Project Management in Emerging Economies

This article tries to capture such differences seen between New York and New Delhi. Globalization has had multiple effects on emerging economies. The per capita income has risen, and the underlying facets of project execution and delivery are subject to these changes in the economy. The emerging nations have provided relatively abundant low-cost, English-speaking labor that could deliver under tough constraints. In these circumstances, project management has been focused primarily on meeting the bottom line, as opposed to focusing on the other values and methodologies required for managing projects. However, the cost-driven outsourcing of earlier years has changed to value-driven outsourcing in more recent years.

While the overall goal of project management is to ensure successful delivery while adhering to project management principles as described in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—Fourth edition (Project Management Institute [PMI], 2008), another dimension is added by the constraints and culture in which the project itself is executed. Project management cannot provide the final required value to the project as long as “individual interests” (such as keeping down cost) are given higher priority than other aspects of the project. This difficulty is more obvious in emerging nations.

I firmly believe …