Defining the Project Mission

The identification of a clear mission for the project is widely considered to be essential for the effective management of projects—indeed it can be considered one of the five principal project management processes (Winch 2000). However, the complexity of client organizations and the social, economic, and regulatory environments in which they operate, coupled with the absence of adequate quantitative project appraisal tools, means that the strategic definition of the project mission is inevitably politicized, and many project missions are the outcomes of complex negotiations and trade-offs (Winch 2002). The case studies by Hall (1980) show how decision-making around public sector projects is a complex trade-off between political, social, and economic interests, while Law and Callon (1992) pun the description of the TSR2 aircraft as a "variable geometry" aircraft due to the way in which it meant different things to different stakeholders. More recently, such a trade-off has become even more difficult with the emergence of principled opposition on environmental grounds and the consequent placing of the legitimacy of existing fora for handling such decisions in question. In such cases the trade-off process itself can be a major project management exercise in its own right, as the planning inquiry into London Heathrow's Terminal 5 shows.

These problems are, perhaps, most severe in the realm of the provision of public assets, because no clear economic criteria for the supply and distribution of such assets exist (Hall 1980, 189). Some projects, such as Mitterand's grands projets, appear to be entirely politically driven (Chaslin 1985). A recent development has been to privatize such projects through the development of concession contracting, which in turn has led to the recent rapid increase in the project finance market. The effect of this is that financiers become direct stakeholders in the management of the project, and the allocation of risks associated with the project, a matter for complex negotiation (Beidleman, Fletcher, and Veshosky 1990).

Purely private sector projects face similar problems. The context of the Eagle technology project was politicized within Data General, as the company moved its research and development functions from Boston to North Carolina (Kidder 1982). Kodak's Factory of the Future project was abandoned as a coherent vision that met the interests of all the stakeholders but could not be articulated (Bowen et al. 1994). The London Stock Exchange's Taurus project threatened the very existence of the registrars who keep records of share deals by proposing a central register. A compromise reached in 1989 provided for a decentralized system, but at the cost of a much higher level of complexity. Regulatory demands for high levels of security and opposition from small stockbrokers who feared the system would reinforce the dominance of the large banks led to its abandonment (Drummond 1996). As the former chief executive of the Stock Exchange stated, "Taurus meant an awful lot of different things to different people, it was the absolute lack of clarity as to its definition at the front that I think was its Achilles' heel" (Financial Times 3/7/95).

The purpose of this chapter is to present a methodology aimed at enabling the better understanding, and hence management, of the definition of a project's mission that explicitly addresses the inherently politicized nature of decision-making at this stage of the project life cycle. It therefore offers a complement to the better-known capital budgeting and cost-benefit analysis techniques that are frequently deployed to aid project definition. In essence, it addresses the generation of alternative definitions of the project mission, rather than the formal evaluation of the merits of alternatives. It is proposed that the methodology is most appropriately used at project inception. The use case is likely to be a small group-brain-storming session led by the client's project manager, organized with the objective of identifying possible opponents to the project who might be in a position to disrupt progress, thereby generating program and budget variances. The stakeholder map and power/interest matrix are proposed as tools for increasing the effectiveness of such sessions and facilitating the more rigorous analysis of the potential threats to the project.