Old theories, new contexts: extending operations management theories to projects Welcome to this Special Issue (SI) and the World of Project Operations! Operations and supply chain management (OSCM) is concerned with organizing work. This work spans a spectrum from novel to repetitive and from variety to volume. Projects are a particular kind of worktemporary and uniquethat lie toward the novel and varied end of the spectrum. Organizing project work requires perspectives, approaches, methods,

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... ols, and techniques that differ from those used in repetitive, ongoing operations. There will, however, also be areas of commonality between project-based and repetitive operations. It is these similarities and differences that will be explored here. We start with the background to this SI and then explore how scholars in the field have responded to the call for papers. Lastly, we present the eight papers comprising this SI and identify both the contributions and areas of the project-operations work landscape that remain relatively unexplored. Background Projects pervade organizations, being the prime operations process for many organizations in IT, R&D, engineering, construction, government, and innovation, and a key activity in many others (e.g. organizational change, strategy implementation, mergers acquisitions and divestments, and new product development). Economically, it is estimated that project activity comprises c.35 percent of GDP for some countries (Schoper et al., 2018) , an indication that this is a significant field of activity. Whilst ubiquitous, projects often suffer from "the performance paradox" where their importance is at odds with their performance (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003) . Consistent with this importance, it is a rich context for research (Söderlund and Maylor, 2012; Browning, 2017) . There are several dedicated journals (and many that serve specific project-based industry areas such as construction and information systems), but project management (PM) until recently has not captured the attention of the wider community of business and management academics, including those in OSCM. As we will show, this is changing, consistent with a recognition of ongoing "projectification" of work, first identified back in the 1990s (Midler, 1995) . From PM to project studies: a brief history The genesis of modern approaches to managing projects is generally credited as being in the 1950s with the development of a set of tools and techniques for planning and scheduling tasks in a project. These "classic" tools, including work breakdown structures, critical path analysis, Gantt charts, and S-curves, became the standard fare of projects. Accompanying these was the emergence of full process sets, moving from an exclusive focus on tasks, to a wider consideration including governance and assurance, procurement, quality, cost, risk, and configuration management (e.g. PMI, 2017). Many of these approaches are now