Project organization: Exploring its adaptation properties

Firms investing in project organization often do so in order to become more flexible, adaptable and customer-oriented. This promotes the question of whether there are specific properties of project organization, which contribute to instilling such capabilities in a firm, and if so, what managers could do in order to bring them on board. I discuss how certain project organization features may be conducive to that end, and suggest that project-level processes display features of an evolutionary learning process, with pre-selection, variation and retention as distinguishable process steps. Similarly, at higher levels within project-based firms, projects can be used as experiments within trial-and-error based strategic learning. A case study of a project-based firm is used to illustrate the propositions and managerial implications put forward.