Project Management Circa 2025

Bopaya Bidanda, David Cleland, Bopaya Bidanda, David Cleland

• Publisher: Project Management Institute
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781933890968
• eBook ISBN: 9781935589143
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Gain insights into the future of project management and prepare for the challenges ahead.

Project Management Circa 2025 provides the basics about how project management is used in the present, and how organizations will create a new state-of-the-art for project management. As readers learn what the future of project management might be, they will also see the likely impact on their own organizations, now and in the future.

This insightful resource:

• Explores the impact of globalization and technology on project management
• Examines the role of sustainability and innovation in future projects
• Offers guidance on developing necessary skills and competencies

This is an essential resource for project management practitioners, managers, executives, and academics seeking to understand the evolving landscape of project management and prepare for the future.

PART 1

Examples of Projects from Geographic and Industry Applications

CHAPTER 1

The Deployment of Project Management: A Prospective View of G8, European G6 & Outreach 5 Countries in 2025

Christophe N. Bredillet

Background

The world is moving fast and turbulently. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), one of the measures of a country's economy defined as the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time (Wikipedia, 2008), is used as a development indicator for countries, regions and for global levels. For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit expects for China a real GDP growth in 2008 of 9.8%, less than the 11.9% expansion recorded in 2007, with an expected further slowing to 9% in 2009 (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2008a). The slowdown in India, according to EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2008b), will be relatively shallow, with real GDP growth slowing to 7.7% in 2008-09 and 7.1% in 2009-10. For the U.S., real GDP is forecast to grow by just 0.8% in 2008 and recover modestly to 1.4% in 2009 (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2008c).

The major organizations and governments need more and more to know about the past performances, but also to better predict the future in order to quickly define or re-define their strategies and policies in various domains. This need has been created in the past few decades because of an environment in which international organizations such as the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Funds (IMF), World Bank, or governmental organizations such Energy Information Administration (EIA), Eurostat, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are developing important standards and frameworks to collect and process the information related mainly to social, financial, economical, environmental, demographic, and technological domains at the country, regional, and worldwide levels. A look at the publications and databases of these organizations shows the huge amount of information collected, processed. and made available through public means such as the Internet. While there is a great deal of historical data at the major databases, the forecast data is rarely available. Some short-term two-to-three-year projections may be accessible for some domains, but mid- and long-term forecasts are absent or not available to the public.

The project management discipline is a part of this moving world. The United Nations and OECD¹ reported in 2005 that about 22% of the GDP of the economies in transition and developing economies is gross fixed capital formation (United Nations, 2007), which is almost entirely project-based². The professional associations aiming at developing and supporting project management continue to grow globally and regionally. The Project Management Institute (PMI) announced more than 275,000 members by July 2008 (Project Management Institute, 2008) and the International Project Management Association (International Project Management Association, 2007) announces more than 73,000 members by end of 2007. The actions initiated by the educational systems in many countries, and the worldwide certifications programs supported by standards development continue to progress and to contribute to project management deployment (Bredillet, Ruiz, & Yatim, 2008a).

The major trends that characterize the 21st century such as global competition, rapid technological change, short product life cycle, process improvement, the complexity of undertakings, and the focus on quality all require extensive and professional use of the project management discipline (Lientz & Rea, 2002).

As part of this moving world, project management deployment needs not only to be observed, but also to be predicted like any other important social or economical indicator. Business organizations as well as project management professional bodies should have the possibility to predict the project management deployment status in the future. Can we perform a projection of the project management deployment in the future? What will be the project management deployment situation in a given country at a given year, for example? How the countries can be compared in terms of project management deployment in the future?

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework that allows the construction of a prospective view of project management deployment in the future. This framework will then be used to present the prospective views up to 2025 for the G8, G6 and O5 countries presented in a former paper (Bredillet, et al., 2008a).

Project Management Deployment and Forecasting

To be able to build a forecast model that predicts project management deployment, we first need to adopt a tool that measures this project management deployment. This paper relies on the project management deployment definition and the project management deployment index (PMDI) indicator defined in Bredillet, et al. (2008a) and presented below.

Project Management Deployment Index (PMDI)

The measurement of project management deployment is defined as the level or the degree of deployment of project management within a country (or group) by dividing the total number of the project management-certified individuals within this country (or group) by the total population of that country (or group) during a given point in time (a year). The certification figures considered in this paper integrate those from PMI and the International Project Management Association (IPMA). For a given country, the sum of certified individuals from these both organizations is considered. This restriction to PMI and IPMA figures should have a negative impact on the PMDI by lowering its real value, and very serious impact in some countries like Japan and Australia, where other project management certification bodies are operating.

