Information systems and change in project based organizations

Abstract Companies in highly competitive environments often adopt project management practices to manage their processes and activities in a quest to leverage flexibility. Doing so these companies usually become project based organizations (PBO). This paper aims to design new ways how PBOs respond to change and adapt their project based organization model. This paper adopts an action research methodology and explores the case of a company that faced several environment challenges and so was obliged to change its organizational and information systems processes. From the observed challenges and results, it became obvious that a PBO needs to implement portfolio, program and project management processes and adapt them to volatile business environments. The studied longitudinal case proves that information systems have a crucial role to support the PBO processes as part of an effective change process.