Preface

Advancing its body of knowledge is a cornerstone and hallmark of any profession. The Project Management Institute (PMI ), the world's leading project management professional association, recognizes the importance of this role by including the expansion of the body of knowledge of project management within the Ends Policies of the Institute. As further evidence of its awareness of this important role, PMI supports a vigorous research program into professional knowledge and practices. No profession can survive long term without a continuous effort on knowledge management, especially both knowledge generation and knowledge transfer.

Both the general literature and the research literature about project management have grown significantly since the field became a point of professional focus fifty or so years ago. There are over 500 books on project management topics and a few thousand books on closely related subjects. In the past forty years, over 3,500 research articles have been published within the project management field in the English language.

The dynamic advancement of a profession's body of knowledge requires focus on several areas. These areas include the expansion and exploitation of generally known, proven and accepted project management knowledge and practices along with the identification, demonstration and verification of innovative and advanced knowledge and practices. In fulfilling this critical mission of aiding the advancement of knowledge and practices, a professional association must encourage the continuing generation, refinement, and broad dissemination of new material. It is in support of this important goal, that this book, The Frontiers of Project Management Research, has been published.

The book contains twenty-eight chapters of research information about the theory and practice of project management. The chapters are divided into four key sections discussing:

• Background research in the field

• Effective practices and success factors

• Organizational and team relationships

• Project management techniques.

Each chapter is written by a well-known and established researcher in the discipline of project management and is based on their original work or critical judgment. The book's genesis is the highly successful PMI Research Conference 2000(Paris, France). The co-editors selected twenty-eight of the papers for refinement, updating of the underlying research, and incorporation of the latest thinking by their authors.

The Frontiers of Project Management Research focuses on the current state of the art in project management research and application. The Project Management Institute is proud to make this learning available to everyone with an interest in understanding and using project management as a professional discipline and as a methodology for executing the strategy of businesses and other enterprises.

Rebecca Ann Winston, Esq.
PMI Chair