Special Issues for PMA 2021 Conference

International Journal of Operations and Production Management

International Journal of Project Management

International Journal of Operations and Production Management

Welcome to a Brave New World

On the 17th of November 2019, the world changed, but at that moment in time, no one knew what COVID-19 was or was aware of the impact it was going to have on the global economy and the way we live our lives. This single event has changed what was already a very complex social and economic environment into something even more uncertain and unpredictable. Six month later, organisations right across the world are still having to reconfigure their operations to deal with the new situation. This event is extreme and unprecedented in living memory, but it does provide a unique opportunity to explore and understand the processes, practices and art of using performance measurement to manage operations and to effect change.

A reminder of the previous world

Even before the current crisis, the world was changing fast, and we were already at an inflection point. In differential calculus, an inflection point is a point on a continuous plane curve where the curve changes from being concave to convex or vice versa. When applied to business, a point of inflection denotes a period of significant change. It is a period in which past practices, perspectives, and frameworks are no longer as attractive or relevant. There is strong evidence to suggest that we are now at the next point of inflection in the development of performance measurement and management (PMM) systems - an accumulated effect of changes driven by increasingly more complex business environments. Indicative of this increasing complexity are the following major shifts:

A shift from a focus on cost to a focus on other dimensions of performance, including innovation, responsiveness, sustainability, resilience, and security (Melnyk et al., 2010).
The increasing importance of the customer.
An accelerating rate of change (due in part to rapid changes in technology).
The emergence of new media (e.g., social media) by which customers can make their pleasures (and displeasures) known and by which firms can better predict customer demands and attitudes.
An explosion of data (often referred to as big data) that begs to be analysed and used.
An increasing demand for better visibility and transparency within the supply chain.
A recognition that operations management and supply chains are now being viewed as strategic, rather than tactical, aspects of management.
Turbulent environments demanding that managers take action in the absence of "perfect information" and in the presence of considerable uncertainty (recognizing that proceeding on what could be seen as "poor" decisions has to be weighed against the potentially catastrophic consequences of failure to act).

Today's organizations find themselves embedded in social and natural systems characterized by unprecedented levels of complexity. Striving to grow and improve performance, they are having to deal with disruptive technologies, blurring organizational and market boundaries, shifting competitor and stakeholder landscapes, new distribution channels and rapidly changing customer needs. On top of this, they also need to contend with volatility fuelled by natural disasters, increasing political interventions in trade agreements and intellectual property, and growing threats in cybersecurity.

Such changes demand a re-examination of PMM theory and practice - the focus of this special issue. For this special issue we are looking for papers that help us understand the emerging theories and practices as management control at the heart of the traditional PMM paradigm evolves or is replaced.

Leading organization have always tried to keep pace with the changes in their environments, adapting their approach to performance measurement and management to meet the needs of the time. We have observed this happening to costing and management accounting systems during the emergence of factory production, vertically integrated manufacturing and multi-divisional enterprises at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries (Johnson, 1972, 1975, 1978, 1981). We have also observed this happening again in the late 1980s and early 1990s when outdated costing systems were replaced, and multi-dimensional measurement systems were developed and introduced - systems that enable companies to compete in a consumer-driven world (Johnson and Kaplan 1987; Neely et al 1995; Wilcox & Bourne, 2003). But we have moved on again and in this new world complexity, speed volatility and emergence is creating a challenge for managers as they endeavour to respond to changing demands in a timely fashion (Melnyk et al., 2014, 2017; Bititci et al., 2018)

The Focus of this Special Issue

Over the last 25 years, this journal has spearheaded the research into how organizations measure, manage, and improve performance. This research has moved from the creation of multi-dimensional frameworks (Neely et al., 1995) to exploring their effects in organizations (Pavlov and Bourne, 2011). Early research took the view that performance measurement and management (PMM) systems were needed to direct and control the organisation. Indeed, there has been a considerable focus on using PMM systems to enable the alignment of strategy and operations by cascading objectives, indicators, and targets (Hanson et al., 2011; Micheli and Mura, 2017). More often than not, such approaches have emphasised measurability, stability and controllability. However, the changes in business environments, as outlined in the preceding section, make it apparent that traditional approaches to measuring, managing, and improving performance are struggling to keep up with the change (Melnyk et al., 2014; Bourne et al., 2018; Bititci et al, 2018). These settings demand new ways of thinking that explicitly acknowledge the complexity, dynamism, interconnectedness, and the emergent nature of the challenges faced by organizations.

