From organising as projects to projects as organisations Dirk Pieter van Donk a, * , Eamonn Molloy b a Faculty of Management and Organisation, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands b Saı ¨d Business School, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Received 16 January 2007; received in revised form 16 April 2007; accepted 1 May 2007 Abstract Nowadays, projects and project management can be found in virtually all organisations. Accordingly, preventing project failure has become increasingly critical. In light of this, attempts have been made to redefine the conceptual bases of project management and to define new avenues for research, development of the field, and practical application. So far, theory from organisation design has been under-explored with respect to understanding project organisations and their structures. This paper contributes by considering projects as organisations, having a specific structure. Based on the seminal work of Mintzberg [Mintzberg H. The structuring of organizations. Prentice-Hall, 1979] we develop a typology of project structures. Two illustrative case studies are discussed. The typology shows that contingency factors of projects need to be reflected in appropriate project structures. Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved. Keywords: Managing projects; Organisation design; Contingency approach; Project typology 1. Introduction It seems that there are substantial paradoxes in both the theoretical and practical development of project manage- ment. With respect to the practical side of project manage- ment, several authors [1,2] have observed that on the one hand the use of projects and project management in all types of organisations is expanding from the traditional engineering-based projects into IT-projects, change pro- jects and more general business projects, while on the other hand there is an accumulating evidence of project (manage- ment) failure in terms of cost overrun, late delivery and failure to achieve objectives. Cicmil and Hodgson [3] sum- marise recent and older studies that: ‘‘... provide[s] an insight into frequent cost overruns, delays and underper- formance in terms of quality and user satisfaction, which seems to have become the rule and the reality of contempo- rary projects’’ (p. 7). With respect to the theoretical devel- opment of the field, it seems that the body of knowledge is expanding, the number of textbooks and related academic articles is growing and researchers and students are increas- ingly showing interest in the field, witnessed in the number of new master programmes in project management and executive education initiatives. These are all promising and attractive phenomena reflecting the strength of the field, but there is also some cause for concern. For exam- ple, Winter et al. [1] note ‘‘the most dominant strand of project management thinking is the rational, universal, deterministic model ... emphasizing the planning and con- trol dimensions of project management’’ (p. 640). This rational, deterministic model has been criticised from a variety of different perspectives. For example, Hodgson and Cicmil [4] create a critical management perspective on the dominant thinking in their edited volume. Others argue that a ‘soft’ paradigm is needed (e.g. [5]) or signal that different perspectives underlie the project management literature [2]. Each of these perspectives have advanced our under- standing of project management, yet, as Shenhar [6, p. 394] notes ‘‘as an organizational concept project 0263-7863/$30.00 Ó 2007 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijproman.2007.05.006 * Corresponding author. Tel.: + 31 50 3637345. E-mail addresses: d.p.van.donk@rug.nl (D.P. van Donk), eamonn. molloy@sbs.ox.ac.uk (E. Molloy). www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman International Journal of Project Management 26 (2008) 129–137