Designing a Hybrid Project Management Framework for Concert Production: A Case Study of a Music and Arts Academy in Vietnam

Abstract

This thesis examines the project management challenges at a private Music and Arts Academy in Vietnam and addresses them by designing a hybrid project management framework for its annual student concert. The main research question guiding the study is: How can a hybrid project management framework be designed to improve project efficiency and coordination at Be Singer Academy? The framework aims to help the Academy strengthen the planning, coordination, and delivery of the concert through structured, yet flexible management practices tailored to its working environment. The theoretical framework reviews project management principles, constraint models, and the lifecycles of traditional, agile, and hybrid approaches, as well as the nature of project management in creative and cultural industries. Vietnam’s cultural context is triangulated with the Academy’s environment using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model, and organizational readiness is assessed to support implementation. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured and focus group interviews with 27 stakeholders across six groups, including the CEO, executive assistants, teachers, the costume manager, students, and a live band. The findings identified six key operational gaps and revealed that stakeholders are open to change, yet the new framework must remain simple and non-disruptive. The outcome is a six-phase hybrid framework that integrates predictive and agile elements, introduces a shared digital tracking system, and restructures the practice period into collaborative sprint cycles. Its novelty lies in a phase-based dual-layer logic that assigns agile sprints only to the artistic practice period while preserving predictive control for operational phases, and in applying hybrid project management to a Vietnamese creative-education SME, a context rarely addressed in the literature. This provides Be Singer Academy with a practical, culturally grounded foundation for more consistent and effective concert management. It is crucial to note that the thesis contains confidential information from Be Singer Academy, regarding interviews’ quotation (in chapter 4 and Appendix 3), context-oriented follow-up questions (in Appendix 2) and the Academy’s budget sheet (Appendix 6). These data, therefore, are excluded from the published version of the thesis.