The rise and fall of project management: are we observing the birth of a new discipline?

Abstract

This conceptual paper examines the state of the project, program and project portfolio management literature and highlights the divergent views of strategy that exist between project managers and top managers. Project management concepts are shown to be based on approaches to planning that top managers had rejected after thirty years of unsuccessful experience with strategic planning. Persistently high project failure rates and recent developments at the board level suggest that we might have reached the limits of our current approaches, and the question is asked whether project management is destined to follow the rise and fall of strategic planning.Alternatives to the traditional linear mechanistic approaches are explored and it is suggested that the project management field would need to embrace the delivery of strategy as the common ground to engage top managers. Approaches would need to be developed that are consistent with how strategy emerges in turbulent environments. Program and portfolio concepts are found to have the most potential to contribute to the emerging field of strategy implementation.Keywords: rethinking project management; new project management approach; top management; project strategy Introduction Strategy is derived from the Greek word strategos. It is an ancient concept first expounded in a military context and refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal (Ghemawat 2002). Modern corporate strategy was created after the writings of Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and other military strategists were applied to the business domain in the mid-20th century. However, the application has not been consistent and there are different understandings of strategy. In particular, there is a different level of focus between top managers and project managers. The need for research into the overlap between strategy in the management literature and projects to implement strategy has been noted but never fully explored (Okumus 2003).

Factors influencing the performance of architects in construction projects

“…Such support from top management promotes positive feelings of appreciation and secured wellbeing amongst architects, thereby increasing their performance. The result is consistent with the findings of Young and Young (2012), who revealed that support from the top management is the most important factor for a successful project and thus performance of architects.…”

“…Results reveal significant and positive relationships between working condition, organisational support and effective design process and the performance of architects. The strongest effect is obtained from the influence of effective design process on the performance of architects, thereby confirming the studies of Oyedele (2010), Young and Young (2012) and Oluwatayo et al (2018).…”

“…The factors that influence the performance of architects can be classified into i) working condition (Sinesilassie Tabish and Jha, 2017;Böckerman and Ilmakunnas, 2019), ii) organisational support (Young and Young, 2012;Lai, Yusof and Kamal, 2016), iii) working relationship (Kärnä and Junnonen, 2017;Afolabi et al, 2018) and iv) design process (Kärnä and Junnonen, 2017;Assaf, Hassanain and Abdallah, 2018;Othman and Elsaay, 2018). These factors are subsequently discussed in detail.…”

“…According to Batra (2020), organisational support in the form of providing monetary and non-monetary benefits for the individuals will have an impact on their commitment to accomplish the project goals. Organisational support is revealed through guiding individuals to execute their work (Young and Young, 2012). Miao (2011) suggested that the performance of employees can be enhanced through implementing organisational policies and procedures that value their efforts for work.…”

“…Kennedy and Daim (2011) proposed that firms must learn about the needs of individuals, such as for self-development or monetary compensation, to ensure that the provided support will yield improved performance. Given that organisational support is acknowledged as the most important factor for project success (Young and Young, 2012), it positively affects the performance of architects (Oyedele, 2010). Therefore, organisational support is important to influence the performance of architects.…”