Prior work in operations management has gone some way towards recognizing these issues and proposing ways of understanding and theorizing complexity within and across organizations. This research has been carried out in multiple organizational settings, including supply chains (Choi et al, 2001; Surana et al, 2005; Turner et al, 2018; Bai & Sakis, 2019; Zhao et al, 2019), logistics (Nilsson & Darley, 2006), lean thinking (Saurin, 2013; Ferreira & Saurin, 2019), project management (Maylor and Turner, 2017), decision support systems (Baldwin et al., 2010), risk management (Jamshidi et al., 2016) and, indeed, performance measurement and management (Bourne et al., 2018).

Some studies have explicitly drawn on complexity theory, in its widest sense, with authors using concepts such as complex systems (Saurin, 2013; Ferreira & Saurin, 2019), complex adaptive systems (Zhao et al., 2019; Choi et al 2001; Surana et al, 2005; Nair & Reed-Tsochas, 2019), and evolutionary complex systems (Baldwin et al, 2010) to improve our understanding of organizations and their environments. Others have focused on complexity as a characteristic of organizations and projects, identifying and theorizing practices for managing complexity (Geraldi et al., 2011; Maylor and Turner, 2017; Turner et al., 2018).

More broadly, research in operations management has demonstrated that the emergent and unpredictable nature of modern organizations and their environments is the result of unanticipated variability, diversity of elements and their interactions (Saurin, 2013), the interaction between agents and their environment (Nair & Reed-Tsochas (2019) and the nature of the systems themselves (Bourne et al., 2018). As such, these environments are difficult to describe and understand, let alone manage and improve.

Within the literature, researchers have dealt with these challenges in one of three ways: (1) by proposing better tools and practices for dealing with complexity (e.g., Jamshidi et al, 2018; Nilsson & Darley, 2006; Zhao et al, 2019; Bai & Sakis, 2019); (2) reducing complexity (Maylor & Turner, 2017); and (3) introducing alternative perspectives, such as a "System of Systems" view (Bourne et al, 2018), and various guiding frameworks (Nair & Redd-Tsochas, 2019). However, although this work has created a platform for thinking about complexity, it has not focused specifically on PMM and its role in complex environments (Bourne et al., 2018 and Alexander et al., 2018 being notable exceptions).

Consequently, this has left underexplored crucial questions as to what performance actually means in a complex system and how we should think and go about measuring, managing, and improving it. For example, operating in complex settings may mean that prediction and control are exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, and therefore PMM systems and practices may need to emphasize learning, adaptation and interpretation, rather than alignment, optimization, and a relentless pursuit of "objective" performance data.

Given the nature of this change, we can build on previous research but, in the context of the current crisis, we must also understand the emerging management challenges and be open to new perspectives. Extreme situations require appropriately crafted solutions, and although many mistakes will be made, there will be some exceptional new approaches which should be captured and explored. Further, we must remember that "whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed." (Heisenberg, 1926). So, we are also looking for new theories and theoretical frameworks and lenses to make sense of this new world.

Management Accounting Research

2021 Performance Management Association (PMA) Conference & Special Issue of Management Accounting Research (MAR)

Performance Measurement in Dynamic Environments

The 2021 PMA Conference and related Special Issue of MAR welcome research on performance measurement and management in a dynamic environment. Whereas the conference aims to offer a stimulating opportunity to present and discuss novel work in this area, the Special Issue of MAR welcomes paper submissions on this theme both within and outside of the PMA Conference route.

A rich seam of prior work has highlighted and informed the need for performance measurement and evaluation systems to respond to external changes. Research suggests that there are several challenges in effectively designing and using these systems even in relatively stable environments, where an organization's activities are comparatively predictable and disruptions limited.

In a dynamic environment, designing effective performance management systems is inevitably even more challenging. The stream of research addressing this challenge is concerned with how performance measurement is or could be used in fast-moving environments. Technological disruptions; globalization (or recent impediments or reversals in some cases, such as 'reshoring' and 'slowbalization'); new forms of collaboration between organizations in supply chains and in broader networks of organizations; availability of more data through social media and the Internet of Things, are but examples of such challenging contexts.

