By Way of Conclusion ...

By Way of Conclusion …

We tried in this work to demonstrate that, while project management has become a well-accepted way to manage the organizations and to deal with complexity and uncertainty, the source of competitive advantage and creation of value are the competencies (individual, team, organizational). But developing competencies means that we need to have a clear view of the field. It is the reason we tried to give some insights on this emergent field showing the fundamental role of standards, as social constructs, in its dynamic structure. We showed that, according to the nature of project management, a necessary condition to get project success and organization, and stakeholder performance was to manage member, team, and organizational learning in a systemic, dynamic, and integrated perspective. Standards, knowledge management, learning aspects, and performance and value management provided the basis of the model. As a consequence, the design of architecture had to consider different time periods, factors of contingencies, characteristics of the organization, context, environment, state of the standards and best practices, learning curves, and complex interactions between the individual, team, and organizational levels. Systems thinking provided a support to simulate this complex learning process and helped to design architecture for lifelong learning. The result of this work is the proposition of a systemic and dynamic model to design architecture for lifelong learning. In essence, this model has to be generic and "contextualizable." There is not a "one best way" architecture. Further research will lead us to develop computer simulation (a "what if" model) to link design and performance of organizations.

Thus, we hope to have contributed to demonstrate that project management is an emergent scientific field according to Audet's sense (1986), to show that the design and the application of standards are a dynamic way to build a legitimate framework for the profession while recognizing its existence, to put forward, beyond the dynamics of fads, that the profession, by nature, needs a systemic and dynamic learning framework to provide performance and creation of value and to avoid the rise and decline of popularity and the risk to fall quickly to oblivion.