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114 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

with each project reporting to a programme director whose role is to coordi-
nate the different projects to ensure that they are developing solutions that are
compatible. Being co-located there is also a lot of potential opportunity for
those involved in the different projects to communicate with one another.
2. The distributed project; which is a single endeavour conducted from multi-
ple locations, often involving different organizations. For example, a software
development project is often now undertaken at different locations, with certain
parts of the development work, outsourced to a different organization. India
has obviously been the prime site for this kind of outsourcing software work,
although today there are several other countries where outsourcing is becom-
ing common, including China and Eastern Europe. In this type of project,
members in the home country would typically do the requirements definitional
work, while members in the outsource company would do the development
and maybe the testing work.
3. Multiple projects run at multiple locations. This type of project context is
the most complex because it requires managing multiple interdependencies
across time and space. For example, in developing a new drug, the initial basic
research is typically initiated in a project in a PRO (public research organi-
zation, e.g. a university). Here, the focus of the project work is to discover
and isolate biological agents and mechanisms that, for example, cause disease.
‘Breakthroughs’ are patented in the hope that they might facilitate the devel-
opment of new treatments. Since the role of PROs is not, primarily, product
development, patents are commonly acquired and commercialized by private
firms who will actually acquire intellectual property (IP) from several different
projects in order to develop a drug through the lengthy clinical trials process.
The knowledge from all these various projects must be integrated to allow the
innovation process to continue.

This typology suggests that managing across projects (not just sharing knowledge
across projects to limit reinvention) is as important as managing within projects
because knowledge often needs to be brought together from multiple projects.

>> COMPLEX PROJECT CONTEXTS
The above indicates that there are different types of project context. Two aspects
of this project context appear to be most significant in terms of our under-
standing the issues that are likely to arise in the management of projects – the
complexity of the project context and the degree of interdependence across
projects, as depicted in Figure 5.2.
Looking first at the complexity of the context, along the vertical axis, the dis-
tribution of project work can vary to a greater or lesser degree along three main
dimensions: organizational, spatial and temporal. That is, there can be one or
many organizations involved; projects can be co-located or spatially distributed;
and/or projects can be worked on simultaneously or distributed across time.

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