There is a need for honing our knowledge to inform our understanding of the use of performance measurement and management in these settings. For this conference, our intent is to bring together studies at the leading edge of performance measurement and management. We are interested in the relationship between performance measurement and strategy; in the ways in which these systems operate in fluid and dynamic organizations; and how they are used in specific situations such as decision-making, monitoring, and control. We are also interested in different settings, both within and across organizations. Finally, we are interested in trends and developments, especially when conceptually engaged and connected with the literature.

Topics captured by this call include, but are not limited to:

The use of different types of performance measurement systems for decision making in dynamic environments.
The role or use and usefulness of big data, machine learning, and other advanced technologies in performance measurement and management systems.
Integrated performance measurement and risk management systems.
The role of performance measurement in corporate governance.
Performance measurement and management in supply chains and networks of organizations.
Performance measurement's relationship with trust, risk, and management control.
The use of technology and technological innovations in performance measurement systems, and how technology can help overcome the challenges of managing and controlling performance in dynamic environments.
Performance measurement and management to deal with dynamic tensions in organizations.
The measurement of service performance.
Data protection and data security-related issues of performance measurement and related safeguards/risks and regulatory concerns and compliance.
The predictive capacity of performance measurement systems.
The development and usage of performance measurement for organizational learning and, more generally, in capability development.
The role of performance measurement in transformation programs, especially where there is a major change in strategy.

We welcome studies drawing on any relevant theoretical source discipline and employing any relevant research method, including case/field studies, surveys, archival studies, experiments, ethnographic and historical papers, as well as strongly conceptual descriptive work or thought pieces.

The 2021 PMA Conference (www.pmaconference.co.uk) held virtually between June 28th to 30th, 2021. After the conference, authors are welcome to submit their papers for consideration in a special issue of Management Accounting Research. Whereas the conference aims to offer a stimulating environment to present and receive feedback on novel work on the theme of performance measurement in dynamic environments, the Special Issue of MAR also welcomes papers on this theme outside of the PMA Conference route.

Papers will be subject to MAR's normal review process. Papers should be submitted online via MAR's submission system (ees.elsevier.com/mar/default.asp), but once inside the system, follow a designated Special Issue track. This "Performance Measurement in Dynamic Environments" Special Issue track will open on the MAR submission website on November 30, 2020. We anticipate that this track will remain open for about 6-9 months. It helps if authors also mention their intention to have their paper considered for the Special Issue track in their cover letter.

Guest Editors for the Special Issue of MAR:

Paula van Veen-Dirks (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) - p.van.veen-dirks@rug.nl
Marc Wouters (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) - marc.wouters@kit.edu

Please contact them if you have any questions related to the special issue.

Although first published as regular articles in MAR, accepted papers on this Special Issue track will eventually be available as a Virtual Special Issue. This means that accepted papers considered for this Special Issue are published and citable on a timely basis before they appear together in a virtual special issue.

Measuring Business Excellence

Call for papers and dates to be confirmed

International Journal of Project Management

Project management is an applied discipline in which measuring individuals, activities and use of resources hold a central role ( Jonas, Kock & Gemunden, 2012 ; Laslo, 2010 ). The traditional notion of performance measurements in project management is that the measurement system represents one of the mechanisms of control ( Loch & Tapper, 2002 ). The idea is that performance measurement allows those working in the system to report if the project continues as estimated, exceeds expectations or is at a risk of failure. The system of performance measurements is seen as directing various controls to a managerial unit that can adjust the project so that it works better ( Pesamaa, 2017 ). The traditional project management approach of predict and control, however, moves away towards more process oriented approach of prepare and commit, which would be better suited in dynamic multi-actor environments ( Koppenjan, Veeneman, Van der Voort, Ten Heuvelhof & Leijten, 2011 ). And such stakeholders might have diverse perceptions on project performance ( Koops, Bosch-Rekveldt, Coman, Hertogh & Bakker, 2016 ).

