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Purpose Scholars and practitioners have recognized the significance of integrating environmental practices into project context. This paper focuses on project environmental practices (PEP) and identifies PEP from the life cycle perspective, which includes green design, green procurement, green construction and investment recovery. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the relationship among the four aspects of PEP and their effects on environmental performance and organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical model was established and several hypotheses were developed. This study applied a survey method to test the hypothesized relationships. Based on a sample of 159 respondents, partial least squares structural equation modeling analyses were conducted. Findings The results show that green design has a positive impact on green procurement, green construction and investment recovery. Green procurement is also confirmed to positively influence green construction. Further, green construction and investment recovery have a direct and positive impact on environmental and organizational performance, whereas green design and green procurement influence environmental and organizational performance indirectly through green construction. Environmental performance has a significant impact on organizational performance. Originality/value This study enhances the understanding on PEP by revealing the inter-relationships among its four aspects and establishes the links between PEP and performance outcomes. The findings will contribute to the literature on the integration of environmental principles and project context.

A unified framework is proposed to investigate the ex-post factors of local sourcing practices in overseas projects for the Belt and Road Initiative, which includes twelve governance factors in four dimensions, i.e., coordinated adaptation, control and safeguarding, incentives and payment structure, and policies and regulations. A fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) approach is applied to evaluate the inter-relationships among the factors. The results indicate that relational governance mechanisms such as trust building play a prominent role in implementing local sourcing practices while formal governance mechanisms such as country-level policies and regulations are the precondition for relational mechanisms.

The information transfer process in collaborative projects is dynamic and nonlinear, and the structure of network influences the efficiency and effectiveness of information transfer in a co...

“A good combination of Yin (the invisible) and Yang (the visible) is called Tao.” The project is temporary by nature. However, the enterprises and individuals undertaking the project are long-term.

Management needs should be planned ahead of the problem. The project forms an integral part of project governance. If there is no control over the project, it is not realistic to simply expect positive surprises. Control is not a one-time activity.

The fundamental of Taiji logic lies in seeking truth from facts. Meanwhile, the biggest enemy of seeking truth from facts is dogmatism.

Resources refer to everything we can use rather than what we have, both tangible and intangible. During the process of integrating project resources, it is also necessary to consider that the resources are associated with project stakeholders.

Decisions need to address the following questions after the emergence of project opportunities: do we need to proceed with this project? How to proceed with this project? Opportunity simply indicates a probability of project to be initiated. It is a judgment of future from the current perspective

“A general without capability only leads soldiers to the dead end”. Project manager plays a crucial role in project management. Therefore, the selection of appropriate project manager forms an integral part of project governance and a crucial criterion of decision making.

First step is always the hardest. There is a prerequisite for both project management and project governance: locating a worthwhile project. The first step should do the right things, which is followed by doing things right.

The most important job of managers is to identify and solve various contradictions that are difficult to be dealt with via existing measures. This is particularly the case for those contradictions amongst people, between people and organization in terms of objectives and resources.

Society is full of contradictions. On the one hand, contradictions may facilitate the development of society. On the other hand, they may lead to turbulence and decay of the society. The major role of management personnel is to identify and solve various contradictions in day-to-day activities.

With the global concern of environmental protection and sustainability, construction firms are required to develop and implement environmental practices (EP) to mitigate the negative impacts of project activities on the environment. This paper attempts to explore two potential drivers (i.e., government regulations and project team&rsquo, s knowledge and skills) and performance outcomes (i.e., environmental performance and organizational performance) when the firm implementing EP in construction projects. A survey-based research design was developed to measure the drivers, EP implementation, and performance and to collect data in the Chinese construction industry. Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesized relationships. The results indicate that a project team&rsquo, s knowledge and skills, rather than government regulations, are the key driving factors for the implementation of EP in construction projects. EP implementation is proved to have a positive impact on both environmental and organizational performance. This study provides empirical evidence for project environmental management research and offers managerial insights on how to promote EP in the construction industry.

