Kilden Performing Arts Centre: The Importance of One Man – Learning Project Governance From Real Life Experiences

Introduction: Background And Motivation

Most texts on project governance and project management portrays the organization as populated by anonymous people in abstract roles. This paints a rather gray and dull picture of projects. In this paper I will do no such thing. I take the position that projects are populated with real people. Real people with real names and real faces. People with subjective opinions and history. Individuals with a specter of competences, strong and weak sides. Not least – people with relations to other people and organizations. They are people with motivation and strong affinity to their geographical region and local community. I hope acknowledging this will give life to a colorful story of a project with lots of drama which resulted in a wonderful institution in the regional main city of southern Norway: Kilden Performing Arts Centre (hereafter Kilden¹ – see Figure 1²) in Kristiansand (Norway’s fifth largest city). Trying to keep the identity of the project and the people would be impossible, so why even try. The people in this story has made a tremendous achievement, and they are right to be proud of it.

Figure 1.

Kilden Performing Arts Centre, Kristiansand, Norway

The story is colorful. It will describe important events that turned the project upside down at times. It will praise the people involved for their ability to handle these situations, but also share critical remarks on things that went wrong along the way. To make sure no one gets hurt by these critical remarks, I will not mention their real names. The point I made earlier was to make sure the reader remembers that these are real people, they have made mistakes and successes through their carrier before, during and after this story – just like we all have.

One main point of this story though, is to highlight the role of one man in particular. The man that made the project possible, the man that “kept the ship floating till they found land” through the crisis. He was not in the most prominent formal positions, but he possessed the force, the continuity, and the smartness that made it possible. Obviously – he could not have done this by himself, so his main achievement was probably to get the right people involved. The story is important for two reasons: Firstly, because there are important lessons to be learned by this story. Secondly, because it is a story worth telling, hopefully a good read in its own right. It is written in honor of all those involved in the project, but again – one man in particular.

Figure 2.

Fact box - Information used in the continuing text

A detailed case story with a rich context description may hold a wide range of relevant points to learn from. This text gives such a story, but it is not intended to point out all possible learning points. Many points concerning good practices and applications of those are left out. So are many big and small mistakes and events that did not go as planned. The selected few points that are highlighted in the concluding section stands out as especially relevant to the current development in projects’ complexity and criticality, and development of nuanced understanding of key roles like project executive and project manager in real life situations.

Thus, the paper sets out to investigate:

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  How was the role of project executive performed in this real-life situation?

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  How did the project executive role and project manager role interact during the project?

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  What particular learning points can be made about real life project governance and project management roles from this specific case project?