This paper contributes to the ongoing work and debate on the value of project management, accomplishing this through an empirical investigation of practitioner perceptions on the relative value of different project management practices and their potential to contribute to improved project performance. This investigation is based on a large-scale survey of 753 project management practitioners. This paper aims to answer four questions relating to the value of project management. By identifying the most valued practices, practitioners and organizations can identify their priorities when developing their project management competencies. This can also guide the profession in selecting priorities for future development. When choosing priorities to develop and implement, organizations can look to the tools that practitioners identify as most valuable, as having the most potential for increased contribution to project performance, and as presently under-utilized. In order to fully understand the nature of project management practices, and the mechanisms through which these create value, researchers must better clarify the distinction between the project phases and project processes. These findings can help project management professionals in selecting priorities for future development.

The purpose of this research is to contribute to a better understanding of project management practice by investigating the use of project management tools and techniques and the levels of support provided by organizations for their use. The study examines both general levels of use and variations among project types and contexts. Many aspects of project management practice are common to most projects in most contexts, while others vary significantly among different types of projects and among projects in different contexts. The purpose of this paper is to present empirical results that show both the common elements and the significant variations. The paper is based on a survey of 750 project management practitioners. The use of tools and techniques is seen here as an indicator of the realities of practice. The study found some aspects of practice to be common across all types of projects and all contexts, but on this background of similar patterns of practice, several statistically significant differences have also been identified. The primary focus of this paper is on these variations in practice.

The specificity of project management in different contexts and industries is recognized, but little empirical research encompasses a sufficiently broad range of contexts and project types to precisely identify these specificities. This article adopts such a wide perspective based on a large sample of data from an ongoing empirical investigation of project management practice. Contextual archetypes are identified (i.e., clusters of experienced practitioners that share similar organizational and project contexts). Archetypes of contextualized practice are then investigated through the study of the extent of use of empirically identified toolsets in each cluster. The results empirically confirm some well‐known assumptions about practice but also sharpen the knowledge and understanding of practice in real complex multidimensional contexts. A new concept of “performing‐maturity” emerged from the data. This concept sheds light on the entangled imbrications of maturity, competence, and success. Practices are regressed against performing‐maturity to reveal best contextualized practices.

he article pursues two objectives: first, to investigate if project management practices, tools, and techniques are used in groups or clusters; and second, to investigate if and how practice varies among different types of projects. The scope of project management practice includes a large number of practices, tools, and techniques. Dealing with such an array of practices, whether it be for making an inventory, studying, teaching, using, or any other purpose, is facilitated by groupings or categorizations. There are many ways to group or categorize project management practices. The PMBOK ® Guide (PMI, 2008) presents practices, tools, and techniques grouped in Knowledge Areas and Process Groups. Historically, these groupings were developed from discussions among groups of project management practitioners, from which a consensus emerged. Turner (2006) provided justification of the nine PMBOK ® Guide Knowledge Areas from theoretical premises, but few attempts have been made to empirically validate these groups. According to Hudson and Moussa (2006), the nine Knowledge Areas of the PMBOK ® Guide are shared by four of the five major project management competency standards around the world, those from Australia, South Africa, the Association for Project Management (APM), and the Project Management Institute (PMI), though the standards from other countries have more than nine Knowledge Areas. Is there a single best way to classify project management tools into Knowledge Areas? One could always argue that a particular process, practice, or tool should be classified in another or more than one Knowledge Area, or that a new Knowledge Area should be created to better represent the reality of practice. As an example, according to the Practice Standard for Earned Value Management (PMI, 2005), the earned value control technique is associated with seven different Knowledge Areas. In short, different practitioners with different backgrounds from various parts of the world, all using sound and rational arguments, could certainly classify tools in Knowledge Areas differently. The idea of grouping by Knowledge Area was developed by teams working on previous versions of the PMBOK ® Guide as a way of classifying elements of project management knowledge for presentation in the document. The original eight Knowledge Areas seem to have been organized as a function of what is being managed: scope, cost, time, quality, human resources, procurement, communications, and risk. Project integration management was added in later editions. These are conceptual groupings. This article aims to empirically identify a structure that underlies the actual practice of project management by investigating patterns in the use of project management

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interplay between risk management and uncertainty and the contextual variability of risk management practice. More precisely, the research empirically measures the relation between the extent of use of risk management and the level of project uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach -The research defines risk management from an empirical perspective., i.e. from an empirically-identified set of tools that is actually used to perform risk management. This toolset is derived from the results of an ongoing major worldwide survey on what experienced practitioners actually do to manage their projects. This paper directly relates uncertainty to the degree of project definition. It uses a sample of 1,296 responses for which the interplay between risk management and uncertainty could be measured. Findings -The results are very coherent. They verify and empirically validate many of the propositions drawn from a review of the literature. But results challenge some of the propositions found in the conventional project management literature and some commonly held views. The research shows that the use of risk management practices and tools is negatively related to the degree of project uncertainty. This somewhat counter-intuitive result is consistent with a general tendency for all project management tools and techniques to be used more intensively in better defined contexts. Practical implications -The empirical investigation of actual risk practices and their contextual variability can help better understand risk management practice and manage risks better. The research also clarifies the concepts of uncertainty, risk and risk management. Originality/value -The results confirm some well-known assumptions about practices, but at the same time produced unexpected results that can stimulate the development of new practices adapted to highly uncertain contexts. The project management field needs to develop new responses for specific contexts for which it was not primarily developed. The results of this research point in the direction of such a need for ill-defined projects and highly uncertain contexts.