Project Management

Conceptual Overview

The abundance of projects in today's industry and business life has given rise to much interest in PM. And some commentators argue that the use of the project form of organization is still on the increase so that there is continually an ongoing projectization in society as a whole. Many activities are defined as projects and organized as time-limited efforts. One implication of this is that a growing number of people are involved in PM and some of them even have the title project manager or consider themselves to be project managers. This proliferation of projects is paralleled by the availability of practical handbooks in the area. So even if project manager is not an officially recognized profession, it has some of the traits of a profession.

At the very heart of PM is the concern for fulfilling the task of the particular project at hand. That task can be described in physical terms—a house to be constructed, to give one example—or in abstract terms—a reorganization of the market activities of a company, as another example—and the task is central for the project. One foremost prerequisite for good PM is that the project task gets completed. And the ability of a project manager to see to it that the project is planned and organized in such a way that the task is fulfilled within the constraints of the resources provided and on time is what distinguishes an efficient and able project manager from an inefficient one. A project manager is also judged on the ability to handle the group team so that the goals can be attained.

One challenge in PM is to isolate the project from its environment—PM theory assumes that this isolation can be done in practice—and to organize it in overall terms. The ability to manage the project in relation to its proper context is sometimes denoted as project governance and involves organizing the relationships between the stakeholders of the project, be it owners or sponsors, the project manager, and the team involved in carrying through the project. Project governance is concerned with overall effectiveness rather than project efficiency.

The alternative denomination to project, temporary organization, is sometimes used to stress the time dimension—a project has to be finalized within a [Page 1319]certain time—but another aspect of the difference between the two concepts project versus temporary organization is that project most of the time refers to the practical, normative, aspects of management, whereas temporary organization is used in recognition of the fact that the functioning of projects and the relations between projects and their environments in practice often are different from what is stressed in handbooks on PM of the normative type. Engineers and engineering sciences are currently dominating the normative, prescriptive scene of PM, whereas behavioral science is concerned with describing, understanding, and explaining project phenomena. That division of the area has been even more evident, not to say obvious, during the past few years.

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