As modern project management embraces a broad field of temporal managerial aspects, levels, roles, activities and systems - this also calls for new measurement that support better controls ( Jonas et al., 2012 ), better direction of control ( Pesamaa, 2017 ) and better coordination of controls ( Wang, Liu & Canel, 2018 ) while others show the importance of balancing control and flexibility ( Osipova & Eriksson, 2013) . A meta study on research in the field of project management identified 'performance management' as one of the core areas for further development ( Padalkar & Gopinath, 2016 ). More recent research has focused on the role of performance measurement towards trust based models emphasizing responsibility to reach designated shared goals rather than stressing continuous assessments and controls whether projects actually are on the way to reach goals ( Gregory, Beck & Keil, 2013 ; Williams et al., 2019 ).

However, there have been criticisms of performance measurement ( Franco-Santos & Otley, 2018 ). Despite sophisticated measurement and control systems, many projects continue to fail or don't deliver the expected benefits. For instance, Wang and Pitsis (2020) argue that, although we have good estimates of how well or bad projects perform, we know less about why many not achieve certain performance measures. Thus, given the complexity of the project environment, people are beginning to question whether this traditional use of measurement for control purposes works. Does measurement of activity and progress have meaning when the ultimate goal is not clear or the way it is to be delivered is uncertain? How do we deal with emergence, both in terms of technical issues that were not understood at the outset and in terms of emerging requirements that present as the project unfolds? Should performance measurement be better conceptualized as a guiding and learning mechanism rather than a pure control system?

Recent publications hint on developing new performance measurement systems ( Bourne, Franco-Santos, Micheli & Pavlov, 2018 ; De Rooij, Janowicz-Panjaitan & Mannak, 2019 ), the link between performance measurement and prediction of performance ( Chen, 2015 ), the multi-project control practice ( Laine, Korhonen & Suomala, 2020) , highlighting the research gaps present. Moving towards this end, there is a need for a describing, exploring, understanding and explaining the approach to and effectiveness of performance measurement under different conditions and context. We need to understand both financial-, and non-financial measures that capture the temporal characteristics of a project organization, their use in project settings and how they support or hinder the delivery of project outcomes and benefits.

This call for papers invites authors to submit papers that consider various aspects of performance measurement in projects and project management. The special issue especially encourages papers from various industries, sectors, countries and using approaches that enable evidencing practices but also captures performance and consequences. Particularly we invite those presenting at the 2021 Performance Measurement Association conference ( PMA, 2021 ) in Groningen, Netherlands to submit. We also warmly invite other papers within this area to submit proposals directly (see guidelines below). While methodological pluralism is encouraged, note that IJPM does not publish mathematical methods and demonstrations. While we welcome conventional research design, we also encourage authors to go beyond traditional designs such as case studies and surveys Project management is an applied discipline and thus we are expecting applied approaches that view performance management in novel and different ways. We expect a strong anchoring of the paper in project management. The papers also need a strong theory and a strong theoretical underpinning.

1. Potential topics
Topics welcome but not excluding is:

New and novel theoretical perspectives on performance management in projects;
Performance management for societal impact of projects;
Performance measurement and management in projects and programs as temporary organizations;
Performance measurement and management in specific projects such as long term and mega-projects; repetitive projects; public sector projects; partnership projects; infrastructure projects; organizational development projects; new product development projects; energy projects; etcetera;
Performance measurement and management of project personnel or teams;
Project performance and the relationship to investments;
Performance measurement and management in project governance;
Performance management, stakeholder engagement and co-creation;
Performance measurement systems in project management;
Performance measurement for sustainable project management;
Performance measurement and the impact of control innovativeness and innovative outcomes in project management;
Applied case studies or other kind of empirical studies that show usefulness of performance measurement in project management or the adverse consequences.

The proposed list may not fully cover interesting ongoing research projects that uses the perspective of project management. Other approaches, ideas and proposals that relate to this topic are thus encouraged. A selected number of papers will be published in International Journal of Project Management.

2. Process and key dates
Authors should first submit a max 1000-words proposal to get feedback about the suitability of the topic for the specific issue. Please submit proposals directly to Ossi Pesamaa (ossi.pesamaa@ltu.se). Upon proposal acceptance, full papers must be submitted online at https://www.journals.elsevier.com/international-journal-ofproject-management/-N "Submit your paper" carefully following the Guide for Authors. Submitted papers will be subject to the ordinary IJPM doubleblind review process with multiple reviewers. For questions, please contact the guest editors.

