Innovation in Project Management: Voices of Researchers Joana Geraldi JG Hello, my name is Joana Geraldi, International Centre for Programme Management at Cranfield School of Management. In this podcast I would like to share with you some of the current debates going on in the area of project management. Specifically I will be briefing you on a paper called Innovation in Project Management: Voices of Researchers that I wrote together with Rodney Turner, Anders Söderholm, Mike Hobday, Harvey Maylor and Tim Brady. If we look around us, we will see that we are surrounded by projects, from the development of cutting edge technology to the writing of essays by school children. The “discipline of project management” offers a large body of knowledge on how to lead these undertakings. Frustrating though is that although much work has been devoted to this area, success rates of projects are still poor. For instance, the latest Chaos studies carried out by the Gartner Group, demonstrated that less than one third of IT projects are successful and this has been so for the last 13 years. So, what’s going on? Shall we just accept that projects are too difficult and we are never going to get it right? And if so, do we really need the discipline of project management? That’s what my colleagues and I discussed in this paper. The paper was based on the closing session of the 8th International Research Network on Projects Conference held in Brighton in 2007. The debate started with a polemic statement: “This house believes that we no longer need the discipline of project management”. Academics presented conflicting views around whether we need the project management discipline or not. We organised the arguments in the discussion in a two‐by‐two matrix. On the top of the matrix we considered what we understand as project management discipline: as the traditional body of knowledge or as a research field. On the side, we considered a broader definition of the actor in the statement: whether we are talking about ‘we as practitioners’ or ‘we as researchers’. In the first quadrant, we as practitioners considered ‘discipline’ as the application of traditional practices and tools described in the bodies of knowledge, including Gantt charts, project initiation documents, earned value measures and the like. There are mixed views here. While some researchers argued that projects are never so simple and such a linear and prescriptive discipline is harmful; others argue that many projects actually fail because they lacked any structure at all. In the second quadrant scholars unanimously agreed that practitioners need the research field of project management. A good project manager needs to develop and deploy personal competences and good judgement rather than ‘stick to the traditional discipline’. In the third quadrant we have observed an increasing use of traditional project management approach to manage research. Traditionally academics wish to generate large number of publications and one way to do this is to make the research process linear and mechanistic. The challenge with such a process is that it rarely fits well with Joana Giraldi
the emergent nature of research. Attempts to make the research then fit with the process prove highly restrictive. Finally in the fourth quadrant we as researchers see project management research field as a point of convergence for teaching and research. Contradictions in the voices of researchers suggest that project management research is in a fruitful moment of revolution of paradigms, in which concepts that were taken for granted, such as the importance of control, are now put into question, and new concepts are emerging. We wish that the new paradigm accepts the plurality of research in projects; one that accepts those commentators that do believe on the discipline of project management, and those questioning it. It might be exactly this diversity and contradiction that may aid our comprehension of ‘projects’, and perhaps help us improve its current low success rates. If you have any comment or would like to participate on the development of better project management, please contact us at the International centre for Programme Management at Cranfield School of Management. Thank you. Page 2