لخّصلي

هذا الويبينار، الذي قدمه دانيال نيكولز، يستعرض نتائج بحث PMI حول تحقيق نجاح المشاريع في ظل ندرة الموارد. شارك فيه د. جينيفر ديوار وبدرام بوروجاسي. يهدف البحث لفهم كيفية تحقيق المنظمات، وخاصةً المؤسسات الاجتماعية، لنجاح المشاريع مع موارد محدودة للغاية. ركز البحث على ثلاثة مفاهيم رئيسية: الاستعانة بما هو متاح ("بريكولاج")، وقدرات إدارة المشاريع، والقيادة الريادية. أظهرت الدراسة أن "البريكولاج" يعزز نتائج المشاريع في بيئات ذات موارد محدودة، لكن الاعتماد المفرط عليه قد يؤدي إلى نتائج غير مستدامة. القيادة الريادية تساعد على التخفيف من الاعتماد على "البريكولاج" من خلال تأمين الموارد اللازمة لنهج أكثر تنظيماً، بينما تعزز قدرات إدارة المشاريع فعالية "البريكولاج". استخدمت الدراسة مقابلات شبه منظمة واستبيانًا عبر الإنترنت شمل 63 استجابة لتحليل العلاقة بين هذه المفاهيم وثقة نجاح المشاريع. أشارت نتائج الاستبيان إلى ندرة الموارد، خاصةً في القوى العاملة والتمويل الخارجي، لدى معظم المؤسسات الاجتماعية المشاركة بالدراسة.

[المتحدث 3]
Hello, and welcome to today's PMI research webinar. And as mentioned, I'm Daniel Nichols, and I'll be your host for today's session. We're really pleased you could join us for this webinar.

This study is based on a recent PMI sponsored research, largely around achieving project success with research scarcity. And today we're joined by Dr. Jennifer Dewar, who is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Business at Memorial University in Newfoundland. And Pedram Purugasi is an industrial engineer and a PhD candidate in management and organisation at the Gustafson School of Business, University of Victoria.

Just to give you a little bit of background, our PMI sponsored research programme aims to advance project management knowledge and delivery. And hopefully today's session will provide a little bit of a taster of what some of our research employs. So shortly, I'm going to hand over to Jennifer and Pedram, who are going to take you through the research findings.

And they're going to have some interactive polls for you to take part in. But I will come back in the final 10 or 15 minutes or so, where we can help to address any questions you may have. So please carefully consider these as you listen through today's session.

As mentioned earlier, if you have any questions, please put these into the Q&A tab, and we can take these for you at the end of the session. And if you have any comments, please put these into the comments tab. So without further ado, I will pass over to Jennifer to kick off today's session.

Thank you.

[المتحدث 1]
Hi, everybody. Thank you, Daniel, for that warm introduction. I'm just going to turn on my video.

Here we go. And also thanks, Daniel, for all your support throughout this project for the past couple of years. So we're thrilled to be here with all of you today to share our work and to dive into some exciting findings.

Our goal really is simple, to provide you with insights that you can actually use. By the end of the session, we hope you'll walk away with actionable insights or takeaways that can make a real impact. So let's get started.

Pedram and I will be going back and forth, taking turns presenting slides. And as has already been said, you can post questions to the Q&A and we'll answer them at the end of the presentation. So we also wanted to acknowledge the contributions of other research team members.

So firstly, Dr. Kam Jugdev. She's a professor of project management and strategy at the Faculty of Business at Athabasca University. And her research program spans project management topics such as project management as a source for competitive advantage, lessons learned, and project success.

She's on the editorial board of different project management journals. And she worked with us throughout this project as well. And then we also would like to acknowledge Dr. Natalie Sawinski, who's a professor of strategy and sustainability at Gustavson School of Business and University of Victoria. And Dr. Tom Cooper, professor in strategic management at the Faculty of Business at Memorial University. So just a little bit about how the journey began for this project. So this multi-year initiative backed by the PMI sponsored research program was inspired by the launch of the specialized MBA program in managing social enterprises here at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada.

So when I was asked to create and teach a project management course for social enterprises, it got me thinking, you know, how do project management practices differ in these environments? Can we pinpoint and analyze those differences? And most importantly, what do these distinctions mean for project managers, their teams, and how these organizations are run overall?

So these are the questions that drove this research, and I'm to share what we've uncovered. So let's dive into the exciting project. First, we set out to explore how organizations facing extreme resource scarcity achieve project success.

Specifically, we looked at the role of bricolage, which may be new to some of you. But basically, it's a very simple concept. It's basically the ability to make do with what is at hand in improving project outcomes in this circumstance.

So we didn't stop there. We also investigated how bricolage works in combination with project management capabilities and entrepreneurial leadership. So before we go into some of those definitions a little bit deeper, so I'm just going to share a few examples of bricolage from the cases that we studied.