Electronic waste recycle (e-recycling) is gaining increasing importance due to greater environmental concerns, legislation, and corporate social responsibility. A novel approach is explored for designing the e-recycling reverse logistics network (RLN) under uncertainty. The goal is to obtain a solution, i.e., increasing the storage capacity of the logistics node, to achieve optimal or near-optimal profit under the collection requirement set by the government and the investment from the enterprise. The approach comprises two parts: a matrix-based simulation model of RLN formed for the uncertainty of demand and reverse logistics collection which calculates the profit under a given candidate solution and simulated annealing (SA) algorithm that is tailored to generating solution using the output of RLN model. To increase the efficiency of the SA algorithm, network static analysis is proposed for getting the quantitative importance of each node in RLN, including the static network generation process and index design. Accordingly, the quantitative importance is applied to increase the likelihood of generating a better candidate solution in the neighborhood search of SA. Numerical experimentation is conducted to validate the RLN model as well as the efficiency of the improved SA.

The sharing economy is gradually reshaping the construction industry. This study identifies the use of digital platforms, internal sharing practices with project stakeholders, and external sharing practices with unfamiliar companies as three critical elements of sharing economy practices from a socio-technical perspective. The impacts of these three elements on sustainability performance, including economic performance, environmental performance and social performance, are investigated. Based on a survey of the Chinese construction industry, proposed hypotheses are tested using structural equation modelling. The results indicate that the use of digital platforms can promote both internal and external sharing practices in the construction industry. While internal sharing practices have positive impacts on the three dimensions of sustainability performance, external sharing practices can positively influence only environmental performance. The findings enhance the understanding of sharing economy practices and provide empirical evidence of the relationships between sharing economy practices and sustainability performance in the construction sector.

Risk interaction changes the probability and impact of a given risk, which may result in a less effective risk response decision (RD). This study presents an approach for supporting the project manager in making RDs, comprising a simulation model of risk interaction network (RIN) for evaluating the RDs and an improved simulated annealing (SA) algorithm for optimizing the RDs. The simulation model considers different risk levels and the corresponding risk interaction cases, which is closer to the reality. In addition to tailoring the SA algorithm to optimize RDs, it is improved through enhancing its neighborhood search with the aid of social network analysis. Specifically, two new network indices are designed for calculating the quantitative significance of RIN elements, i.e. the nodes that denote risks and edges that reflect the risk interactions. The element with a higher significance is more likely to be dealt with when generating a new RD in the neighborhood search. An application is provided to illustrate the utility of the proposed approach; a contrastive analysis of the improved SA and standard SA is also conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the former.

A project, especially for one in China, usually involves many organizations and each organization may have multiple projects. There is a clear social network relationship between these stakeholders in a project and the stakeholders’ behaviors are also subject to the structure of the social network. Based on an analysis of the social network, as a methodology that can be used to explain the relationships among project organizations, as well as an example of large-scale information system project in China, we construct in this article a way to establish the social network of governance structure, study network configurations and analyze some representative governance strategies adopted by stakeholders in China. By examining the network of project governance, we can predict the trend of the project governance structure and study the risk based on the structure.

Projects cannot be completed without resources which need to be properly organized. Previous studies show that it is very rare that projects fail because of “hard” reasons such as technical skills and methods. Rather, projects often fail due to reasons related to “soft” abilities such as organization, personnel, and management. Problems derived from inappropriate organization and management account for 48 % of project failures.

Project manager is in charge of the project, and s/he has to perform the planning, organizing, coordinating, and implementing of the project to ensure its successful completion. In project management, the project manager plays a key role and can be considered as the soul of the project.

There is a growing awareness of the importance of project management. There are a number of proverbs related to project management, such as if you are not part of a project, most likely you are doing some boring and repetitive works. However, it is more challenging to run a project.

