Organisational Project Management

Call for Papers – Special issue: Project Management in the Non-Profit Sector

Shankar Sankaran — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 10:20:44 +1000

This journal special issue will explore diverse stakeholder perspectives and share examples of project management practices in the non-profit sector. Key objectives are to develop understandings of project management practice in the sector, to examine how cross-sectoral collaboration and learning can help non-profit organisations achieve their project and programme objectives, and to explore ways in which the wider project management community can learn from experiences in the non-profit sector.

A study of project management knowledge and sustainable outcomes in Thailand’s reproductive health projects

Jantanee Dumrak, Bassam Barroudi, Stephen Pullen — Tue, 12 May 2015 14:27:50 +1000

In Thailand, numerous reproductive health projects funded by both national and international agencies have been established in an attempt to mitigate reproductive health problems. Solving problems on reproductive health projects that only have temporary funding requires effective project management that hopefully leads to better long-term desired outcomes. This paper identifies the association between collaborative reproductive health (CRH) project management and sustainable outcomes. The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^®Guide) is employed to benchmark project management practices on four CRH projects in Thailand. The research methodology presented in this paper comprises of content analysis and questionnaire survey. It is evident that limited use of certain project management knowledge areas (PMKAs) affects CRH project implementation and success. The association between the use of PMKAs and sustainable outcomes on these projects is also presented. Scope, integration and quality management were found to be the most influential PMKAs for sustainable outcomes on CRH projects. Nevertheless, the projects showed a shortage of project management processes for PMKAs that were required to attain the outcomes.

Complexity in the Context of Information Systems Project Management

Alexei Botchkarev, Patrick Finnigan — Sat, 27 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +1000

Complexity is an inherent attribute of any project. The purpose of defining and documenting complexity is to enable a project team to foresee resulting challenges in a timely manner, and take steps to alleviate them.

The main contribution of this article is to present a systematic view of complexity in project management by identifying its key attributes and classifying complexity by these attributes. A “complexity taxonomy” is developed and discussed within three levels: the product, the project and the external environment.

Complexity types are described through simple real-life examples. Then a framework (tool) is developed for applying the notion of complexity as an early warning tool.

The article is intended for researchers in complexity, project management, information systems, technology solutions and business management, and also for information specialists, project managers, program managers, financial staff and technology directors.

Understanding the divide between the theory and practice of organisational change

Julien Pollack — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 05:05:14 +1000

This paper reviews the different ways that academics and practitioners write about and discuss change management, to develop an understanding of whether there is a divide between the theory and practice of change management. This research used scientometric research techniques to compare three corpora: one based on the most cited research in the general management literature on change management; one based on the most cited research in specialist change management journals; and one based on interviews with practising change managers.

It was found that the general management literature emphasised an abstract understanding of knowledge management and the learning organisation, while the change management literature focused more on issues associated with value, culture and social identity. The practitioners emphasised issues at the individual, project and team levels, the need for the effective use of targeted communication to achieve organisational change objectives, and the value of rapidly identifying key drivers in a new context. This research found significant differences between these three corpora, which lends support to other researchers’ claims of a divide between theory and practice in change management.

The IT project manager competencies that impact project success – A qualitative research

Cíntia Cristina Silva de Araújo, Cristiane Drebes Pedron — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 22:51:29 +1000

Since there is a lack of studies about the relationship of IT project manager competencies and project success, this paper will address the following research question: Which competencies should IT project managers develop in order to achieve success in IT projects? To answer this question, we conducted a qualitative research with an exploratory approach. To collect data, twelve (12) in-depth interviews were done with Brazilian project managers from different companies from several business sectors. The analysis results pointed out that for our respondents the most needed category of competencies are team management, business domain knowledge, communication, project management and people skills. As other authors have affirmed, technical skills were considered to be less relevant to project success than interpersonal and intrapersonal competencies.