Management of flexibility in projects

Project managers are challenged to keep their projects focused and at the same time support their organisation’s need to adapt to changes and uncertainty in the business environment. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the dynamics related to project flexibility, both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. To ensure the efficiency of the project organisations, flexibility is usually not desired in the late phases of projects. The projects in this study often applied flexibility even during these phases, usually based on initiatives from project owners or users. It is paradoxical that while flexibility was frequently needed in the studied projects, it was rarely prepared for. As a consequence, structured approaches to project flexibility management are called for. The study indicates that the opinion on project flexibility held by the involved stakeholders can to a large extent be explained by their incentives related to the projects. The empirical results in this paper are based on a multi-case study covering 18 projects.