Contextualization of Project Management Practice and Best Practice

By Claude Besner and Brian Hobbs

Contextualization of Project Management Practice and Best Practice contributes to a better understanding of project management practice by investigating the use and usefulness of project management practices, tools, and techniques. The study examines practice variations among organizational, project management, and project contexts and performance. The use of project management practices, tools, and techniques is seen here as an indicator of the realities of practice. A clear understanding of the state of professional practice is particularly important to future development in the field of project management. Directly observing what project practitioners do and how they put into action their knowledge and competencies is a means to understand their practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Project Management Institute
• Release date: Jul 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781628250107

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www.pmchair.uqam.ca.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The purpose of this research is to contribute to a better understanding of project management practice by investigating the use and usefulness of project management practices, tools, and techniques. This monograph is based on a large-scale survey of approximately 2,500 experienced project management practitioners. The study examines practice variations among organizational, project management, and project contexts and performance. The use of project management practices, tools, and techniques is seen here as an indicator of the realities of practice. A clear understanding of the state of professional practice is particularly important to future development in the field of project management. Directly observing what project practitioners do and how they put into action their knowledge and competencies is a means to understand their practice. These observations are a necessary foundation material for the conceptualization of practice and theory building. As Blomquist, HällgrenNilsson, and Söderholm (2010, p. 5) state The practice approach is not a substitute to present theorizing but rather a complement that brings substance. The present book examines an important and directly observable aspect of project management practice: the use of the practices, tools, and techniques that are specific to the field. Looking at the day-to-day work of managers has led to fundamental understanding and theory building (Mintzberg, 1980; Pitsis, Clegg, Marosszeky, & Rura-Polley, 2003; Schatzki, Knorr, & Von Savigny, 2001) including recent theory building in project management (Ballard, 2000; Blomquist et al., 2010; Simon, 2006).

A rich array of project management practices, tools and techniques has emerged from practice, as witnessed by the content of the project management bodies of knowledge (BOKs) including A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (Project Management Institute, 2008a). Identifying the set of project-specific practices, tools and techniques is an important part of defining the frontiers of the field. The PMBOK® Guide identifies that subset of the project management body of knowledge generally recognized as good practice. Generally recognized means the knowledge and practices described are applicable to most projects most of the time and there is consensus about their value and usefulness. Good practice means there is general agreement that the application of these skills, tools, and techniques can enhance the chances of success over a wide range of projects. Good practice does not mean the knowledge described should always be applied uniformly to all projects; the organization and/or project management team is responsible for determining what is appropriate for any given project." (Project Management Institute, 2008a, p. 4, emphasis added). The PMBOK® Guide does not focus only on tools and techniques, but taking this focus, the PMBOK® Guide can be seen as providing an inventory of generally applicable and generally valued tools and techniques. This inventory is an important starting point for understanding project management practice. However, the PMBOK® Guide gives neither any indication of the relative importance of the different tools and techniques nor the ways in which use varies with context and project type.

Within the endeavor of rethinking project management, (Morris, Crawford, Hodgson, Shepherd, & Thomas, 2006) explore the development and updating of formal BOKs (PMBOK; APMBOK; P2M; etc.) and their contribution to project management professionalization and evolution. They point out that empirical evidence regarding the said generally accepted bodies of knowledge is missing. They conclude that Research has a major role in challenging, shaping and populating such standards (p. 718). Considering the current activity in generating new standards, and the upgrading of existing ones, they insist that the timing for additional research is highly appropriate (p. 718). The aim of the present research is to provide guidance for practitioners and organizations and to contribute to the development of project management knowledge.

The research has been ongoing since 2003. Data was collected in three phases in 2004, 2007, and 2009. The monograph presents the results to date related to the research questions below. Some results have already been published including (Besner & Hobbs, 2006a, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c, 2010, in press-a, in press-b).

1.1 Research Objectives and Questions

The objectives of the research project are to advance and support project management knowledge and practice and to provide guidance to individuals, organizations and professional associations by studying the present state of professional practice.

The research addresses the following questions:

What is the extent of use and perceived usefulness of the project management practices, toolsets, tools, and techniques?

How does the use and usefulness vary with organizational, project management, and project contexts?

What are the best project management practices?

Do best practices vary contextually?

What should be the priorities of practitioners and organizations when choosing to invest in the development of project management practices, tools and techniques?

In an applied field such as project management, the examination of professional practice can be seen as an examination of the field itself. The results of the examination can, therefore, provide insights into the present state of the field and identify possible future developments, while at the same time providing guidance to practitioners and organizations.

The objectives of this research project are quite challenging for several reasons. The project context is a multidimensional space. Projects can be described by many different characteristics. Project practice is multi-faceted and there are many project management practices to be investigated. The number of variables to be investigated and controlled is therefore very large. The contextualization of practices is challenging because of the multidimensionality of the contexts in which real practice takes place; for example, external or internal projects with different degrees of innovativeness or complexity have already been revealed as being managed differently (Besner & Hobbs, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c). Each concrete example of a project context can be described using a combination of such dimensions, the effects of which may be reinforcing or may cancel each other.

