The Frontiers of Project Management Research
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Discussion and Relevance to Today's Research Agenda
It must be emphasized that this analysis can only be taken at a broad level of generalization. It is more than easy to claim that a paper has really been misallocated or wrongly classified. (Several papers deal with issues from more than one BoK topic: one analyst could say that in their opinion a paper should really be classified under another topic. Similarly, another analyst could say that in their view a paper did, say, address business needs where here we have said that it did not.) The analysis is made not to prove an ineluctable truth but to make the following points via the survey data.
Even allowing for errors in categorization, the data shows the following.
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Project management research has not been particularly oriented to demonstrating business relevance.
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There is almost nothing at all relating expenditure on project management to business benefit.
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There is significant mismatch between current research priorities and published research.
Let us take the first point as now made. The second point, which is quite extraordinary, seems to be a matter of record, at least as far as these journals are concerned.[8] (And would seem to point to a major research need in its own right.)
The third point is worth looking at further. First it needs acknowledging from the outset that the list of topics given in Table 2 is both personal and very generalized. Perceptions of research priorities are bound to differ depending on the role one occupies and the issues being faced at the time. Second, the survey is bound to show a mismatch: the data shows the published results of research that was conducted during at least the last three or four, to fourteen or more years ago. It takes time for research to be initiated, carried out, and then published. Nevertheless, if we accept the list in Table 2 as a valid set of high-level generalizations, it is worth comparing the Table 2 list, and extensions thereof, with the findings of Table 6. This is Table 7.
| Topic | No. of Papers | Table 2 Type "Current" Issues | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.0 General | 59 | Benchmarking; Maturity models | Benchmark processes and practices as well as metrics. |
| 1.1 Project Management | 0 | Definition as a discipline; Methodologies; Business benefit | Several industries are seeking to understand better and introduce PM as a core discipline. |
| 1.2 Program Management | 7 | Business benefit; Methodologies (PRINCE, etc.); Practice as super PM-as with US A/Es (Bechtel etc.) | |
| 1.3 Portfolio Management | 10 | New product development/Project management | |
| 1.4 Project Context | 148 | New product development generally failing to appreciate management of projects perspective. Engineering management/PM linkage could be strengthened. | |
| 2.0 Strategic | 3 | Linkage between project and corporate strategy | |
| 2.1 Project Success Criteria | 25 | Overruns; High failure rate of IS projects, Key performance indicators and critical success factors; Business benefit; Scorecards | A crucial area. Links with 5.1, 5.3, and others. |
| 2.2 Strategy Plan | 7 | Strategy formulation | Project strategy, though central, is inadequately understood. |
| 2.3 Value Management | 0 | Evidence of application and benefit | |
| 2.4 Risk Management | 49 | Perception of risk | Already exhaustively covered? |
| 2.5 Quality Management | 24 | ||
| 2.6 Safety, Health, & Environment | 4 | New legislation | |
| 2.7 Ethics | 1 | Reasons why important | |
| 3.0 Control | 36 | Scorecards (e.g., balanced) | |
| 3.1 Work Content and Scope Management | 10 | WBS, PBS still causing terminology difficulties. | |
| 3.2 Scheduling and Phasing | 52 | Concurrent engineering | More has been published outside IJPM and Project Management Journal and PM Network . |
| 3.3 Resource Management | 10 | ||
| 3.4 Budgeting and Cost Management | 2 | Treatment of whole life [operating] costs | BOT/private finance; relates also to 5.3. |
| 3.5 Change Control | 2 | ||
| 3.6 Performance Management | 18 | EVA still unpopular. | |
| 3.7 Information Management | 26 | IT tools, intranet, e-project management; Role of IM strategy; Knowledge management | An enormous area with whole networks of researchers active-e.g., Construct IT, Stanford University CIFE, etc. Link with processes and practices (i.e., business benefit) important. |
| 4.0 Technical | 3 | Need to establish more clearly the generic role of PM | This area is not well "mainstreamed" yet in project management, though research shows that its management is vital to project success. |
| 4.1 Design, Production, etc. Management | 11 | Identification of generic practices; Simultaneous design; Systems engineering/PM and design management/PM linkages. | |
| 4.2 Requirements Management | 3 | Best practice; applications; tools | Still weakly recognized as fundamental to PM. |
| 4.3 Technology Management | 3 | Strategy; Introduction of not-yet-proven technology | |
| 4.4 Estimating | 12 | Software | Still difficult to get s/w estimating reliability. |
| 4.5 Value Engineering | 3 | Non-construction applications | A powerful area of business benefit not well applied outside construction. |
| 4.6 Modeling and Testing | 0 | CAD and virtual modeling | |
| 4.7 Configuration Management | 7 | Relation to Information Management | |
| 5.0 Commercial | 2 | ||
| 5.1 Business Case | 2 | Business benefits of PM; Link with corporate measures (See 2.1, etc.) | |
| 5.2 Marketing & Sales | 3 | Linkage to PID; Concurrent engineering | |
| 5.3 Financial Management | 17 | BOT, etc.; Financial measures for project management benefit (2.1 and 5.1) | BOT has figured strongly in IJPM. |
| 5.4 Procurement | 28 | Partnering; Supply chain management; E-commerce; Procurement strategy; Target setting in partnering | A huge area with still an enormous amount to be clarified. |
| 5.5 Bidding | 12 | Rebid on repeat contracts | |
| 5.6 Contract Administration | 14 | New forms of contract | |
| 5.7 Legal Awareness | 2 | ||
| 6.0 Organizational | 4 | ||
| 6.1 Life Cycle | 1 | Generic models; role of ILS | |
| 6.2 Organization Structure | 14 | Processes; Impact of procurement/supply chain configuration on (a) organization (b) project management practices-e.g. design/build vs. independent designer models | Continued need to clarify and refine processes. |
| 6.3 Organization Roles | 11 | PSO; Role of sponsor-particularly in inexperienced organizations | |
