Managerial complexity in process industrial R&D projects

Process industries often have features that differ from other businesses, such as round-the-clock production and costly and specialized production processes--features that have not been dealt with in the project management literature. From a study of papers in project management journals published between 2000 and 2008, the paper concludes that generational project management research can be divided into four major categories: project management practice and perspectives; project performance; project success factors; and project complexity. This study is based on an inductive approach, and it explores how development work is conducted in the Swedish process industry. It also provides insight into the complexity of R&D projects in the process industry; that is, to describe the complexity consisting of interrelated parts in R&D projects and the requirements this complexity imposes on the project managers.