Reflections From PMI Research & Academic Award Winners

  Career Development  

PMI’s awards celebrate excellence and highlight outstanding achievements each year, and the PMI Research & Academic Awards are no different. The six awards cover research, teaching, literature and students.

But what does it mean to win an academic award? How did the winners do it? And how do the academic awards translate into practical applications? All this and tips for potential applicants will be covered here by recent previous honorees.

Professor Lavagnon Ika (Telfer School of Management, Canada) was “thrilled” to win the 2024 PMI David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award for his book Managing Fuzzy Projects, co-authored by Prof. Jan Saint-Macary.

A divide between theory and practice is often cited. But this book was deliberately written for project management professionals and other project stakeholders who find themselves grappling—like the fictional protagonist of the book, project manager Nancy Smart—with the challenge of delivering “fuzzy” projects.

Fuzzy projects are those complex projects with elusive or evolving goals, or stakeholders with differing—if not changing—expectations.  The book summarizes two decades of research on more than 3,000 projects from around the world. It speaks volumes about project behavior, and the complicated life of projects—which often take complex …

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