The research objectives are both empirical and theoretical. Three of the limitations of the project management bodies of knowledge are that they lack empirical foundation, that they are inventories of practices but provide little indication of the relative importance of the diverse practices or the structure that might underlie them, and that they indicate that practice must be adapted to the context but do not provide indications of what this adaptation might be. The research reported here aims to contribute to these current shortcomings in the literature generally and in standards specifically.

1.2 General Strategy to Accomplish the Goals

The specificity and originality of the present research is that the description of practice here is based on quantitative data, whereas most other investigations of project as practice are based on qualitative data. The results based on quantitative data can contribute to the enrichment and the validation of the descriptions of practice emerging from the qualitative stream of research because the two are complementary.

This empirical research is based on a web-based survey to which a large number of experienced practitioners responded. Each respondent provided demographic information on themselves that is used primarily to ensure that respondents have the experience necessary to report on project management as it is actually practiced.

Information was also gathered on their organizational, project management, and project contexts. This information was used to examine how practices vary contextually. As was stated above, contextual variables vary together. For example, the majority of practitioners working on engineering and construction projects work for firms that do projects for external customers; in this way the type of project is linked to the type of project customer. The contextual data is analyzed to identify interactions among contextual variables and to identify clusters of practitioners with common multidimensional contexts (i.e., contextual archetypes).

Information on project management practice is gathered by asking respondents to identify to what extent they use each of 108 pre-identified practices, tools, and techniques that are well-known and that are very specific to project management. In this way, practitioners report on their actual practice. Most of the analyses of practice are based on this data.

Much of the literature on project management and standards in particular are normative and opinion-based; practice is presented as good or exemplary in the opinion of the authors or the persons that were consulted in the preparation of the text. A distinction is not often made between descriptions of actual practice and normative statements as to what practice should be. The present research empirically measures actual practice through descriptions of practice and context that are as factual as possible. The data on the context and on the extent of use of the 108 practices, tools, and techniques is not based on subjective evaluations of value or merit. However, information is also gathered on practitioners’ perceptions of the potential impact that using more of these practices, tools, and techniques, or using them better, would have on the performance of their projects. The two types of data are kept separate and treated differently. Moreover, the present research makes a clear distinction between descriptions of project management as it is actually practiced and best practices, which are practices that differentiate high performers from low performers. The description of actual practice and the identification of best practices are very different pieces of information. Both are useful for understanding project management practice. They are more useful if they are not confused one with the other. For this reason, the results for each are presented in different chapters.

It can be very fastidious to study 108 practices, tools and techniques individually. Fortunately, the analysis reveals that practitioners use them in groups or toolsets. The majority of the analyses present the use of 19 toolsets rather than 108 individual practices, which is a much more parsimonious approach. However, some detail is lost because of this. In order to report results that are as complete as possible, an index is provided in Appendix 2, which contains a one-page summary of the results for each of the 108 individual practices and each of the 19 toolsets.

The database is large and can be exploited in many different ways using a variety of statistical techniques. The analyses that are presented in the monograph are those that address the research questions the most directly. All of the statistical techniques are well-known.

1.3 Organization of the Monograph

Following the introduction, the second chapter presents a review of the relevant research on project management practice. Chapter 3, the methodology chapter, presents the questionnaire and the method used to identify the practices, tools, and techniques that are investigated. The methodology chapter also has one section describing in detail how the data is analyzed. The results are presented in each of the chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7 and in the index in Appendix 2. Chapter 4 presents the respondent demographics, the contextual variables and their descriptive statistics. 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 significant differences have also been identified. Chapter 5 presents the description of project management practice for the entire sample, without considering contextual variability. Contextual variations in practice are presented in Chapter 6 for individual contextual variables, for four types of projects, and for five multidimensional contextual archetypes. Best practices are identified in Chapter 7 for both the entire sample, for each of four types of projects and for the five contextual archetypes. The results are discussed in Chapter 8, which is followed by the conclusion. The document ends with two appendices, including the index of one-page summaries for each practice and each toolset.

The expression practices, tools, and techniques is not used systematically throughout the monograph, it is often replace by the shorter expressions tools and techniques or simply tools or practices; all these expressions are considered equivalent and used to improve readability.

Chapter 2

Project Management Practice

2.1 Introduction

Until the 1960s, project management was considered more of an art than a science (Lalonde, Bourgault, & Findeli, 2010); except for a few tools like the bar chart (Gantt, 1903) that were far from being systematically used, projects were not manage with standardized practices. Some tools and techniques developed in the late 1950s for large organizations, like the Critical Path Method (CPM) developed for DuPont and Remington Rand (Kelley & Walker, 1959) or for large projects like the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) developed for the U.S. Navy Polaris missile project (Malcolm, Rooseboom, Clark, & Fazer, 1959) are widely known today, but were largely unknown at that time.