So first example was a building repairs example at a social enterprise. So this organization, you know, was strapped for resources, and when scheduling a contractor became impossible, the management team rallied friends and performed the repairs themselves. They creatively used existing resources meant for other purposes to solve the problem.

Another example. So this is around a community collaboration. So a project based resource shortages.

So the organization turned to the community for help. They tapped into collaborative relationships to supplement what they lacked, showcasing how existing networks can provide solutions. And then finally, we have a playground construction example.

So this organization was tasked with creating a playground within a certain area of town. So instead of buying new equipment for a playground that a social enterprise was constructing, they repurposed what was already available, creatively working with the resources that they had at hand. So these are just a few of many of the examples that we saw, just to give you some insight into what bricolage is.

So now bricolage is incredible for short-term challenges, as we just saw, but what if the project extends over years? Let's say you need to maintain the playground for a decade. Can you rely solely on friends and what's readily available?

So likely not. And that's where entrepreneurial leadership comes into play, helping to inspire and mobilize others while building sustainable systems. And of course, we must ask, what role do project management capabilities like planning, risk identification, and scheduling play in supporting bricolage?

How do these capabilities enhance its effectiveness and contribute to long-term project success? So we're going to explore all of this as we continue throughout the webinar. So just for the agenda for today, here's what we have planned for today's webinar.

We hope you're going to find it an engaging session. We're going to kick things off and Pedram is going to introduce the study. He'll walk us through the key concepts, and then I'll share the study's objective, the main research questions we tackled, and the methods we used to dive into the topic.

Next, in the second part, Pedram will break down our findings. We'll talk about what we uncovered regarding the role of bricolage, entrepreneurial leadership, and project management capabilities in driving project success. And then finally, we'll shift gears to something practical.

We'll share a roadmap based on our findings, one designed to help you acquire and use project resources more effectively. We're then going to wrap things up with a quick recap, and of course, answer your questions. So get ready to dive into the discussion and feel free to add your thoughts or questions to the Q&A section as we go along.

So let's get started. Turn it over to Pedram now.

[المتحدث 2]
Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you, Jennifer and Daniel.

I will share my video as soon as I can do that. All right. Here we go.

All right. Hello, everyone. Thank you, Jennifer and Daniel.

So the challenge that we addressed, if we can go to the next slide. The challenge that we tried to address in our research was this, how can we achieve project goals in extremely resource-constrained environments? So in these environments, project managers face some critical challenges.

First, they need to secure resources like money, labor, or equipment. For instance, as Jennifer mentioned earlier, this could mean finding workers for a maintenance project or tracking down the right tools for a playground project. Second, they have to make the best possible use of the resources they do already have, because there might not be any alternative options.

And then finally, they need to create value from these resources to actually achieve the project's goals. We knew that there has already been a lot of research on how social enterprises use a concept called recollage to handle these challenges. That made social enterprises a perfect setting for us to explore project management in these resource-constrained environments.

So we saw that recollage helps social enterprises navigate these obstacles and still meet their goals. But what's really interesting is that their goals are often even more complex than just making profit. You know, they're also working towards other social objectives, which adds another layer of challenge for them.

So the next slide would say what exactly is a social enterprise. Social enterprises are businesses. They sell goods, they sell services.

But what makes them different is that they also have social, cultural, and environmental purposes, and these goals or missions are embedded into their businesses. It means that they make a profit, but they reinvest the majority of that profit back into their social missions. So let me give you two prominent examples of social enterprises.

You may have heard of Grameen Bank or Greystone Bakery. Grameen Bank is a microfinance institution in Bangladesh. It gives small loans to individuals in rural areas without any need for collateral.

How they employ recollage is through their innovative lending practices that instead of relying on financial capital, it leverages the undervalued resources and social capital in such low-income and rural communities. And Greystone Bakery in the United States, it offers employment opportunities to individuals who are facing obstacles. For example, homeless people or people with criminal records.

It also employs recollage. Its open hiring model makes it possible to creatively use the available resources, which leads to achieving both business success and community impact. So before moving on to the next section and discuss recollage in more detail, we'd like to hear a little bit about you, whether you've worked for a social enterprise and whether you've encountered extreme resources scarcity in your projects.

So when we say extreme resources scarcity, we mean situations when not only you do not have the resources you need, but you cannot also acquire them because they might not be available in the environment, or for example, the cost is so unreasonably high. So please answer to the questions you see on the screen. There are two questions.

First one asks if you work for a social enterprise and the second one asks if you have faced extreme resources scarcity in your projects before. Let's wait for a few seconds to receive responses. That's so interesting.

So as I expected, most of the attendees do not work for a social enterprise, but they did experience resources scarcity. So we hope that our study will have some lessons for you because, well, we studied social enterprises and how they address social, how they address resources scarcity, but we try to draw lessons in a way that are applicable to other contexts as well. So let's define recollage.

