But we still know little about how such Project Capabilities may be efficiently developed in PBOs.
Our study analyses how a project-based firm, 'Global Engineering', builds new project capabilities for digital delivery through work on three major road and railway infrastructure projects.
Project capabilities have been described in the literature as the appropriate knowledge, experience and skills to perform pre-bid, bid and project execution activities.
This paper explores the relationship between the organizational configurations PBOs adopt, and the effectiveness with which they develop their project capabilities.
The Special Forces context provides a particularly interesting illustration of how to build Project Capabilities over time, to the extent that they have been carrying out successfully multiple projects in extreme contexts for more than 60 years.
To overcome this differentiation/integration dilemma, the recent literature suggests that PBOs must develop Project Capabilities, defined as the internal ability of a PBO to create lasting performance based on multiple short term projects.
Their cross- case comparison and discussion of emerging findings in light of the extant literature suggest that the divisionalization inherent in multi-business-unit PBOs influences negatively their effectiveness in developing project capabilities.
Our study thus provides insight into how project-based firms build project capabilities for the digital delivery of complex projects in order to remain competitive in their existing markets, and has broader implications for learning in the project ecologies associated with these projects.
In order to contribute to the capabilities perspective on PBOs, this paper proposes to approach Project Capabilities building processes as a multi-level and dynamic process, and offers as an illustration the case of a very specific PBO — the French Special Forces (SF).
We argue that creating relative stability enables firms to use existing, and build new, project capabilities, and hence aligning and reconciling are important to project-based firms in environments where there is high interdependence across heterogeneous firms and rapid technological change.
