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Future-making in the front-end of projects

Joseph Harrison & Jennifer Whyte

International Journal of Project Management2026https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2026.102854article
AJG 2ABDC A*
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

• Enriches project front-end scholarship with insights on future-making. • Acknowledges both demands for commitment and provisional understanding of futures. • Proposes five strategies for the project front-end that mobilize insights on future-making as inquiry. • Strategies address timing, sequencing, abandonment, flexibility, and inclusion. • Establishes research agenda to enable more inquiry-led planning in projects. Future-making scholarship frames the future as something iteratively constructed through practices of interpretation and negotiation. The project front-end literature, by contrast, is dominated by rationalist assumptions treating planning as a vehicle to enable ‘lock-in’ to preferred outcomes early in a project. To bring these literatures into dialogue, we theorize the project front-end as a space in which provisional representations of the future intersect with institutional demands for early commitments. Drawing on practice-based perspectives and pragmatist inquiry, we propose five strategies to mobilize insights on future-making as inquiry in the project front-end: (1) strategic timing, (2) staged sequencing, (3) potential abandonment, (4) design flexibility, and (5) participatory inclusion. We conclude this essay by outlining a research agenda to enable more inquiry-led planning in projects.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2026.102854

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{joseph2026,
  title        = {{Future-making in the front-end of projects}},
  author       = {Joseph Harrison & Jennifer Whyte},
  journal      = {International Journal of Project Management},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2026.102854},
}

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Future-making in the front-end of projects

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.