This paper aims to make a contribution to theory, as well as to practice, by identifying which practices are used by most private organizations in general and by sector of activity. The influence of practitioners' characteristics in the choice of project management practices and their use in groups are also analyzed. The results show that the most used project management practices are Kick-off Meeting, Activity List, Progress Meetings, Gantt Chart and Baseline Plan, however, differences between activity sectors and practitioners' characteristics were found. The results also indicate that the most used project management practices are, in fact, used as toolsets.
■ This paper describes the quantitative analysis phase of an exploratory study to identify useful project management improvement initiatives and factors contributing to their successful embedment in organizations. A preliminary framework, based on a literature review and a series of interviews with practitioners, was tested via a questionnaire, which elicited 793 responses from project management practitioners worldwide. The paper focuses on factor analyses of the questionnaire responses, addressing issues of construct validity and reliability. The resulting final framework highlights 15 key project management improvement initiatives and 26 embedding factors grouped by the factor analyses into three project management improvement initiative themes and six embedding themes.
This paper describes the results of a qualitative study to develop a framework to help organisations to embed useful project management improvement initiatives (PMIIs), which specifically aimed to identify key PMIIs and key embedding factors, based upon the circumstances encountered in different organisations. While the literature on PM provides some advice about PMIIs, understanding how to facilitate their embedment appears to be limited. However, research reported in the innovation literature provides a useful preliminary set of salient factors. A first attempt at framework conceptualisation based on a literature review was used as a starting point for exploratory empirical research. A series of thirty semi-structured interviews with PM professionals sought to identify additional PMIIs and embedding factors and check its salience. Analysis of the interviews data led to a framework comprising key 15 PMIIs and 26 key embedding factors, grouped into four improving themes and six embedding themes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.