Following the birth of PMI in 1969, project practitioners and researchers from all horizons deliberated on what is generic about project management. This idea of a common practice across industries was shared by other groups in other parts of the world. It has led to what is now known as project management BOKs. Before, project management was not considered to be comparable between projects. Each project was considered unique and therefore different, whether the projects were in the same industry or in different industries. The teaching of project management was accordingly envisioned as discipline-dependent. This new idea of a generic practice slowly made its way within academic institutions. The initiative to teach the same project management curriculum to students of different disciplines including not only engineering but also commerce, marketing, and even cinema, was not an easy sell to the practitioner community 35 years ago when of the University of Quebec at Montreal created its Master's Degree Program in Project Management, the first graduate program in project management worldwide.

Wirth (1992) argued that project management is largely generic, that is to say, applicable to many industries with little adaptation. The very existence of the PMBOK® Guide is itself an illustration of the generic nature of project management, although the PMBOK® Guide does emphasize that adaptation is required (Project Management Institute, 2008a, p. 4). Crawford, Pollack, and England (2007), and many before them, challenge the generic standards asking: How generic are project management knowledge and practice? Have we gone too far in generalizing the standard practice? Today, many, including (Shenhar, 2001), argue that one size does not fit all. There has been an increasing interest in the study of variations in project practice across different types of projects and different contexts. The proliferation of specific interest groups within PMI (now communities of practice), and the publishing of the Government, Construction and U.S. Department of Defense extensions to the PMBOK® Guide (Project Management Institute, 2002, 2003a, 2003b) are also clear indications of variations in project management by application area. This is often seen as a way to develop the field of project management beyond generic knowledge and practice. Payne and Turner (1999) and Shenhar (1998) have shown that project management practices do vary significantly from one type of project to the next. Crawford, Hobbs, and Turner (2005, 2006) have shown that organizations divide their projects into categories in order to apply different tools, techniques, and approaches to different types of projects. They showed that one of the primary reasons that organizations create systems for categorizing projects into different types is to adapt their project management methods to the specific requirements of each type of project. This adaptation is twofold, an operational aspect as organizations seek to improve the performance on projects and a strategic aspect that allows firms to differentiate themselves in competitive markets.

There is, therefore, widespread recognition of the variability of project management practice by project type, by application area, and by other contextual factors. The questions now deal with the extent of the variation, the project characteristics and project environments that are associated with the greatest variability, and the detailed identification of which practices vary in which contexts. The present research contributes to the debate in three ways. First, it demonstrates the existence of both generic project management practice and variation in the level of use of the practices. Second, it investigates the similarities and differences among project management practices on different types of projects and in different contexts. And finally, beyond differences in practice, the research presents which practices are perceived to have the most potential to contribute to improved project performance, and investigates which practices lead to better performance and thus can be considered the best practices generically and in different contexts.

There is considerable research studying project management practices, tools, and techniques, or, more generally, project management practice. The vast majority of this research focuses essentially on one specific project management practice. In general, the selected aspect is of interest to the author and to the reader who both seek to identify and understand its specific usefulness and value. However, this body of research on practices does not allow for comparative evaluation of the relative use and usefulness of those practices. As we will see in more detail, some research does compare a number of practices, but most often in a specific context. Very few adopt, as does the present research, a wider view and attempt to identify general and relative use and usefulness of project management practices in different contexts, simultaneously looking at a wide range of practices and contexts. Looking at the larger picture allows the present research to analyze contextual differences in project management practice. Figure 2.1 below illustrates the approach taken.

The following sections first present research concerned with the value of project management practice. The review then examines some example of research about specific application areas, knowledge areas, or specific aspects of the use of tools. The text then focuses on studies which like the present research adopted a wider view. The review finally looks at the case of project management software (PMS). For some members of the project management community, the expression project management tool refers to computer-based tools and specific software products. As is shown by the discussion so far, the term is used here in a broader sense, analogous to the use found in the PMBOK® Guide. Nonetheless, PMS is an important aspect of practice.

2.2 Researching the Value of Project Management Practice

Many project management tools are inherently value-oriented. The practice of value analysis is devoted to minimizing the cost and optimizing the performance of projects and deliverables. Earned value management uses value as a metric for gauging cost and schedule performance during project implementation. Financial measurement tools, such as rate of return on investment (ROI) or cost/benefit analysis, are also used to measure organizational value. These tools can provide useful information for implementing rational decision-making processes. Besides these value-oriented tools, there are many other practices and tools in the practitioner's toolbox that have the potential to improve project success and contribute to value creation.

Over the last 30 years, several noteworthy studies have identified project success factors. Cooke-Davies (2004) summarized these and proposed a distinction among three levels of project success: doing projects right, doing the right projects, and doing the right projects right, time after time. In