This seminar is being presented in conjunction with the Major Projects Observatory.
***M.Sc. Students, this event can count towards one of the six mandatory Research Seminars Series needed to attend (MHS6991 or MGT6991).***
Jeffrey K. Pinto, PhD
Project management has historically existed as a discipline with deep roots but modest coverage, particularly in the business literature. Part of the reason for this disconnect from more traditional business school majors and departments is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of projects and project management as a critical means for providing value. We see the disconnect most clearly – and ironically – in the manner that corporate strategy is often taught and researched, in which great attention is paid to managing the strategic “front-end” while virtually ignoring implementation. That is, textbooks on strategic management routinely devote the majority of their content to the process of internal and external environmental scanning, strategy formulation, and the application of variety of competitive models. Typically, the actual process of strategy implementation has been less well understood or studied from a strategic or practical perspective. Projects, which have been described as “the building blocks of strategy,” are the principle means by which broader corporate strategies are implemented and their effectiveness evaluated. This lecture will address the critical “strategy/project” nexus, arguing that project management, as a continually developing discipline, provides several keys to better understanding the process of successful strategy formulation and implementation. Understood in tandem with strategic initiatives, we will examine the manner in which examples of project management successes and failures offer a means for deeper investigation of the scanning-formulation-implementation model.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jeffrey K. Pinto is the Andrew Morrow and Elizabeth Lee Black Chair in the Management of Technology in the Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State University, the Behrend College. He is the lead faculty member for Penn State’s Master of Project Management program. The author or editor of 28 books and over 200 scientific papers that have appeared in a variety of academic and practitioner journals, books, conference proceedings, video lessons, and technical reports, Dr. Pinto’s work has been translated into ten languages. He is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences and has served as keynote speaker and as a member of organizing committees for a number of international events, including three Project Management Institute research conferences. Dr. Pinto served as Editor of the Project Management Journal from 1990 to 1996. With over 25 years’ experience in the field of project management, Dr. Pinto is a two-time recipient of the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute (1997, 2001) for outstanding service to the project management profession. He received PMI’s Research Achievement Award in 2009 for outstanding contributions to project management research. In 2017, he was honored with the International Project Management Association’s Research Achievement Award for his research career in project management. One of the most frequently cited scholars in the field of project management, Dr. Pinto has consulted widely in North America and Europe on a variety of topics and he has written a best-selling college textbook, Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage, published by Prentice-Hall and currently in its fifth edition. With Dr. Ray Venkataraman, he is the author of a second textbook, Operations Management: Managing Global Supply Chains, published by Sage and currently in its second edition.
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