Conclusions


Research into project management is alive and well. IJPM is having to increase the number of its issues per year to cope with rising demand. The PMI Research Conference 2000 itself attests to this fact. But there is still far to go.

It is inevitable that an analysis such as that carried out in this chapter will show that published research lags today's research issues: three to four years is a typical cycle time from research topic conception, through raising funds, performing the research, to publishing it. Yet there is a need, fundamentally, to refocus the discipline and its research paradigm. We need to understand better, in particular, the linkages between project management and business performance, and project management's generic responsibilities and actions in the whole area of technology and design. Information technology and procurement/supply chain management remain as key areas, in many sectors, of project management business leverage. And the way we deal with and build knowledge, learning, and competency development is key, and with today's human resource concerns and technologies, is an important area of research.

The challenge of research in project management today, I contend, is to build a broad, multi-industry, theoretically grounded explanation of what is required to initiate and accomplish projects successfully. Research has a fundamental role to play in building this theoretical framework.

Notes

  1. This makes the fourth such analysis. Martin Betts and Peter Lansley classified IJPM papers for the period 1982-92 (Betts and Lansley 1995). The topics they used to classify the papers (with the percent of papers over the period shown in parenthesis) were: human factors (15 percent), project organization (15 percent), project environment (12 percent), project planning (12 percent), conceptual models (10 percent), project information (9 percent), project performance (7 percent), risk management (7 percent), project startup (6 percent), project procurement (4 percent), and innovation (3 percent). Professor Stephen Wearne, at UMIST, has recently analyzed Project Management Journal and IJPM papers and PMI and IPMA conference papers using an early version of the CRMP BoK as the basis of classification (Themistocleous and Wearne 2000). Urli and Urli analyzed all the papers relative to project management in the bibliographic ABI-INFORM database from 1987 to 1996 using an "associated word" method (scientometric analysis) (Urli and Urli 2000). Their findings are interesting and relevant: the field appears to have broadened in scope during the review period while the themes seem to have become less and less linked—not surprising perhaps given the breadth of source material. Apropos the opening paragraph of this paper they reported, "Even though there is considerable professional interest in project management, one is forced to conclude that this interest is not as visible among university academicians, at least in North America" (Urli and Urli 2000).

  2. Apropos research: interestingly the APM review team, while welcoming whole-heartedly the empirical basis now provided by the CRMP data, was adamant that the APM version should not refer to abstruse, difficult-to-understand research papers, such as those published in IJPM!

  3. For example, the 2000 New Zealand Project Management Conference streamed all papers under the ten PMBOK topic areas. QED.

  4. Those by Thamhain (1993), Ibbs, Lee, and Li (1998), and Leach (1999).

  5. Those of Mark (1992), Feney (1992), Christensen (1993), Ryder (1993), Thamhain (1993), Ingram (1994), Blanchard (1995), Tan (1996), Jiang (1996), Pascale et al. (1997), Shenhar et al. (1997), El-Najdawi and Liberatore (1997), Jannadi (1997), Robinson (1997), Christensen and Gordon (1998), Leach (1999), Lidow (1999), Baccani (1999), and Chang (1999).

  6. The ten on performance management refer predominantly to earned value.

  7. Tighe (1991), Rhyne and Whyte (1991), Gyeszly (1991), Barnes (1991), Leong (1991), Ireland (1992), Frizelle (1993), Tiong et al. (1993), Lisburn et al. (1994), Mansfield et al. (1994), Reijners (1994), Wearne (1994), Kayes (1995), Wateridge (1995), Sunde and Lichtenberg (1995), Belassi and Tukel (1996), Ongunlana (1996), Quartey (1996), McElroy (1996), Jafaari et al. (1996), Laufer et al. (1996), Kirby (1996), Chan (1997), Gabriel (1997), Voropayev (1998), Love et al. (1998), Gupta (1998), Eden et al. (1998), Wateridge (1998), Lopes and Flavel (1998), Grundy (1998), Clarke (1999), Archer and Ghasemzedah (1999), Tam (1999), Lim and Mohammed (1999), Hendricks et al. (1999), Kog et al. (1999), and Atkinson (1999)—no doubt there are others: the list is intended to be indicative, not exhaustive.

  8. Ibbs, C. W., and Y. H. Kwak (1997), published by PMI—and somewhat in the Project Management Journal and PM Network —is an exception. Interestingly the United Kingdom (UK) project management monthly magazine Project Management Today (PMT)—not as research or technical as the other three—tends to have more on business benefits. Every issue in the first half of 2001 had at least one feature. (This may well be due to the influence of the Projects in Controlled Environments [PRINCE] methodology which is pervasive in the UK and which exerts a significant impact on PMT's editorial content.)

  9. This includes the contribution of the PMI Fortune 500 Benchmarking program. The Construction Industry Institute's (CII) work for example, though still relatively weak, is much more robust.

  10. As an example of the danger of such generalization, research under way at UMIST is currently looking at linguistics as a basis for time recording and estimating in software projects instead of the more traditional product breakdown structure (PBS). The method has been successfully adopted in the old British Aerospace (BAES).




The Frontiers of Project Management Research
The Frontiers of Project Management Research
ISBN: 1880410745
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 207

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