars for teachers and researchers in project manage-
ment. Further, she was involved in developing the Danish Project
Management Competence Baseline in 2002 and the Scandinavian
Project Management Competence Baseline in 2004.
Currently, she is an associate professor of project management at
the University of Southern Denmark. There she conducts research
and teaches in the field of project management and organizational
behavior. She has published a number of papers on project manage-
ment and participates in international conferences every year.

A project-oriented company is an organization that uses projects as its main structural
element. The projects are expected to ensure the necessary level of renewal and learning
in the organization and enable the organization to accommodate the many demands and
possibilities it is confronted with in the form of prompt shifts in customer preferences,
technology, competition, legislation, supplier structure, composition of personnel, etc.
However, it is not unproblematic to manage a project-oriented company. Research (e.g.,
Eskerod, 1997, 1998; Eskerod et al., 2004) has shown that actors in many project-oriented
companies experience the situation that there are many projects to accomplish but only
few resources available. Both managers and employees report that they feel they have
lost overview of the portfolio of projects owing to the high number of projects. At the
same time, distressed and suffering projects can be observed. Some are never accom-
plished, while others end up with time and budget overruns, specifications and quality
requirements not met, dissatisfied stakeholders, and/or failure to achieve the purpose

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