Being Lean & Seen: Meeting the Challenges of Delivering Projects Successfully in the 21st Century
There are a huge need and potential impact in improving project management (PM) perspective to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This concern extends to lean and agile academics and practitioners and has come especially to the attention of EU countries. In this respect, a research study is being funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) programme.
The study aims to investigate the process-oriented management aspects and characteristics of establishing effective lean PM, understand its impacts and investigate how concepts such as agile PM are optimized to ensure multi-dimensional projects requirements are met and performance can be achieved.
The research is based on three major pillars:
“Being Lean”– adapt, enhance and advance management practices from other industries in response to the need for efficiency and effectiveness of projects
“Begin Seen”– incorporate the perspective of the people responsible for delivering projects by accentuating the psycho-social aspects
“Being Lean and Seen”– adapt projects to dynamic environments in order to sustain competitive advantage in the long run with dynamic capabilities and adapt PM methods to developing countries
The research covers the fundamentals of PM as well as their application in different country contexts i.e. developed and developing countries and in different industry contexts, such as infrastructure, construction, engineering and IT. The RISE programme comprises 10 partners with extensive exchange of researchers over a period of 48 months in order to fully explore the complementary strengths and synergies within the consortium.
During this period, Refine Projects AG contributes to the research as a partner by the exchange of staff and knowledge related to lean PM, in particular with the Liverpool John Moores University. In this context, researches are part of the practical implementation of the Lean Principles within construction projects. On the other hand, Lean Construction practitioners are actively involved in all the research stages, which take place in the UK and Germany. At this point, Refine has hosted 4 months of secondments from a total of 8 target months. Likewise, the target from seconding staff to Liverpool is set with a total of 5 months. The first of them planned by the end of 2018, the following 3 months of secondment are scheduled to the first quarter of 2019 and the remaining one for 2020.
The aim is to engage not only the academics and practitioners but also the general public. For additional information and to participate in the project, visit the Being Lean and Seen Website.