Validity of Project Management as a Research Area and Research Funding

However arguable the shape and details of the above analysis, there would seem to be little doubt that the subject area is (a) important and (b) alive and full of potential. Much is on going, both in industry—competencies, BOTs, concurrent engineering, and so on—and in research groups. Much, however, is industry specific (construction, software, defense, and so forth). How valid a research field is generic project management as such? How strong a theoretical basis does it have? Are we fooling ourselves by proposing that there is such a thing as a research agenda in project management?

The above analysis suggests that the traditional core of project management (tools and techniques—and to a lesser extent, middle management organizational issues) is now well understood. Though they often pose challenges in implementation, their theoretical bases and application have limited (though still some) research needs.

There has been much published on the contextual application of project management (20 percent of all the papers). This is excellent and much needed. Project management, though a generic discipline, is contextual.

The results of this chapter's analysis suggest that the major research needs of project management are now to demonstrate, within a theoretical context, how the overall discipline works coherently to deliver projects successfully. This finding, I believe, is supported not just by the above analysis but also by current business experience.

Validity of the Findings

A potential criticism of the analysis behind this view is that it is overly self-referencing. After all, the criticism could go, the analysis is based partly on a personal and quasi-subjective presentation of project management issues and research needs, and partly on a more objective (but still very questionable) categorization of papers classified against a framework that stems from a particular view of the discipline (the "management of projects"/APM BoK view).

There is some validity in such a criticism. There is also much that could be said to counter it. Tables 1 and 2 undoubtedly do represent contemporary issues. The APM/CRMP BoK models are based on research (first on the causes of project success and failure; second on what project management professionals believe project management practitioners need to be knowledgeable of).

Funding and Theoretical Coherence

Who will pay for this research? Is there a strong enough theoretical basis for at least some of it to be funded by the traditional academic research funding agencies?

This is where we came in. Many enterprises are willing to pay for work to be done to provide answers to as yet unanswered questions in project management. Often they call this consulting support—and this is indeed research of a kind, as we said at the outset. The challenge for research, which has a stronger theoretical basis, is precisely the perceived weakness of the discipline's theoretical base. Partly because project management is so practical, many practitioners find it difficult to get enthusiastic about introducing theory. And from the academic side, the subject—at least as it has been presented here in this chapter—is so large, cross-sectional, and multi-dimensional that the traditional funding agencies often (though not always) consider it too tenuous. Project management does not hit square onto many of the traditional academic funding agencies. Academic work is typically funded by agencies looking at a particular aspect of the overall subject.

There are exceptions—and we should look to the professional institutions to be leading them: PMI's sponsorship of the "Return on Investment" study undertaken by Ibbs, Reginato, and Morris is just such an example (http://www.berkely.edu/pmroi)—but generally it is up to us, the researchers, teachers, scholars, and enthusiasts of the discipline, to work on building the overall theoretical basis to the subject. I genuinely see this still as the major challenge.