While projects have traditionally been viewed as means to deliver specific outputs against a predefined scope, they are now increasingly conceptualized as agent of changes for value creation (Laursen et al., 2016; Martinsuo et el., 2019; Vuorinen et al., 2019). Notably, shifting the attention from product to value creation (Winter and Szczepanek, 2008) implies taking multiple dimensional perspective of value (Doloi, 2018) beyond the purely short-term economical dimension. Value is perceived differently among project stakeholders (Liu et al., 2019) and evolves across the project (and product) lifecycle (Eppinger et al., 2021). Indeed, value in complex projects is jointly created by the participating stakeholders but it also includes long-term benefits for society and the environment (Laursen, 2018).

Over the past decade, academics and practitioners developed a plethora of tools and techniques to assess and manage value. “Value Management” is a blanket term that covers a broad range of techniques spanning from value planning to value engineering and value analysis. “Value Management” can equip stakeholders to maximize project value across concept, definition, implementation and operation phases of a project. It encompasses a set of systematic and logical procedures and techniques to enhance project value through the life of the infrastructure.

Typically, the project’s sponsors, within the front-end of a complex project (such as the building of a stadium), identify the business problem or opportunities (e.g., change in regulations, growth in turnover linked to large events), define a possible solution (e.g., construction of a larger stadium), identify possible clients (e.g., municipality), primary stakeholders (e.g. equity and debt holders, suppliers and contractors) and secondary stakeholders (e.g., local authorities, unions, local communities), and investigate their interests and influences (e.g. Football clubs may be interested in hi-tech facilities, environmental activists may negatively influence the public opinion about the construction of the new stadium). Furthermore, project’s sponsors plan actions to predict, measure and guide value exchanges among the stakeholders involved during all the phases of the project and to deliver the solution (e.g., new stadium) to the customers, and allocate the required funding to proceed.

However, in the New Space Economy context, the development of a new infrastructure (e.g. satellite constellation) the value exchange cannot be easily assessed in a traditional way. Indeed, new actors bringing in technologies and knowledge from other industries are involved since the early stages of the infrastructure development, the space agencies are no more the primary client of the project, and the space infrastructure has to be valuable for new, often unknown, end-customers in the long run exceeding the mere economic return and including other tangible and intangible values. To grasp the extent of the change taking place, take the development of the NAVSTAR GPS infrastructure as an example. Developed and built by the US Department of Defense (USDOD) for military purposes with an initial investment of $12 billion, once opened to civilian services, it revolutionized mobility globally by favouring the valuable birth of new businesses and services that leverage on the GPS infrastructure for free (e.g., UBER, Deliveroo). Therefore, project’s sponsors are in urgency to assess the value exchange among the project stakeholders to guarantee a positive return on the investment and to prevent from possible future value losses.

In this regard, starting from the “Value Management” existing literature, the adoption of models and theories which shed light on the complexity of value exchange in complex projects has to be investigated. Accordingly, the student(s) can decide whether to pursue one of the two bibliographic theses listed below that deal with one or more of the reported questions:

Thesis 1) – Value Management in Engineering Management: a taxonomy

• RQ) What is the state of the art of the Value Management methods/approaches discussed in the Engineering Management body of knowledge?
  (What the scientific community knows and agrees, what is discussed, what has not yet been studied)

Expected output: Taxonomy of Value Management methods in Engineering Management (methods, application domain, theoretical and practical domain, quantitative/qualitative approach, etc.)

Thesis 2) – Value Management in Project Management: a taxonomy

• RQ1) What is the state of the art of the Value Management methods/approaches discussed in the Project Management body of knowledge?
• RQ2) Which methods/approaches are used to identify/quantify value in projects?
  For each method: key references, applicability, strengths, weaknesses, inputs/outputs, empirical evidence, etc.
• RQ3) To what extent these methods can be used to manage value in complex projects when value and stakeholders are not fully defined?

Expected output: Taxonomy of Value Management methods in Project Management (methods, application domain, theoretical and practical domain, quantitative/qualitative approach, etc.)

Ideally, to work on this dissertation, a student should be enrolled in the “Complex Project Business” major or at least have the exam of “Project Management” in his/her curriculum

Further Material

Allee, V. (2008). Value network analysis and value conversion of tangible and intangible assets. Journal of Intellectual Capital, 9(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1108/14691930810845777

Allee, V. (2009). Value-creating networks: Organizational issues and challenges. Learning Organization, 16(6), 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1108/09696470910993918

Cameron, B. G. (2007) ‘Value Network Modeling’, Engineering, p. 169.

Collopy, P. D., & Hollingsworth, P. M. (2011). Value-driven design. Journal of Aircraft, 48(3), 749–759. https://doi.org/10.2514/1.C000311

Doloi, H. (2018) ‘Community-Centric Model for Evaluating Social Value in Projects’, Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 144(5), p. 04018019. doi: 10.1061/(ASCE)CO.1943-7862.0001473.

Eppinger, S. D. et al. (2021) ‘Improving the systems engineering process with multilevel analysis of interactions’. doi: 10.1017/S089006041400050X.

Kannan, H., Bloebaum, C. L., & Mesmer, B. L. (2016). Incorporation of Risk Preferences in a Value-Based Systems Engineering Framework for a Satellite System. https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2016-0681

Laursen, M. (2018) ‘Project Networks as Constellations for Value Creation’, Project Management Journal, 49(2), pp. 56–70.

Laursen, M. and Svejvig, P. (2016) ‘Taking stock of project value creation: A structured literature review with future directions for research and practice’, International Journal of Project Management, 34(4), pp. 736–747. doi: 10.1016/j.ijproman.2015.06.007

Liu, Y., et al. (2019) ‘The co-creation of values-in-use at the front end of infrastructure development programs’, International Journal of Project Management, 37(5), pp. 684–695. doi: 10.1016/j.ijproman.2019.01.013.

Martinsuo, M., Klakegg, O. J. and van Marrewijk, A. (2019) ‘Editorial: Delivering value in projects and project-based business’, International Journal of Project Management, 37(5), pp. 631–635. doi: 10.1016/j.ijproman.2019.01.011.

Potts, M. W., Sartor, P., Johnson, A., & Bullock, S. (2019). A network perspective on assessing system architectures: Foundations and challenges. Systems Engineering, 22(6), 485–501. https://doi.org/10.1002/sys.21519

Sutherland, T. A., Cameron, B. G. and Crawley, E. F. (2012) ‘Program goals for the NASA/NOAA Earth observation program derived from a stakeholder value network analysis’, Space Policy, 28(4), pp. 259–269. doi: 10.1016/j.spacepol.2012.09.007.

Winter, M. and Szczepanek, T. (2008) ‘Projects and programmes as value creation processes: A new perspective and some practical implications’, International Journal of Project Management, 26(1), pp. 95–103. doi: 10.1016/j.ijproman.2007.08.015.