Management is already an academic discipline; however, no disciplines sufferes embarrassment as management, as it does not have concepts of consensus, system in itself, and specific methodology different from other disciplines. For many years, management has been in “theory jungle”. People have different perceptions on management, so they always use a self-deprecating and less-confident tone to explain this discipline in a way like, for example, “management is a science, but also an art.” To make things even worse, many people who do management also do not recognize the value of their own work and do not think management is a profession which needs special learning and training to master.

It is well recognized in the military science that it is more difficult to retreat successfully than attack successfully. This is the similar case in mountain climbing and politics. In World War II, it was found that the most loss of fighter aircrafts occured in returning to the military base after tasks were accomplished, rather than during battle at air. Project management is no exception. It is easier to initiate than close projects. Under the business environment featured with economy turbulence, the performance of project closure will determine not only the profits of enterprise but also the satisfaction level of project stakeholders, which plays a critical role for future business opportunities.

Once decisions are made, a project should be officially initiated. All projects have risks. Within all the processes in a project life cycle, initiating process brings most risks to the project. Many projects fail because there are failure threats from the beginning of the projects. When these threats break out at the late period of the projects, there is nothing project managers can do.

We live in an era of great revolution. As a result, a number of new products emerged, which brings new kinds of experience and achievements. At the same time, depression and failure is accompanied. Both “deep reform” and “continuous innovation” place emphasis on changes. Many people, especially senior executives of enterprises, are struggling with the paradox of failure with or without changes. Projects exist for dealing with changes. It provides a way of surviving and developing to accommodate these challenges.

In this changing era, business opportunities go away quickly without notice. This presents significant challenges to every single project manager to accomplish the expected objectives within limited period of time.

It is common that multiple enterprises participate in the same project. These enterprises come together for their own objectives. They might collaborate or betray each other at any time. The strategies they adopt depend on the benefits the strategies can bring. Further, each individual enterprise that participates in the same project has other projects undergoing at the same time. There are limited resources in enterprises. Therefore, enterprises must consider how to assign the limited resources to different projects. It will be disappointing if enterprises simply treat project boundaries as the management scope, and ideally think project resources are provided indefinitely where projects can be managed by project managers through authorities and contracts.

The project conflicts are viewed as various contradictions existing in project managements. There would be no projects without conflicts. In other words, projects are born with conflicts. Ubiquitous conflicts consist in both classic project aims, such as time limit, cost and quality, and expectations of the project stakeholders. Therefore, project managers are the managers of conflicts to some degree. If you want to manage conflicts well, you would be required to know the sources and features of the conflicts, catch principal contradictions and principal aspects of the conflict, and find approaches to solve conflicts through internal and external relationships of things.

Communication is the most important project management skill. Project manager’s main duty is to communicate with project stakeholders. To some extent, the success of the project depends on the effectiveness of communication among project stakeholders. Similarly, if the company’s management is not so good, the company can offset that by strengthening the effective communication skills.

“Team” is one of the most popular words in today’s corporate operations. Two decades ago, since there were very few companies ever applying the concept of team and its mode into operation, it became a hot topic when some industry giants such as Volvo, Toyota, and General Food pioneered to do so. Since then, team has been becoming a focus among industry sectors and nonprofit organizations. Even Bill Clinton had set up team development trainings for his major administrators when he was the President of the USA. In academia, research on team building has been drawing an increasing attention.

According to Standish Group, a specialized research institution on project management, only 30 % of projects could achieve project objectives in terms of key performance indicators such as schedule, budget, and quality. However, the survey revealed that more than 90 % of respondents were not satisfied with performance management approaches. Thus, it is urgent and critical to improve the project performance management.

Project scope refers to the work to be completed for achieving the project objectives. This is an era that demands are changing constantly and customers perceive that it is their rights to change their demands. As a result, it is more challenging to control the project scope where more creativity is required.