Project management as skilful performance: Animating and enchanting collaborative work in distributed projects

This paper synthesizes a praxeological perspective that emphasises the performative, sociomaterial, and socio-affective character of IS project work and its management. This enlarged conception of project management is developed in relation to a rich empirical study of collaboration in the context of a distributed project. The paper identifies four important practices anchoring, attending, admitting, and advancing, which provide insights into the complex and challenging nature of project collaborations and relationships development. These insights suggest that project management demands a practical mastery of the practices that cultivate, steer and craft collaborative engagements. This approach, therefore, points to the importance of attending to the enactment and performative power of these practices in specific sites of project work. The paper contributes to the IS project management area in uncovering relational and socio-affective dimension of project work and illuminating the relevant project management skills as a craft that requires high levels of mastery of some distinctive generative practices.