Paper of the Year Award to Fredrik Tell and Yunchen Sun

September 2026.

Congratulations to Fredrik Tell and Yunchen Sun who have been awarded the Project Management Journal (PMJ) Paper of the Year Award for 2026 from the The Project Management Institute (PMI)!

The paper "Tensions in Digital Transformation: How Prototype Work Links the Temporary and the Permanent" is available here:

Sun, Yunchen & Fredrik Tell (2025), Tensions in Digital Transformation: How Prototype Work Links the Temporary and the Permanent, Project Management Journal, 56(3): 358-374, https://doi.org/10.1177/87569728241278661.

Abstract: Digital transformation projects often fail due to tensions that emerge between temporary project teams set to design digital transformation and the permanent organization where digital transformation is to be executed. As a potential organizational response to such tensions, we introduce the notion of prototype work; in other words, the actions and interactions facilitated by making prototypes. Through a real-time longitudinal study of a digital transformation project in a Swedish manufacturing firm we specify prototype work, addressing strategic tensions, temporal tensions, and cross-functional tensions at different loci of temporary–permanent interfaces and, in turn, how both temporary and permanent organizations are transitioned.