| 7.0 People | 22 | ||
| 7.1 Communication | 6 | Impact of telecoms/Internet | |
| 7.2 Teamwork | 20 | High-performance teams; IPTs; Virtual teams | A key area, but well covered in research. |
| 7.3 Leadership | 9 | ||
| 7.4 Decision-Making | 8 | ||
| 7.5 Negotiating & Influencing | 1 | ||
| 7.6 Conflict Management | 2 | ||
| 7.7 PM Competency Development | 31 | BoK topics; Competency; E-learning; Learning mechanisms; Organizational learning; Certification | A very important area, consistently receiving attention, and needing to with new technology and pressures on competency and external certification. |
| 7.8 Personnel | 6 | PM as a career | PM often not a core career: how then to build best practice professionalism? |
Again, due note needs to be made of the inaccuracies inherent in such a high level comparison. There are whole research communities busy in just single areas of the table (for example in IT and procurement). The table is presented for indicative purposes.
The following points would seem to stand out.
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There has, surely, to be research initiated as soon as possible on the business benefits of investing in project management. There has been hardly any to date.
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Benchmarking results have in general been poorly covered so far.[9]
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The role of "the management of projects" as a paradigm in new product development ("Project Context") would seem to offer a link into the general business management writing that should be exploited.
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Engineering management ("Project Context") is in general not a well-covered area. Project management could make a significant contribution to improving understanding of this area.
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Strategy is widely seen as of fundamental importance in projects and their management. There is virtually nothing published on it.
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VM has nothing published on it in IJPM or the Project Management Journal and PM Network . VM and VE both have significant potential to business benefit; neither is formally well practiced outside construction.
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There has been a vast output on risk management: is there really that much more to be researched? (Yet the public's perceptions of risk continue to be poor; often intuition does not fit well with probability theory.)
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Much of what has been published in IJPM and the Project Management Journal and PM Network on concurrent engineering is anecdotal, and tends more to be about fast tracking projects. There is little on the theoretical underpinning, little on technology support, and little on business benefit. More is published in general engineering management literature.
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There is no research published in these journals on ethics in project management.
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The traditional areas of project control—the basics of much of the literature, training, and teaching in project management—would seem to offer little significant scope for research.[10]
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Information management—already well served—is a strong area for continued research.
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There are several areas in the technical arena that are currently weakly served: requirements management, systems engineering, and design management, for example, all need more robust analysis and exposition.
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There is next to nothing published in IJPM and the Project Management Journal and PM Network on the relation between marketing and project management.
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Build Operate Transfers (BOT)—private finance—have been well covered in IJPM but the whole area is creating profound changes in the practice of project management—and not just in construction (power, water, transport, and so on). IT and defense/aerospace for example are both significantly affected. The impact extends through organization, financing, supply chain, people, process, metrics, and so forth. There is much research opportunity here still.
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Procurement and supply chain configuration continues to offer major research opportunities. Partnering and e-commerce are currently extremely hot topics. Arguably our overall theory of procurement is not as robust as it could be.
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Organization and people issues continue to cause major challenges in the effective implementation of projects. How much new theoretically-based research is still to be accomplished is questionable. Organizational learning is an example, however, of where there is genuinely new theoretical ground to explore.
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Project manager competency development—particularly of the knowledge [BoK] elements and the issue of certification, and the relationship with knowledge management and organizational learning—has rightly been, and will continue to be, a major area of research enquiry. This also links to business benefit and to career development (personnel).
[8]Ibbs, C. W., and Y. H. Kwak (1997), published by PMI—and somewhat in the Project Management Journal and PM Network —is an exception. Interestingly the United Kingdom (UK) project management monthly magazine Project Management Today (PMT)—not as research or technical as the other three—tends to have more on business benefits. Every issue in the first half of 2001 had at least one feature. (This may well be due to the influence of the Projects in Controlled Environments [PRINCE] methodology which is pervasive in the UK and which exerts a significant impact on PMT's editorial content.)
[9]This includes the contribution of the PMI Fortune 500 Benchmarking program. The Construction Industry Institute's (CII) work for example, though still relatively weak, is much more robust.
[10]As an example of the danger of such generalization, research under way at UMIST is currently looking at linguistics as a basis for time recording and estimating in software projects instead of the more traditional product breakdown structure (PBS). The method has been successfully adopted in the old British Aerospace (BAES).
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