Building Options at Project Front-End Strategizing: The Power of Capital Design for Evolvability

CHAPTER 2

Literature Review

This doctoral research combines two main literature streams that have remained largely disparate in prior work: Literature on the management of capital projects and on real options. The combination of these two research streams was suitable to research ways to improve the quality of project front-end strategizing, a notion core to the management of capital projects (Morris, 1994, 2011). The literature on the management of major projects sheds light on the importance of investing early on in front-end strategizing to reduce unproductive design iterations (Gil, Tommelein, & Schruben, 2006; Morris, 1994). It also elucidates the fuzzy nature of front-end strategizing where project teams develop narratives and make key ...