Projects tend to have a complicated life (or “behavior”) of their own with plenty of out-turns, going off track, and, in the end, targets set may be realized anywhere but on target, from near misses to near hits. Therefore, the project behavior phenomenon abounds in project management theory and practice. However, while scholars see the need to understand project challenges within the context of project behavior, they fail to follow the trail to its defining principles. Against this backdrop, this handbook focuses on the observance of the project behavior phenomenon in which there are systematic deviations between project initiation and execution. This introductory chapter explains what project behavior is and why it matters for project management scholars and practitioners alike. It reviews the key principles of project behavior and how they each connect to project complexity, risk, uncertainty, and performance, from both a scholarly and practical standpoint. It provides not only a historical context for the different theories of project behavior but a typology. As well, it offers a summary of the chapters in the handbook and discusses how they advance project behavior theory and practice.

This chapter presents a longitudinal process study of an information systems project and suggests that a hierarchy of sub-projects that belong to the same overall project may trigger unfavorable project behavior. Our findings indicate that project managers run the risk of “balancing” divergent evaluations of sub-projects via an averaging rule, which in turn leads to an overestimation of the overall project performance and consequently negatively impacting project behavior. Based on our case-study findings, we develop a process model explaining the dynamic relationship between hierarchical project structures, managerial decisions, and project behavior. Interestingly, this research shows how hierarchical project structures may hinder rather than support complex task execution, a finding that could help explain the erroneous decision making often observed in troubled projects.

Projects are prone to a variety of sudden unexpected disruptions across their development cycle, requiring that effective organizations develop strategies for proactively recognizing disruption likelihood and swiftly responding to these events. We explore a hierarchy of responses to disruption and propose an “antifragile hierarchy” in which four key responses to project disruption are demonstrated (Fragile, Robust, Resilient, and Antifragile), with a range of strategies available for addressing these disruptions. Each behavior will produce different outcomes for a project, ranging from irretrievable value loss to considerable value gain. Finally, we offer a set of strategies for effectively responding to disruptions to promote antifragility in projects.

This chapter addresses the impact of governance on project behavior from an intra-organizational and an inter-organizational perspective. It starts by introducing governance fundamentals, like principles, approaches, standards, and paradigms, and subsequently describes the implications of these fundamentals for project behavior. Four behavior types are identified based on projects’ teleological, deontological, introvert, and extravert behavior. The inter-organizational view introduces a three-layered model for the governance of inter-organizational networks for large and megaprojects. This addresses multi-layer governance at the levels of a) network governance (i.e., for a single project), b) governance of networks (i.e., for the network of networks for several projects of a firm), and c) metagovernance (i.e., the investor’s ground rules for governance). The reader benefits from the discussion on the impact of these layers on project behavior, from understanding the impact of governance complexity on project behavior, and the practical examples given throughout the text.