Project Management Journal

The extent of authority and autonomy granted to the project manager and to individual team members has a significant impact on the ability of the project team to meet stakeholders’ goals and expectations. This is particularly true in dynamic environments, where resources, requirements, and other conditions change rapidly, and a great deal of innovation is required. In this paper, we provide some recommendations regarding the structure and flexibility of project teams operating in turbulent environments. The recommendations are based on a set of experiments carried out with agent-based simulation, a novel tool for organizational design. The observed results show that under high uncertainty, loose designs for project teams outperform tight organizational structures.

A promising new topic for researchers who focus on project management is the application of knowledge management concepts as a way to improve project success. In this paper, knowledge management theory is used as a lens to examine the Project Management Institute's A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), because this book is globally influential among project managers. Several different theoretical frameworks are used. Results show that the PMBOK® Guide has a strong bias toward explicit and declarative (i.e., “how”) knowledge, and pays less attention to tacit and causal (i.e., “why”) knowledge. Our recommendations outline how the existing structure of the PMBOK® Guide can be preserved while the content is enhanced using knowledge management concepts that have been shown to be influential in enhancing project success.

This is an enhanced and expanded version of a paper presented at the PMI Research Conference 2004 in London, England.

This paper discusses the possibilities that a qualitative research approach grounded in critical interpretative perspectives of phronetic social science can offer an alternative way of understanding and talking about the practice of project management. Such an approach implies a combination of practical philosophical considerations and concrete empirical analysis of lived experiences and social processes in concrete project settings. Two important issues are addressed: the complex process of this kind of qualitative research, and the nature and practical usefulness of its outcomes. First, the interconnectedness of a number of elements in the process of management research (the focus of inquiry, theoretical tradition used to define the research question, methodological approach to research design, and data collection and interpretation method) is presented as a holistic framework, which is then used to discuss the implications of deploying interpretative and critical methodologies in researching project management practice, skills, and competencies. By providing examples of both the process and outcomes from an illustrative research study, the paper illuminates how the chosen, phronesis-centered approach underpinned by the concepts of “pragmatic epistemology” and “cooperative enquiry” can generate new insights into project managers’ daily coping with the complexity of projects. Further commentary is then provided on how the mainstream, normative prescriptions regarding individual skills and competencies could be combined with the alternative ones that promote intuition, judgment, and social and political virtuosity in local contexts, and integrated to enhance the existing project management training and development schemes.

Organizations that undertake many projects need to identify the types undertaken, and use labels to name them. These labels are attributes that form the basis of a project categorization system. There are two reasons why organizations need to categorize projects. The first is to develop and assign appropriate competencies to undertake projects successfully (do them right). The second is to prioritize projects within an investment portfolio to maximize return on investment (do the right projects). Prior research into project classification, the methodology adopted, and the model developed is described. Two major components of a project classification system, the purposes for classifying projects and the attributes used to classify them, are identified; as well as that attributes can be grouped into larger classes. There are also more complex, multidimensional systems for categorizing projects. Finally, how an organization can implement a categorization system is described. This research of project categorization was funded by the Project Management Institute.

The motivation for this work is derived from the current interest in speeding up development schedules for information technology(IT) projects. A keyimplication of the shift to more rapid development methods is the growing emphasis on fixed time and fixed effort delivered during such projects. However, there appears to be little work that addresses the impacts of dealing with bound effort levels. The result of binding time and effort is to deprive project managers of the normal parameters that are used in trade-offs. The paper introduces a quantitative analytical framework for modeling effort-boxed development in order to uncover the effects on the overall development effort and the potential leverage that can be derived from incremental delivery in such projects. Models that predict product size as an exponential function of the development effort are used in the paper to explore the relationships between effort and the number of increments, thereby providing new insights into the economic impact of incremental approaches to effort-boxed software projects.