Perspectives on Projects

Rodney J. Turner, Martina Huemann, Frank T. Anbari, Christophe N. Bredillet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415993739
• eBook ISBN: 9781135848835
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Modern project management had its genesis in the field of operations research in the late 1940s, but today it is a much more diverse subject. It has evolved and developed a much wider range of methods, techniques, and skills that the project manager can draw upon.

Not all these skills are relevant to every project, but an assortment of them will be relevant to most. This book aims to describe for students, researchers and managers the full range of skills that project managers can use to develop their methodologies.The authors group the skills into nine perspectives, representing nine schools of project management research and theory. By attaching a metaphor to each of these perspectives, students, researchers and managers are better able to understand each approach and decide whether it is best suited to the development of a strategy for managing their project.

Perspectives on Projects builds upon the various theoretical orientations that the field of project management has developed. Featuring several case studies, drawn from a variety of settings, to illustrate how the different schools can provide different perspectives on projects, this book is an ideal text for anyone involved in project management.

1
The diversity of projects and project management

1.1 New perspectives on project management

The management of projects is a subject is of considerable economic importance. Data produced by the World Bank shows that about one-fifth of the world’s $50 trillion gross domestic product is spent on new capital formation (World Bank, 2007). The amount varies by country. The developed economies spend smaller amounts—about one-sixth of GDP in the UK and USA. The developing economies spend more to help achieve economic growth. India spends around one third of its GDP on new capital formation and China a massive 45 percent. New capital formation is almost entirely project-based and so this means that at least one-fifth of the global GDP, $10 trillion, is undertaken as projects. But companies also spend money on projects through their revenue expenditure and so the total amount of the global economy spent on projects may be closer to one third, $16 trillion. Rodney Turner, Ann Ledwith and John Kelly (2009) have shown that small to medium enterprises (SMEs) spend on average one-third of their turnover on projects. SMEs make up 70 percent of the private sector economy, so that means 20 percent of the private sector economy is spent on projects in SMEs.

Thus globally substantial amounts of money are spent on projects, ranging from large infrastructure projects to small projects in SMEs. Anyone who is aware of these figures can have no doubt about the importance of the discipline and profession of project management to the global economy. It is critical for organizations around the world to develop sound project management practice. Data produced by the Standish Group (Johnson, 2006) show on average projects are at least 10 percent late and 10 percent overspent, meaning a massive $3 trillion (at least) is wasted annually on poor performing projects, three times the amount made available by the G20 countries at their meeting in April 2009 to help support the global economy.

Modern project management as a discipline started in the late 1940s as an offshoot of optimization theory from the field of Operations Research (Hillier and Lieberman, 2002). Techniques such as critical path analysis (CPA) and bar (Gantt) charts were found to be useful to help with planning and controlling the delivery of projects. Since then a substantial amount of research has been done, expanding the range of the discipline and the tools available. However, in spite of this development, the performance of projects leaves a lot to be desired. Part of the reason for this is many organizations still do not put any effort into the development of the competence of their project managers. Many project managers’ competence development comes solely from on-the-job experience, and that experience comes from working in organizations of low project management maturity. If the devel- opment of project management competence comes solely from working in organizations which themselves have low project management capability, you have to expect that the competence development of project managers will be poor. However, another reason, and the one we hope to make some contribution to solving with this book, is that in spite of all the development, many project managers do not seem to be aware that there are tools available to them other than the optimization tools of CPA and Gantt charts. There is a mythodology in project management that the only success criteria of any relevance are the wretched triple constraint of time, cost and quality, and the only tools to use are network analysis and bar charts. Project managers use famous software products where that is almost the only functionality provided, and think that is all there is to project management. We call these the memes of project management, ideas that seem to be so deeply ingrained that project managers use them without question. But there is far more to project management:

• CPA has only limited applicability, being appropriate for projects with low uncertainty and ambiguity—more sophisticated modeling techniques are required on more complex projects;

• there are success criteria other than the wretched triple constraint of time, cost and performance, which Aaron Shenhar and Dov Dvir (2007) have shown to be almost irrelevant, and the achievement of the other criteria requires different tools and techniques;

• higher level governance roles other than the project manager are required to link projects to corporate strategy, and corporate governance needs to define how projects will be delivered and controlled in the organization and create the capability to do that;

• projects involve people, and the behavior of those people and their commitment to the project needs to be managed;

• people’s commitment is a price to them, and they pay that price to obtain the benefit (product) from the project, and so the project needs to be promoted to people in the place they have contact with it; it needs to be marketed;

• the project itself can be viewed as an algorithm, a process to be followed to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity, and you can follow the algorithm in a structured way to manage the reduction of uncertainty;

• as you follow the process many decisions are required to establish the project and define what direction the project will take, and as the project progresses, decisions are required to keep the project on track; the decisions need to be based on a sound business model;

• every project is different and so every project requires a different set of tools and techniques for its delivery, and not just a standard set involving CPA and Gantt charts.

These eight bullets, together with the optimization tools, illustrate that there is a range of perspectives we can take on our projects and project management. These different perspectives are supported by nine fields of research in project management, which we call schools, representing different areas of research over the past six decades. These nine perspectives, and the schools which support them, guide project managers and their teams to the selection of new and different sets of tools and techniques to manage their projects. Through this book we aim to raise our readers’ awareness of different perspectives they can take on their projects, and how the nine schools which support them can then suggest a range of methods they can draw for managing projects. The nine perspectives are Optimization—representing the genesis of project management—and Modeling, Success, Governance, Behavior, Marketing, Process, Decisions and Contingency—representing each of the issues raised in the list above. Our proposal is that on any project, two, three or four of the perspectives may be relevant, enabling the project management team to paint a picture of their project and guide them in selecting a much richer methodology for the management of their projects.

In the remaining nine chapters of this part we describe each of the nine perspectives in turn. Then in the second part we present three case studies illustrating the use of the nine perspectives in practice. We have case studies from different sizes of project and different industry sectors.

In the remainder of this chapter we describe first the memes of project management. We then give an overview of the nine perspectives. We give a brief description of a theory of project management to introduce concepts used throughout the book. We also want to show that we believe there are essential elements of project management which must be addressed in the management of projects, and other tools (usually associated with the memes) which are used only because they are part of project management mythodology. We also introduce two typologies of projects to which we refer repeatedly throughout the book.

1.2 The memes of project management

Up to now the theory of project management has not been widely recognized. David Cleland and Bill King (1983; first edition published 1968) offered a theory of project management based on systems theory, and Rodney Turner (2009, first edition published 1993) offered one based on the process approach. However, this work was not widely recognized as offering a theory, and so project management has essentially remained largely atheoretical. Rodney Turner wrote a series of articles in the late 1990s (see, for instance, Turner, 1999) suggesting that project management was a profession governed more by faith than knowledge. He made a pun on the word “profession” as being either “a statement of belief in a religion” or “a paid occupation especially one involving education and formal qualifications.” For many people project management is little more than a religion. Many of the tools and techniques of project management are taken as being relevant as articles of faith, not based on any theoretical principles or empirical evidence. Some of these articles of faith are so str...

Table of contents

• Perspectives on Projects
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 The diversity of projects and project management
• Part I The nine perspectives
• Part II The three case studies
• Index