Project Management Toolbox

The respondents were invited to clearly express, in a closed list of project management tools and methods, whether these are unknown to them, known but not used, used at least once, or systematically used. The global results are shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Project Management Toolbox

Although we don't have enough space to discuss the results here, our first investigations show a very important role of the job function in explaining the diversity of the real use of the project management toolbox (Figure 6). A preliminary hypothesis is that, taking into account the more recent diffusion of project management methods in France, the only emerging process of professional certification, and the extreme variety of our sample, people import into the project the tools they already know. This can partly explain the relative poor score obtained by traditional project control tools. No doubt that the use of specific tools is largely influenced by the particular way project management culture is implemented and fueled in each organization. This is another interesting study to perform in the future taking into account another type of data collected about project management culture.

Figure 6: Project Management Toolbox According to Job Assignment