If you could move to the next slide. So yes, so let's define recollage. Recollage is defined as making do with what is at hand, which happens by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities.

Recollage becomes important, especially when there is extreme resources scarcity, because it is a situation in which an organization has a very limited access to the resources that are critical to achieve their project goals and sustain the operations. The resources could be financial, human, material, or even social resources, and they are limited and they are also important to an extent that not only not having them would be harmful for the organization, but it puts the survival of the organization at risk. So if an organization can find a way to address such limitations in accessing such critical resources, well, it can survive, but if we are talking about an environment that is characterized by extreme resources scarcity and one organization can find a solution to address them, well, not only it can survive, but it will have an advantage over the other organizations that are operating in the same environment, so it will thrive. But what exactly do these mean in practice? Let me give you a few examples.

Imagine you want to expand a small business like a barber shop or a coffee shop, but for example, the cost of renting a new space has gone up to a point that such a resource, which is in this case a physical space, is practically impossible to obtain that. But you may be able to address the resource shortage by repurposing some existing resources. For example, suppose that you have a van or something like that and you figure out how to convert it to a mobile kitchen or to a barber shop.

And the resources does not have to be physical. Imagine you want to promote your business in your community and you do not have the option of advertising it in a conventional way, like posting it on a billboard, but you find someone in that community who is well-connected to other community members, like a social media influencer. You provide them with a free or discounted service in exchange for recommending your business to others.

So again, we would like to hear back from you. So know that we have defined recollage. Do you think that it is something that you have used before to overcome resource scarcity?

We'd appreciate it if you could tell us how much you agree with this statement that you see on your screen in a few seconds. So it says that we deal with new challenges on projects by combining existing resources originally intended for other purposes. It's very interesting.

So most of you have already have been already using recollage, but perhaps and I hope that you'd like to learn more about it and how to use it more effectively in your projects. So we will explain that in more details in the next part. Jennifer will introduce our study.

[المتحدث 1]
Perfect, thanks Pedram. All right, so now we're going to talk about how we approached this study. Our goal was to tackle, of course, this practical challenge and uncover lessons that organizations could apply in their day-to-day operations.

So at the same time, we wanted to make sure that our work was thorough and met rigorous academic standards, of course. So far, this approach has allowed us to present our findings at an academic conference and publish a paper in the International Journal of Managing Projects in Business. So a milestone that we're really excited about.

At the end of the webinar, before we wrap up, we'll share links to access the journal article and also the PMI white paper so that you can dive deeper into the details if you're interested. So stay tuned for that at the end. All right, so let's dive into the key research questions that got in our study.

So we asked, under what conditions do recollage capabilities enhance or diminish project outcomes in social enterprises? So to explore this, we focus on three core concepts that we wanted to better understand and see how they interact. So first, of course, bricolage.

So in project management, bricolage is all about creatively reconfiguring existing resources to tackle current challenges. Imagine repurposing underused or even discarded resources, whether they're human, financial, or physical, to find innovative solutions. This can be a game changer, especially in resource-constrained environments.

And so while bricolage has been widely studied in other fields, it's often overlooked in project management research, even though it plays such a critical role in driving success when resources are limited, like we saw here today in our poll. Our research aims to shine a light on this capability and its value to project managers, especially in social enterprises. So secondly, project management capabilities.

So that's the other concept or construct that we're looking at. These are skills, of course, probably all familiar with these, right? The skills, knowledge, and practices organizations use to run their projects effectively.

Things like creating a project plan, tracking progress, and managing risks. They reflect a systematic, structured approach to project management that's great when you have ample resources. But what happens when resources are scarce?

How do project management capabilities interact with more flexible approaches like bricolage? That's what we wanted to dig into. These two capabilities, bricolage and project management capabilities, come from very different schools of thought.

So understanding how they work together or don't is key. And then finally, entrepreneurial leadership. So that really is about empowering teams to think creatively, take calculated risks, and find innovative solutions to top challenges.

This type of leadership is crucial in environments that are highly dynamic, uncertain, and resource-constrained, like, of course, the world of social enterprises and many other types of organizations as well. And interestingly, while entrepreneurial leadership and bricolage are often found together in these challenging environments, there's been little research on how entrepreneurial leadership shapes the use of bricolage or its impact on project outcomes. So our study takes a closer look at these three concepts, bricolage, project management capabilities, and entrepreneurial leadership, and explores how they interact to influence project success.

So the goal is to provide a clearer picture of how organizations can leverage these capabilities effectively, especially when resources are tight. So now looking a little bit closer at the objectives of our study and the key ideas behind it. So as we discussed, our main goal is to figure out how bricolage, this creative process of making do with what's available, impacts project success in social enterprises.