Forecasting

Second, we need to design a forecasting model that fits best to the project management deployment setup. The literature review reveals no studies addressing the project management deployment forecasting topic as per the date of this paper. In economics, for example, an econometric model is used to forecast future developments in the economy, and econometricians measure past relationships between variables and then try to forecast how changes in some variables will affect the future of others. Most forecasters believe that analysts judgment should be used not only to determine values for exogenous (outside of the model) variables, but also to reduce the likely size of model error (endogenous variables unpredicted variations) (Hymans, 2008). Based on historical time series data, the past relationships between the project management deployment and some influencing factors such as the gross domestic product per capita and the national culture dimensions have been studied in Bredillet, Ruiz, and Yatim (2008b) without proposing any forecasting model. The regression model generated with the above-mentioned cultural study could have been used to forecast the values of PMDI in the future, based on the values of GDP per capita and cultural dimensions scores. But we have excluded it because the national culture is generally stable and not changing significantly from one year or one decade to another (Hofstede, 1983). Thus, the variation in PMDI will be only linked to the GDP per capita growth, which is assumed not enough to explain the future predictions.

With the absence of a forecasting model or a theory of how various factors influencing project management deployment interact with each other, we focused in this paper on the trend model derived directly from the past recorded time series of PMDI values, bearing in mind that:

• Any forecast of the project management deployment for such a period of about 20 years is subject to uncertainty and error. This is due to unpredictable changes and events that may take place during this period of time. An example of such unpredictable events is the effect of the new certification exam PMI announced to take place by September 2005. At the end of 2005, the results show 86% growth in the U.S. (PMDI passed from 174 in 2004 to 323 in 2005), compared to 44% in 2004 (PMDI passed from 121 in 2003 to 174 in 2004), and 20% in 2006 (PMDI passed from 323 in 2005 to 388 in 2006).
• Basing our forecast only on the past experience (growth trends) of project management deployment is not enough to carefully predict the future. This past experience should be correctly analyzed with other possible influencing factors to elaborate better forecasting models (NOBE, 2002).

Methodology and Data Choices

Trend model

The proposed trend model is based on PMDI, argued to be a valid measurement tool for project management deployment measurement within a country or a region; and is based on the concept of project management certification process supported by the major project management professional bodies and adopted more and more by the business organizations (Bredillet et al., 2008a).

For this paper, we consider a forecast approach based only on historical past trend data. This presupposes that, in the future, project management deployment will behave the same way as it did during the past recorded years and that the impact of the influencing variables will continue to be exactly the same. This assumption introduces a non-measurable error that may appear in the final forecasting results.

The trend equations have been calculated for each country and the polynomial (degree 2), having goodness-of-fit (R2) greater than 96% for all of the considered countries, and have been selected as the trend equations that best represent the trends based on the past recorded data.

The absence of inflexion points in the analyzed data dismissed the possibility of an “S” curve in the near future. This confirmed the general increasing trends of PMI and IPMA members and certified individuals and of the GDP per capita for the considered countries.

Accordingly, we propose the following framework based on the application of the trend equations of the past values of PMDI:

–Select the country or the set of countries that will be the objects of the projection (forecast)

–Select the past period of time for which the PMDI values for the selected countries are known

–Elaborate the trend equation(s) based on the best-fit extrapolation of the past data

–Proceed with the application of the elaborated trend equation(s) to calculate the PMDI values for the projected period of time for each selected country.

Selected Countries

We have selected the following 15 countries to deal with for this study. Apart from their important roles as major economic and social actors on the international market, this selection is dictated by the fact that we have already presented and discussed project management deployment within these countries during the period 1998-2006 (Bredillet, et al., 2008a) and that we have at our disposal the related set of data. These 15 countries are grouped as follows:

–The G8 countries constituted Canada, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States. The selection of these countries was based only on their economic size (about 65% of the world economy) and their presence at the international level as the most developed countries.

–The European G6 countries constituted France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and United Kingdom. They constitute the largest European countries in terms of population and economic sizes.

–The O5 countries constituted Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa—also called the “emergin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 - Examples of Projects from Geographic and Industry Applications
• Part 2 - Project Management Systems Applications
• Part 3 - Project Management Organizational Application
• Part 4 - Project Management in Government
• Part 5 - Likely Growth of Project Management