Coordinating work in the repair and modification of offshore production systems -The role of the project manager

We have over the years followed up the coordination work associated with engineering challenges that involves collaboration across boundaries, i.e. different engineering disciplines and companies. In most of these projects the practitioners involved had to balance the degree of uncertainty, between having a highly confirmatory shared syntax vs. handling an increasing degree of novelty and uncertainty. The consequence of this degree of novelty will influence the coordination practices. Confirmatory routine work requires a different approach than a creative problem solving process. In our situation this field evolves around those customers in an operational setting that need engineering services whether in the form of modifications and repair vs. those that provide the needed vendor services and competence to modify or repair the customer equipment. The engineers are organized across boundaries of which are partly company internal and partly company external. The work tasks of the engineers are knowledge intensive as they have to diagnose the problem, develop an appropriate solution and manage the actual repair and modification. There is a substantial amount of shared practice that eases this project management process. However, across these situations and boundaries, the engineers have different skills, experience, professional and organizational identities. In short there will be differences in syntax and interpretations. Some work is routine based other activities are more novel. The approach to develop a shared understanding and to approach a problem will differ across the boundaries. To address this complex coordination challenge, project managers work on behalf of the customer to plan and execute the modification and repair. The situation we address is where the project manager executes his/her role within a dominating syntax. This means that the project manager operate in a space where he/she has the possibility to use this syntactic dominance in the coordination of the other partners.