Book Reviews
People, Processes, Projects: Harnessing complex socio-technical systems
By Errol Lawson (ed)
ISBN: 978-0-977520-82-4 2007 140 pages University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes, SA
Reviewed by Ken Parry
Graduate School of Management, Griffith University, Nathan QLD
Errol Lawson is an adjunct Associate Professor with the Systems Engineering & Evaluation Centre (SEEC) at the University of South Australia. He comes from an illustrious career consulting in systems methodologies, principally with the defence sector. The foreword is by Stephen Cook, Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of South Australia.
The authors of each chapter are students in the Masters programme in project management. All are senior managers of the Australian Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO). Each of the 11 chapters is the final assignment that students undertook in their degree. It was a great idea to turn their work into a publication. Excellent work is done each year in thousands of research projects that would not otherwise see the light of day.
The theme common to all chapters is the importance of social systems, which complement the structural and systemic process issues that traditionally take the time of project managers. This book is an attempt to put together a coherent body of knowledge from which to develop a case for the explicit inclusion of social system concepts in project planning, implementation and post-project analyses.
A cynic would say that it is great that project managers have finally realised the importance of people to the success of their projects. I recall having a conversation with a colleague a few years ago in New Zealand. We commented on how great it is that the strategy scholars have finally realised the importance of leadership to the success of strategy. The same could be said of project management. Having said that, scholars have known for many years about the importance of social systems to the success of organizations. Scholars have also known about successful project management. It is refreshing to see that some genuine cross-disciplinary work is being done to further integrate these two bodies of knowledge.
First seven chapters based on Dwight Eisenhower's quote that ‘The plan is nothing; Planning is everything'. Clearly, the importance or otherwise of planning is central to these chapters - the first two have this as the title. It is not until Chapter 3 that an author attempts to have an individual title for a chapter.
Chapters 8 through 10 are about ‘forms of capital vs success and failure'. These three chapters are based upon a proposition form Lawson's PhD research, and examine the role of social capital vis-à-vis other forms of capital, in the success of projects. Two chapters have this as a name, but unfortunately only one attempts to broaden the scholarly contribution by giving the content of the chapter its own name. The final chapter is about the ‘NAO (UK) Project Gold Standard' but is called ‘project control'.
Some coherence between the chapters would have helped. It was probably was preferable to let the students choose their topics. However, it seems less than ideal for a reader to have seven chapters on one topic and only one chapter on another topic. Moreover, if some attempt was made to generate an integrative title for each chapter, the reader would have benefited further.
There is no integrating concluding chapter from the editor. This would have added hugely to the contribution that this book makes to knowledge about social systems in project management. The editor has written an introduction, but that is all it is. There is potentially a great contribution that this body of work could make. Unfortunately, this contribution is not realised. A concluding chapter is needed that teases out the contribution to theory that is made by these research projects together.
This book was designed as a collection of papers for the Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre, and serves this purpose well.
