Chapter 10: Project Management Practices in French Organizations - A State of the Art

Daniel Leroy, Ph.D. Universit des Sciences et Technologies de Lille

Introduction

The purpose of this study came from the discrepancy noticed between the current bodies of knowledge, both American and European—describing what should be effective project management practices—and what we could observe in the real world during our participation in more than one hundred projects in French organizations and in many different sectors. Furthermore, much of the literature in project management is written by field specialists and empirical studies are mainly achieved in sectors dedicated to projects with professionals. With the broadening of project management implementation into every sector of economical activity, it appears important to try to map what occurs in France in order to better know to what extent and how project management is used. So, we decided to conceive a database in order to better understand what happens really in both sectors, traditionally project oriented and not, collecting information from project professionals and others. Like in other management fields, theorization doesn't precede the companies' practices but the contrary. For four years, with the help of our postgraduate program, we have administrated questionnaires, collecting information about the projects' concept understandings and basic parameters, project actors roles and organizational matters, project key factors of success, tools and methods used, and elements of project management culture embedding. Presently, we have collected 621 valid questionnaires corresponding to 1621 projects. We are presenting here only the global results in four main dimensions showing the diversity of project management practices in France and the imperative necessity to better contextualize the way we consider the project management field.