Page 220 - Global Project Management Handbook

MANAGING HUMAN ENERGY IN THE PROJECT-ORIENTED COMPANY 10-9

Conception of Time
The very notion of applying projects as the main structural element in a company
points to time as an important issue. A project is a temporary organization, and concep-
tion of time is one of the four concepts that differentiate a temporary organization from
a permanent organization according to Lundin and Söderholm (1995). (The other con-
cepts are team, task, and transition.) Temporary and permanent organizations differ in
two fundamentally different aspects relevant for time conception. The aspects are the
length of sight applied and the types of tasks associated with the type of organization.
A temporary organization has a limited predefined life span, and in this lifetime, the
more or less unique objectives of the project must be reached. The project team has
only one chance to accomplish the project successfully. A permanent organization, of
course, also has deadlines. But termination of the organization is not given in advance,
as it is in a temporary organization. The permanent organization is expected to have
eternal life, and at the same time, certain tasks and obligations must be taken care of
again and again (making a yearly statement, annual plans and follow-ups, etc.). These
different conditions in the two types of organizations influence the conception of time.
Roughly speaking, time can be conceived of as linear in a temporary organization,
whereas it can be conceived of as cyclic in a permanent organization. [New project
management trends, for example, agile movement, suggest incorporation of cyclic
thinking in projects (Highsmith, 2004). Furthermore, time can be conceived of as a spi-
ral in a permanent organization (Burell, 1992). However, these nuances are not relevant
to the topic discussed in this chapter.]
Lundin et al. (2001) offer two distinct categories of how to conceive of time in that
they introduce the concept “master clock” and “countdown clock.” The master clock is the
overall clock, which runs for everyone. It “runs from infinity to eternity” (Lundin et al.,
2001, p. 2). The countdown clock, on the other hand, runs from the defined start to zero.
When a temporary organization (i.e., a project) starts, the organization starts to “con-
sume” time in a countdown manner. This time cannot be replaced.
The reason why time is such an important issue in projects is that time conception can
be seen as a way to motivate project participants and to help them make sense of their
way of working and prioritizing among different tasks. The countdown time imposes a
sense of urgency with regard to task completion. A project plan communicates (agreed
on) expectations of the project team. Setting challenging goals related to time by defining
milestones and deadlines is assumed to stimulate effort and commitment (Shawn et al.,

1995). The reason is that it guides the attention of project participants because time-
specific objectives produce a kind of competition within the individual: “Is it possible to
reach the milestones or not?”—and maybe thoughts such as: “I perceive myself as a
responsible and reliable person. A responsible and reliable person meets deadlines. It is
therefore of utmost importance that I meet the deadlines in the project.”
At the same time, the project work is more or less well defined because the scope of
the project is explicitly defined. This is another way of focusing the attention of the proj-
ect participants.
Conception of time and explicitly defined objectives and tasks help project partici-
pants to concentrate on accomplishing the project work. However, as the empirical data
have shown, if an individual employee is assigned to more than one project at the same
time, a lot of unwanted disturbance might appear. Instead of focusing on the single proj-
ect, the individual has to slice time and use only a fraction of the work time on each proj-
ect (or other task) before shifting to another project. According to the empirical data, this
time slicing causes severe mental startup costs in every shift because most project work
requires mental absorption, and absorption takes time. Therefore, many shifts place big
requirements on the cognitive capacity of the person in question.