Project resilience: a conceptual framework

Abstract

Resilience is a novel but promising concept in project management studies. Resilience thinking can help projects maintain their performance through flexible, systemic and context-specific approaches once faced with disruptive events. That said, the main goal of this paper is to advance an interdisciplinary understanding of project resilience by proposing a definition and a conceptual framework of this concept. To achieve this article's objectives the literature on project risk management is first reviewed to identify current research effort and limitations of dealing with disruptions. Consecutively, the concept of resilience in its broader applicability is explored where two dimensions are sieved; awareness and adaptive capacity. The literature on the new concept of project resilience is also scrutinized where its novel nature, the lack of scientific studies to conceptualize it, and its significance to project management are demonstrated. These facts helped propose a definition and a conceptual framework of project resilience, where a set of relationships are instigated, which constitute a base line to perform further disquisitions to assess their validity. Implications for future contributions advocate conceptual exchanges with more advanced research fields (e.g. organizational resilience). These exchanges can assist in the development of indicators to evaluate the ability of projects to deal with disruptive events and enhance their resilience.

Keywords

• project risk management
• resilience
• project resilience
• awareness
• adaptive capacity
• recovery