Are Blockchain-based Systems the Future of Project Management? A Preliminary Exploration

Abstract

Blockchain technologies have introduced a platform for a new wave of project management systems, providing managers with a range of characteristics, capabilities, and feature sets to aid their practice as they engage in increasingly complex processes and projects. This paper presents an explorative case-study in which open-ended interviews were conducted with practicing project managers. The interviews are analysed to understand currently deployed project management tools, technologies, and methods and to contextualise how blockchain-based systems may allow for improvements. Five constructs emerge: transparency, control, dynamic status updating, incentives, and trust. Feedback suggests blockchain-based alternatives could offer significantly better performance within each of these constructs, and thus should be explored as the technological backbone to the next generation of project management systems.

Construction payment automation using blockchain-enabled smart contracts and robotic reality capture technologies

“…Transparency: the blockchain's traceability feature fosters collaboration among AEC stakeholders (Altay and Motawa 2020), and it helps increase the trust in the data used in construction management applications (Shojaei et al 2019;Turk and Klinc 2017). This increased trust and transparency are argued by few studies to be the key features that make the technology appealing to construction practitioners (Hamma-adama et al 2020;McNamara and Sepasgozar 2018;Renwick and Tierney 2020). A case study of permissioned and public blockchain finds this value proposition to be particularly of importance in projects where stakeholders are geographically distant, and it is hard to naturally establish (Yang et al 2020).…”