شالوده شکنی مدیریت پروژه: تحلیلی جنسیتی از دستورالعمل‌های مدیریت پروژه

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the nature and extent of variations between project management practices in six industries. The investigation had the practical purpose of supporting a group of pharmaceutical R&D organizations in their search for an optimum project management model. A total of 10 ‘domains’ was identified using qualitative methods and these formed the basis for a programme of 31 in-depth interviews with knowledgeable project management practitioners in 21 organizations drawn from the six industries. Each interview elicited a quantitative assessment of the practices relating to the domain, using pre-determined scales, and qualitative comments on the practices based on the experiences of the interviewee. Differences between companies and industries were found to exist in each domain. The most highly developed project management models (which might be said to equate to measure of project management maturity) were found in the Petrochemical and Defence industries, which on average scored highly on most dimensions. Other industries (Pharmaceutical R&D, Construction, Telecommunications, and Financial Services) displayed some interesting differences in different domains, but did not display the coherence or scores of the two leading industries.

If you are a project manager, and you suspect that the basic approach to project management in your organization is not ideal, what can you do to convince senior management of the benefits of adopting a different model? Can you trust your own intuition and experience? Where can you look for evidence that there are better ways of approaching the management of projects across an organization? One place to start is by talking to practitioners in different organizations, or even in different industries, and this paper describes one piece of empirical research that was designed to provide someone asking these questions with some kind of a “road map”. But is it likely to prove fruitful? Does the literature on project management suggest that this might be a sensible topic to study empirically? Modern project management has its roots in the second world war, and developed in a limited number of engineering based industries during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s [1]. More recently, the demand for project managers has mushroomed, as project working has increased dramatically in a broad range of industries [24]. One might reasonably expect “industries of origin” to have developed a more advanced model of project management than industries such as Pharmaceutical Research and Development which adopted project management disciplines and practices somewhat later. But did they? Are these “industries of origin” in some way more “mature” than later adopters of project management? Is there evidence that being more “mature” in project management brings with it an improvement in project management practice?

Just as with the pilot exercise carried out to validate the instrument, these results are more interesting as qualitative indicators of the different models underlying project management in different industries than they are statistically reliable indicators of the maturity of different industries. There is, however, some evidence in the results that the “industries of origin” are indeed more mature in terms of project management than industries that have adopted the approach more recently. The Engineering-based industries do score more highly than industries that adopted project management as a core capability much more recently, such as financial services or pharmaceutical R&D. The petrochemical industry's apparent pre-eminence as a source of excellence in project management is perhaps due to the prolonged pressure on reducing the costs of oil discovery and extraction due to the sustained low oil price in the 1980s. This was particularly true of the North Sea oil fields during the 1980s and 1990s, which gave rise to innovative co-operative ventures such as CRINE (Cost Reduction in a New Era). The results provide a fascinating insight into the way that project management has developed differently when it is fostered and formed in different environments. They also open up the possibility of identifying a series of alternative “project management models” each of which provides a “habitable” way of managing portfolios of projects in a different industrial environment. The group that sponsored the research used the results to identify a desirable profile to which they aspire. This profile, and how to accomplish it, will inform the group's work for coming years. It will be interesting to see whether further studies can build on these empirical foundations to reveal more precisely the mechanisms by which superior practices can be developed over time.