Project Management - Getting Better or Worse?

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Situation: You occasionally wonder whether we're moving forward as a profession.

PMI's mission, roughly speaking, is to have business leaders view project management as essential for businessresults.  Obviously, the best way to do that is to show increasing success over time.  That's why I found this particular PMI research report interesting.  Are we getting any better? Comparing project management in the years 2000 and 2008 was a report produced by Erling S. Andersen and present two weeks ago at the PMI Research conference.  Mr. Andersen was kind enough to answer a few questions for us recently about the research he conducted.

Q. Your research was conducted using the X Model, could you tell us a bit about how that works? (both at the micro and macro level) 

The intention of the X Model is to give a comprehensive view of the present situation of an enterprise or an organization. It is extremely valuable for a manager to get such a condensed picture of how the organization is performing and that it is presented in a way that makes it possible to discuss why the situation is as depicted. The X Model was originally development in the 1970-ies with firms in mind. Many years later I started to apply it to projects. The strength of the X Model is that the present situation is presented on one page of paper and that it allows for causal analysis. It is easy to discuss why the results are as we see them. The results must depend on the way we conduct our work processes, and the work processes are affected by personal and factual premises. 

I have quite recently written an article which presents the ideas of the X Model in more detail: Erling S. Andersen (2010): Describing and assessing projects: The X model. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business,3 (3), pp. 369-386. 

At Norwegian School of Management BI we have given Masters-level courses in project management since the middle of the 1990-ies. I have taught our students, who are experienced practitioners from industry and government, the X Model. Many have used it in their Master theses to assess projects they have been writing about. The students have used it on a micro level (to assess their real world projects) to get a better understanding of their projects and discuss improvements. After a while I thought might be interesting to collect all the X Models that the students were making. Then much later the idea appeared that it would be interesting to compare the situation of 2000 and 2008 by looking at all the models from these two years. I then did what we could call a study on the macro level to see if it was possible to identify significant changes over time. And as you see from my paper we are getting better. 


 

Q. You concluded that some areas of project management have shown improvement, saying specifically that team members are more knowledgeable about project work, project objectives are more clearly expressed, project organization is more appropriate, most work processes are improved, team members experience project work as rewarding and are more motivated for future projects, and the results of the project are more balanced. Why do you think this is true? Do you credit PMI? Better Training? Stiffer performance requirements from employers? 

My research does not look into why we have become better. I would think that many factors contribute to progress. Project managers and team members are better educated and have more extensive experiences compared to ten years ago. Of course the professional associations like PMI deserve credits. They have argued strongly for professionalization, use of standards and certifications. 

 

Q. You also talk about areas for improvement, specifically, in achieving the project mission and goals or keeping to the project schedule and budget. Why do you think this is the case? 

It is of great importance at the start of the project to discuss what we mean by project success. Our research shows that there is too little interaction between the project owner (the sponsor) and the project manager. Often, the purpose of the project is not clearly stated. The project manager tends to focus solely on the project constraints (time, cost, and quality), but the project owner is focused on value creation. Better and close cooperation between the two parties always improves value creation.

 

Q. Do you know of other recent and important research in this area? Do you know of other studies being conducted now that might be of interest? 

I have been fortunate to have taken part in two very interesting research projects: "Value of Project Management", chaired by professor Janice Thomas, Athabasca University (the results are presented as a special issue of Project Management Journal, 2009, issue 1) and the UK-initiated project "Rethinking Project Management" (the results are presented as a special issue of International Journal of Project Management, 2006, issue 8). Many international researchers took part in both projects and they have affected the way we think about project management.