Reframing Project Management Process Paralysis : An Autoethnographic Study of the UK Fire Service

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new social, environmental, and economic challenges for organisational routines, and a multilevel perspective of project management processes and decision making is required to untangle the complex nature of projects and phenomena. This research hence aims to investigate reframing of traditional project failure reasoning in pressurised situations by adopting a wider organisational view of the causation of failure using models from high-risk industries which support good decision-making practices and highlighting the project, programme and organisational structures which inherently position a project manager to fail in conditions with cognitive overload, limitations, and constraints. Through an institutional perspective, both individuals (the project managers) and organisations are considered under the influence of normative and cognitive pressures, and both are sources of change