Summary

This project followed a very carefully thought out plan and methodology. Since the team had not worked together before and, to our knowledge, no project of this nature had ever been attempted previously, we had to develop our own blueprint. The team came together quickly and worked together very well. This was important because we had a very large task and limited resources, especially time, to accomplish our objectives. Sounds like most projects, doesn't it?

The team utilized sound project management techniques and methodology strategy. The use of Reference Manager as a tool for gathering, cataloging, categorizing, and analyzing the citations worked very nicely and we believe will be an asset for future researchers and authors. The research methodology worked well, but the real beneficial aspect of that strategy was to hold the workshop. We gained invaluable assistance and insight from the professors and practitioners that participated. We believe this to be a significant means to obtain, define, and validate information about what is really happening in the field of project management and feel more of these workshops are needed in the future.

This research proved to be a monumental effort involving nearly 100 people who worked about 6,000 hours (much of it on a volunteer basis) over the short time period of seven months. When we identified over 100,000 documents that were related to project management, we were overwhelmed. We are proud to say that we greatly exceeded our expectations for this project. There are some sources that are not included, such as books, and time did not permit us to include as many conference papers as we would have liked. However, we do feel that the vast majority of important project management research published in English is included in the annotated bibliography of 3,500 articles, dissertations, government reports, and conference papers that resulted from this research effort. We are also very pleased that we persuaded over fifty senior project managers to help us interpret the trends we identified, state their opinions on the articles that they felt were most useful to them, and predict future directions for project management research. Our hope is that the combination of the database and these interpretations will encourage other project management research.

Trends that emerged from our analysis showed that in the 1970s there was a trend toward the development and use of automated project management software. The use of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) became widespread. The focus of research during this period was on cost and schedule control, performance measurement, the use of WBSs, and life-cycle management. The government still sponsored a large number of the research projects in the literature, but the number of projects sponsored commercially or by educational institutions increased. As the decade closed, the concept of design to cost and life-cycle costing first appeared in the research literature, as did leadership and conflict management issues. In the 1980s, the volume of research projects in the literature increased significantly with focus on project risk management and the Cost/Schedule Control Systems Criteria (C/SCSC) and earned value. The research literature also continued to focus on design to cost and life-cycle costing, plus a number of studies were published on team building, quality management, and project management computerized systems. The initial reporting on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Expert Systems and Knowledge Based Systems (KBS) also began appearing in the literature. In the 1990s, a large number of research projects focused on the human resource aspects including team building, leadership development, and motivation. Other research topics included project risk management, project quality management, and project communications knowledge areas of the PMBOK Guide.

Our findings based on our research literature search were borne out for the most part by the practitioners in the workshop. We determined that in the early years in project management (1960–1970) most of the research and focus in project management centered on large government programs in the DoD. Over time the commercial use of project management techniques in construction, information systems development, and new product development have become much more prevalent. Project management is now used in virtually all aspects and areas of commerce and industry. Today, as in the foreseeable future, this trend is likely to continue. As government research and development (R&D) budgets have declined in real terms and our economies turn global, the use of project management in enterprises has risen sharply. We believe this is more than just an issue of numbers; it is a genuine focus by executive management to improve their chances for success in both return on investment and in the quick and economic development and release of new products and services to the marketplace. Therefore, we would say that project management now has a very strategic role in industry and is not just being used as a means to mitigate corporate risk. We think this is an important distinction because project managers are now, more than ever, being looked to as the people who are going to implement the corporate strategies and objectives rather than just being a reporter of status or the messenger of a disaster. We as project management practitioners are now being viewed as a needed and important profession and we are of strategic importance to the corporation or the government agencies we work for and to the executives who run them. We see a distinguished past, a current world of opportunities, and a bright future.