But why focus on bricolage? We talked a little bit about it, and I'll just kind of explore that a little bit more now. So research already shows that bricolage can transform limited resources into better performance for social enterprises.

But we wanted to see how bricolage plays into project performance specifically, so within the project management instead of just within the organizational realm. And here's why we think bricolage can help projects to succeed. So social enterprises, being smaller and often resource constrained, tend to embrace improvisation instead of sticking to rigid plans.

They adapt and innovate on the fly, and that's exactly what bricolage is all about. And secondly, bricolage thrives on making the most of what's available. So when projects require creativity, like prototyping or experimenting, bricolage can open up new possibilities and help secure resources in unexpected ways.

So what's the catch? While bricolage can help in the short term, relying on it too much may backfire. So you might end up with solutions that work, but aren't sustainable, creating what's been called a tinkering trap.

Constant improvisation can prevent organizations from developing structured routines and processes that ensure stability. So over time, this repeated reliance on bricolage can limit growth, lead to inefficiencies, and even hurt performance. So where's the balance?

That's where entrepreneurial leadership and project management capabilities come in. Entrepreneurial leaders are game changers in resource constrained settings. They do two key things.

They motivate people to find creative solutions and explore opportunities for growth. They help organizations move away from bricolage by securing the resources needed to plan and execute projects more efficiently. This means that when strong entrepreneurial leadership is present, bricolage becomes less critical.

Instead of relying on making do, teams can focus on structured strategic approaches to achieve their goals. Now turning to project management capabilities, strong project management routines like planning, scheduling, and monitoring, of course, we know are critical for efficiency. But here's the twist.

They can actually enhance the impact of bricolage when used together. Imagine this. Your plan has a solid plan and structure.

Then an unexpected challenge comes up like a resource falling through. This is where bricolage shines. It provides the flexibility to adapt and overcome those surprises while the structured approach ensures that you don't fall into the tinkering trap.

The result, a balanced, efficient way to achieve project goals. Overall, then, our study looks at how bricolage, entrepreneurial leadership, and project management capabilities interact to drive project success in social enterprises. We're trying to understand when bricolage works best, when it might hold organizations back, and how it can complement more structured approaches.

Now let's take a look at how we conducted the study. This is our research methods. So here's how we approached our research processes.

Our own approach was to use quantitative data. But before diving into the surveys, we wanted to get a deeper understanding of the concepts, so we constructed or we conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with project managers and social enterprise. And these conversations really helped us refine our understanding of the key ideas and approve our survey design.

And once we had a solid draft of the survey, we ran a pilot test with a small group of experienced project managers to make sure everything worked as expected. After fine-tuning it, we launched the survey on the Qualtrics platform for broader distribution. To reach the right audience, people who really understand project management and social enterprises, we partnered with BiSocial Canada.

This is an organization that supports social enterprises across the country and Canada, and distributed our survey throughout their network. So in total, we received 213 responses. But after cleaning the data to ensure accuracy and completeness, we ended up analyzing 63 surveys.

And for the data analysis, we took a mixed approach from the interviews. We identified key themes that gave us deeper insights into our quantitative results. And we're working on another article based on those interviews.

And then for the survey, we used things like confirmatory factor analysis, simple linear regression, and regression with two independent moderators to explore the relationship between our variables. So this combination of the qualitative and quantitative methods allowed us to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how bricolage, project management capabilities, and entrepreneurial leadership influence project success. So just a little bit now about some of the highlights from our survey responses.

So as you can see here, approximately 50% of the organizations were established less than 10 years ago. 85% were small organizations with 50 or fewer employees. And every single one relied, at least in part, on volunteers, pretty typical characteristics of social enterprises.

What's interesting is that 68% of the respondents said that their organization initiates an average of one to five projects per year. Plus, half of the organizations reported having a moderate level of general project management experience or expertise. And lastly, 72% of the respondents had been with the organization for at least two years.

So that gave us some confidence that they had the experience needed to provide informed responses for how their organization manages projects. So finally, we want to understand, of course, the level of resource scarcity that these organizations face and how it impacts their ability to complete projects successfully. So we asked our respondents what they felt they needed more of to get their projects done.

And here's what they told us. As you can see, the top need was for more project staff. Right behind that was the need for external funding.

Other key needs included access to technological or specialized knowledge, guidance on how to secure funding for projects, and project management expertise. In short, there's a clear picture of high levels of resource scarcity, both in financial and human resources, as well as gaps in project management and technical skills. So now we're going to look at what we've discovered and Pedram will discuss the findings.

You're muted, Pedram.

[المتحدث 2]
Sorry. So our study had three main findings that we explained in this section. Our first finding was that the organizations we studied, that were social enterprises dealing with resource constraints, were able to achieve better project outcomes when they use bricolage.

This means that bricolage is an effective approach in social enterprises dealing with resource limitations.