Temporality in Organization Studies: Implications for Strategic Project Management

Project managers require temporal skills and the ability to improvise when linear assumptions confront the complexities of managing projects within a context of strategic calculation. While the management and organization (MOS) literature emphasizes the importance of temporal skills for managing uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity, a dearth of project management literature contributes to this discussion. By reviewing literature on time in MOS and linking it to the field of project management we seek to make an initial bridge of this gap and argue that in order to improvise project managers need temporal skills. Project management practitioners and researchers work with assumptions of what constitutes normal time and linearity in projects, despite the variety of situations and events faced in projects. Practitioners, students and researchers in project management need to develop more sophisticated temporal skills to deal with a variety of projects, situations and events strategically.