Proposal submission deadline: 31st March 2021.
Selected proposals invited for full paper submission: 30th June 2021.
Full paper submission deadline: 31st October 2021.
Notifications to authors after review: Jan 2022.
Revisions and final acceptance decisions: Spring 2022.
Expected publication: Summer 2022.

Declaration of Competing Interest
None

References
Bourne, M. , Franco-Santos, M. , Micheli, P. , & Pavlov, A. (2018). Performance measurement and management: A system of systems perspective. International Journal of Production Research, 56 (8), 2788-2799 .
Chen, H. L. (2015). Performance measurement and the prediction of capital project failure. International Journal of Project Management, 33 (6), 1393-1404 .
De Rooij, M. M. , Janowicz-Panjaitan, M. , & Mannak, R. S. (2019). A configurational explanation for performance management systems' design in project-based organizations. International Journal of Project Management, 37 (5), 616-630 .
Franco-Santos, M. , & Otley, D. (2018). Reviewing and theorizing the unintended consequences of performance management systems. International Journal of Management Reviews, 20 (3), 696-730 .
Gregory, R. W. , Beck, R. , & Keil, M. (2013). Control balancing in information systems development offshoring projects. MIS Quarterly, 37 (4), 1211-1232 .
Jonas, D. , Kock, A. , & Gemunden, H. G. (2012). Predicting project portfolio success by measuring management quality A longitudinal study. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 60 (2), 215-226 .
Koops, L. , Bosch-Rekveldt, M. , Coman, L. , Hertogh, M. , & Bakker, H. (2016). Identifying perspectives of public project managers on project success: Comparing viewpoints of managers from five countries in North-West Europe. International Journal of Project Management, 34 (5), 874-889 .
Koppenjan, J. , Veeneman, W. , Van der Voort, H. , Ten Heuvelhof, E. , & Leijten, M. (2011). Competing management approaches in large engineering projects: The Dutch RandstadRail project. International Journal of Project Management, 29 (6), 740-750 .
Laine, T. , Korhonen, T. , & Suomala, P. (2020). The dynamics of repairing multi-project control practice: A project governance viewpoint. International Journal of Project Management. In press .
Laslo, Z. (2010). Project portfolio management: An integrated method for resource planning and scheduling to minimize planning/scheduling-dependent expenses. International Journal of Project Management, 28 (6), 609-618 .
Loch, C. H. , & Tapper, U. A. S. (2002). Implementing a strategy-driven performance measurement system for an applied research group. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 19 (3), 185-198 .
Padalkar, M. , & Gopinath, S. (2016). Six decades of project management research: Thematic trends and future opportunities. International Journal of Project Management, 34 (7), 1305-1321 .
PMA, 2021 https://www.pmaconference.co.uk/pma2020index.html .
Osipova, E. , & Eriksson, P. E. (2013). Balancing control and flexibility in joint risk management: Lessons learned from two construction projects. International Journal of Project Management, 31 (3), 391-399 .
Pesamaa, O. (2017). Personnel-and action control in gazelle companies in Sweden. Journal of Management Control, 28 (1), 107-132 .
Wang, A. , & Pitsis, T. S. (2020). Identifying the antecedents of megaproject crises in China. International Journal of Project Management, 38 , 327-339 .
Wang, Y. , Liu, Y. , & Canel, C. (2018). Process coordination, project attributes and project performance in offshore-outsourced service projects. International Journal of Project Management, 36 (7), 980-991 .
Williams, T. , Vo, H. , Bourne, M. , Bourne, P. , Cooke-Davies, T. , Kirkham, R. , et al. (2019). A cross-national comparison of public project benefits management practices - The effectiveness of benefits management frameworks in application. Production Planning and Control, 31 (8), 644-659.

International Journal of Operations and Production Management

Welcome to a Brave New World

A reminder of the previous world

The Focus of this Special Issue

Suggested Topic Areas

Management Accounting Research

2021 Performance Management Association (PMA) Conference & Special Issue of Management Accounting Research (MAR)

Performance Measurement in Dynamic Environments

Measuring Business Excellence

International Journal of Project Management

PMA 2021 - Performance Measurement and Management in Dynamic Environments