Joana Geraldi

Presentation

The number and relevance of projects is growing at a staggering pace. This phenomena transformed organizations and is today changing the nature of social and economic action in society. Accompanying this development is the need to organize for projects, and to theorize about it. I study human and organizational behaviour in projects and develop behaviour-centric organizational contexts for projects.

I am Project Studies scholar, that is, I am part of the research community that studies projects, programs and portfolios. My empirical contexts are in projects and project organizing across different industrial contexts, in particular, large engineering projects, IT, construction and wind industries. My research earned international awards and led to over 50 publications, most of which in the key project journals and conferences.

In the recent years, I came to recognise the relevant of decisions and behaviours in decisions to projects, and have since studied how decisions happen in projects, and how objects, and in particular, visualizations, can inform (and misinform) decisions.

Primary research areas

• Project organizing
• Project society
• Organizational and behavioral decision making
• Visualization

Courses

• Decisions, uncertainty and ambiguity

Supervision

PhD Supervision:

2015 – now: Verena Stingl (primary supervisor) on simple heuristics and decision making under uncertainty in project-based organizing).

Master Thesis: I supervised over 40 bachelor and master theses. Examples from 2017:

Maximilian Schriewersmann (in collaboration with Rambøll, supervised with Verena Stingl): Quick sifts – a qualitative study on experts’ criteria and heuristics for selecting project opportunities at Rambøll.

Marisa Ferreira Silva: Managing projects for legacy: The role of institutional barriers in Rio Olympics 2016.

Andrzej Rogala: Visual Design Communication for Project Execution: The Case of 1:1 Scale Mock-Ups for a Pharmaceutical Production Facility (in collaboration with NNE, supervised with Anja Maier)