Categorising Industrialisation Projects : Tailoring Project Management Based on Project Characteristics

Today’s manufacturing companies face numerous challenges related to an increase in productupdates. These challenges can be a concern to the industrialisation process and its relatedproject methodology. Project managers within industrialisation must, for example, deal with anincreased number of project sizes and scopes which puts strain on the project methodology’sflexibility. A strategy to deal with these concerns is to adopt an agile approach to work. Byusing an agile work methodology, companies can manage projects in a more flexible manner,to embrace the ongoing changes related to frequent product updates. The research was inspired by a case study design where several industrialisation projects wereinvestigated to gain insight into the driving forces of industrialisation projects to be able tocategorise them. The data was collected through interviews and document studies. The study identified four main themes with the help of a thematic analysis. These themes weredefined as, Project lead time, Product change, Process change, and Software change. Thedriving forces identified were supported by the document studies and the theoretical frameworkto create an industrialisation project categorisation framework. The framework was analysed inconnection to project categorisation limitations and agility where it was seen as a precursor tostandardisation and agile project management. However, a lack of reliability within thecategorisation framework indicates room for improvement before a possible implementation. This study helps to shed light on the importance of project categorisation and its connection toagile project management. Given the similarities between the developed framework and othercategorisation frameworks, it is likely that it could be applicable, to some extent, in otherenvironments. It is however important for the categorisation to be practically and nottheoretically oriented.