Antoaneta Törner

We investigate the effect of frontloading on project financial performance. Frontloading refers to the practice of concentrating project members’ efforts, on the execution of concurrent tasks, towards the beginning of the project, so that errors are avoided in the earlier stages, avoiding the costly need for rework in later stages. However, not always companies can frontload a project, especially when the concurrent execution of multiple interdependent tasks generates excessive complexity in the early stages. Companies hence face a conundrum when they cannot afford the costs of complexity associated with front-loading, but yet need to reduce the risk of discovering costly mistakes too close to project completion. Building on the literature on project teams, we develop hypotheses to conceptualize how companies can ensure high project performance when low levels of frontloading need to be applied. We test our hypotheses using a proprietary dataset of 413 projects of a high-tech European firm. We find that the positive effect of frontloading is attenuated when team leader, team, or client familiarity is high as the different facets of familiarity allow teams to be better at collaborating and anticipating errors at the beginning of the projects, compared to less familiar teams. The practical and theoretical implication of these moderation effects is that when project managers need to keep frontloading low, project performance can be increased by ensuring that the project team has high team leader, internal and client familiarity. More generally, our findings shed light on the effect of frontloading on project performance—a question that is to date unanswered by empirical research.