PROJECT MANAGEMENT: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

Nicholas G. HALL

Department of Management Sciences Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, USA

hall_33@fisher.osu.edu ()

Abstract

This paper studies the business process known as project management. This process has exhibited a remarkable growth in business interest over the last 15 years, as demonstrated by a 1000% increase in membership in the Project Management Institute since 1996. This growth is largely attributable to the emergence of many new diverse business applications that can be successfully managed as projects. The new applications for project management include IT implementations, research and development, new product and service development, corporate change management, and software development. The characteristics of modern projects are typically very different from those of traditional projects such as construction and engineering, which necessitates the development of new project management techniques. We discuss these recent practical developments. The history of project management methodology is reviewed, from CPM and PERT to the influential modern directions of critical chain project management and agile methods. We identify one important application area for future methodological change as new product and service development. A list of specific research topics within project management is discussed. The conclusions suggest the existence of significant research opportunities within project management.

Keywords: Project management, overview, recent practical developments, opportunities for research

1. Introduction

A project is conventionally defined as a

“temporary endeavor undertaken to create a

unique product or service” (Project Management

Institute 2008). Alternatively, a project can be

thought of as a well defined set of tasks that

must all be completed in order to meet the

projects goals (Klastorin 2004). In a typical

project, many tasks are performed concurrently

with each other. Another key feature of projects

is the existence of precedence relations between

the tasks. These relations typically define

constraints that require one task to be completed

before another starts.

Compared to many business processes,

project management appears to be particularly

difficult, from both theoretical and practical

perspectives. From a theoretical perspective, the

fundamental planning problem of resource

constrained scheduling is highly intractable.

From a practical perspective, the two standard

objectives in project management are defined to

Systems Engineering Society of China amp; Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

be completion of the project on time and on

budget. Yet, many projects fail to meet these two

criteria, despite detailed planning before

execution begins and the use of modern project

management software. Further, the failure rate of

projects is higher in many modern applications

than in traditional ones, due to less reliable data

and the more challenging characteristics that are

discussed in Section 2 below. Indeed, it can be

said that, despite its recent massive growth in

use, project management is a difficult to manage

business process. As we discuss, this is creating

extremely interesting research opportunities. The

purposes of this work are to outline what those

opportunities are, and to provide some specific

examples.

This paper is organized as follows. In

Section 2, we provide a brief history of project

management, document its dramatic recent

growth, and discuss the new challenges

presented by its greatly expanded set of

applications. Section 3 summarizes the

development of methodology for project

management over time, from familiar techniques

developed in the 1950s to more recent and

newly influential ideas. In Section 4, we identify

many specific research opportunities in project

management. Section 5 provides a conclusion.

2. History and Growth

The use of project management as a business

process goes back a long time. Indeed, the

building of the Egyptian pyramids is believed by

many to have been assisted by the use of simple

project management principles. For much of the

history of project management, the predominant

application type was engineering and

construction projects - for example, roads,

bridges and skyscrapers. This was still the case

when project management became formalized in

the 1960s with the help of new computing power.

A particularly impressive project management

achievement at that time was the Apollo moon

landing project (1961- 1969), which required the

coordination of about 410,000 workers at a cost

of $25 billion in 1961 dollars, or $154 billion in

2011. Another impressive achievement is the

organization of the Olympic Games using

project management. This is an example of an

event project, where the project de

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