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Since the mid 1970s, project management associations around the world have made serious attempts to conduct themselves as professional associations. Traditional professions distinguished themselves by emphasising standards such as service to the public and competence in their field, and by ensuring that their membership meets these standards. An important element of a profession is ownership of a body of knowledge that is distinctive to the professional group. Project management associations have spent considerable time and effort in developing Bodies of Knowledge (BOKs) and their associated certification programs, and indeed the popularity of these has been notable. Yet there are problems, some relating to the broader issue of whether the project management associations really are equipped to act as professional bodies, others related to the specific challenge of agreeing the 'distinctive body of knowledge' and to the value of certification.This paper draws on insights from the rethinking project management EPSRC project as well as several separate research programs to explore the development of project management as a profession and the role of the formal BOKs in this professionalization, and to suggest a research agenda for critiquing, contributing to, and maintaining both the formal BOKs and the more general body of knowledge relevant to the needs of the discipline.

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Project management is widely seen as delivering undertakings on time, on budget, and on scope. This conceptualization fails, however, to address the front end and its management. Addressing the front end moves the discipline to a second, more strategic level. This article proposes a third level of conceptualization: the institutional level, where management is focused on creating the conditions to support and foster projects, both in its parent organization and its external environment. Management here is done for and on the project rather than in or to it. We show that management at this level offers an enlarged research agenda and improvement in performance.

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This paper is a multi-case study exploratory investigation into the earliest stages of projects and their management. We refer to this throughout the paper as the 'front-end'. We provide a definition of this phase of the project life cycle and conduct a literature review of the various topics that would suggest themselves to be apposite to the front-end. This includes governance and strategy; requirements and technology; estimating; risk and value; people and learning and development. Following this review of literature, we set out the approach taken in the empirical study. The context for the study was the UK, although many of the organizations investigated had a global presence and some of their projects were multinational in nature. We detail the research methods, the multi-case study route taken and the nature of the in-depth interviews with senior project management representatives from nine extremely credible organizations experienced in managing projects. Our findings are presented so as to identify the key set of findings determined after multiple passes of the interview details. These findings reflect both what comprises the front-end of projects and what management does in the front-end. Some of this would be expected of project management, but we found aspects of the front-end management that are not within the normal remit of what is considered to be traditional project management. These findings both reinforce the literature and offer new insights, for example, showing the strong influence of the commercial and economic non-project players in leading or influencing the front-end of projects. A considered set of conclusions are presented together with recommendations for further research.