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First of all, because of the random way to collect questionnaires, we realized a posteriori a typology according to project's nature. It's obvious that project management is overwhelming every economical sector and covers many different types of projects, although "internal projects" are becoming predominant (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Project Types
According to a literature review (Leroy 1994), the concept of a project is generally understood by listing its intrinsic characteristics. We selected the definition that seemed to us the most complete, the definition proposed by J. Rodney Turner (1993, 8):
An endeavour in which human, material and financial resources are organized in a novel way, to undertake a unique scope of work, of given specification, within constraints of cost and time, so as to achieve beneficial change defined by quantitative and qualitative objectives.
In order to know which characteristics are considered as the most important ones by people, we imposed among these ten items the choice of three ones only. As we noticed in our experience the extreme confusion of project perceptions—certainly due to the polysemy of this concept (Boutinet 1992)—we wanted to verify at what scale people could identify that the essential features of a project are that it is a unique piece of work, undertaken using a novel organization to deliver beneficial change (Table 1).
Job Functions | Global | Project Expert | Logistics | Top Direction | Human Relations | R&D | Informatics | Project Leader | Quality | Project Consultant | Production | σ |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Set of Activities | 12.7 | 10.1 | 6.1 | 18.9 | 17.9 | 12.7 | 9.4 | 15.2 | 9.4 | 16.8 | 8.1 | 3.72 |
Resources | 22.3 | 20.8 | 21.2 | 26.5 | 25.6 | 20 | 19.5 | 23.1 | 22.3 | 25.2 | 22.5 | 2.25 |
New Organization | 5.2 | 8.7 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 7.7 | 1.8 | 4 | 1.4 | 7.2 | 7.5 | 4.5 | 2.05 |
Unique Scope of Work | 6.1 | 8.7 | 4.5 | 2.3 | 10.3 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 5.2 | 5 | 8.4 | 2.7 | 2.23 |
Cost Constraint | 10.6 | 10.1 | 13.6 | 9.1 | 7.7 | 12.7 | 11.4 | 15.5 | 7.2 | 4.7 | 11.7 | 2.83 |
Time Constraint | 11.2 | 12.1 | 13.6 | 10.6 | 0 | 13.6 | 14.8 | 15.5 | 10.8 | 9.3 | 8.1 | 4.09 |
Quality Constraint | 11.1 | 11.4 | 18.2 | 11.4 | 7.7 | 12.7 | 10.1 | 8.6 | 11.5 | 8.4 | 16.2 | 3.40 |
Beneficial Change | 12.6 | 12.1 | 10.6 | 12.1 | 20.5 | 7.3 | 14.8 | 9.7 | 15.8 | 10.3 | 15.3 | 3.90 |
Quantitative Objectives | 4.3 | 4.7 | 3 | 1.5 | 2.6 | 5.5 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 6.5 | 4.7 | 7.2 | 1.49 |
Qualitative Objectives | 3.8 | 1.3 | 3 | 1.5 | 0 | 5.5 | 3.4 | 1.4 | 4.3 | 4.7 | 3.6 | 2.20 |
Globally, we can notice that the uniqueness of the scope of work and of the project organization are not considered as fundamentals. Beneficial change gets a roughly moderate score also. The allocation of human, financial, and material resources is pinpointed as the most important project feature but, considering also the score of the "set of activities", which managerial fact doesn't encounter these two characteristics? It is interesting to see the very close scores of quality, time, and cost items which constitute the famous triangle of project control still deeply embedded in the mind of French project actors.
Looking more precisely at this data, a general assumption can be proposed: to explain the diversity of project perceptions, it seems that the job function plays a role of being moderately variable. For example, project leaders are well sensitized to cost and time constraints, project experts are aware of the uniqueness of the scope of work and project organization, people from logistics, quality, or production highlight the importance of quality specifications, people from human relations emphasize the beneficial change, and so on. These ideas deserve further examination to test this hypothesis.
It's also interesting to observe this ranking according to other variables. We did so with the private or public status of companies' respondents. The main deviations are noticed for the cost, quality, and performance characteristics that are notably considered less in public sector (respectively 8.0 percent, 8.5 percent, and 10.1 percent versus 11.8 percent, 12.4 percent, and 11.6 percent) to the benefit of profitable change (15.6 percent versus 11.3 percent). We have also taken into consideration the difference of project perceptions between project-oriented companies and those not project oriented. The same deviations are noticed for the cost and time characteristics with amplified results (respectively 14.9 percent versus 9.0 percent; 16.3 percent versus 9.3 percent). But the position of quality constraint is in reverse order to the benefit of public companies (10.9 percent versus 11.7 percent) certainly due to the preeminent technocratic culture of the French state-owned companies. At the opposite, the uniqueness of the project activities is better considered in project-oriented companies (7.1 percent versus 5.7 percent) but the beneficial change generated by the project is better taken into account by the public sector companies (14.4 percent versus 7.8 percent), similarly for the novelty of project organization (5.8 percent versus 3.8 percent). The project perceptions ranking is not clearly discriminated by the variable "size of the manpower;" any project characteristic is correlated significantly with it.
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