Explorations of Value: Perspectives of the Value of Project Management

Over 4 years ago, the Project Management Institute (PMI) initiated a research project titled “Researching the Value of Project Management. ” The project, which came to be known fondly as the Value Project to all involved, began as a discussion between two researchers in a café in a small town in rural Alberta in July 2004. Ultimately, it grew to involve 48 academic volunteers within the core team, as well as 17 case-study research teams on four continents around the world over a period of almost 4 years. If nothing else, the management challenges associated with such a large and complex research project would be interesting for this audience; it is certainly not easy managing a research project of this scale, which requires the development of strategies to address volunteer participants and multiple time zones, languages, and cultures. Engaging though these stories are, they are discussions that we will leave for another article or issue. Here, we explore, through multiple perspectives and through the lenses of many gifted researchers, the different views that have emerged on the value that project management delivers to organizations. The project officially ended with the delivery and publication of the major findings of the study in the monograph “Researching the Value of Project Management,” published by PMI in October 2008. Even in a manuscript of over 500 pages, only so many of the total findings of the study could be reported. This thematic issue of the Project Management Journal is meant to highlight some of the additional research insights generated by the case-study research teams. Each case-study research team was tasked with collecting a full set of common data from its unique set of case studies, as well as further contributing to our understanding of value by applying their own unique interest lens to the study of this data and any additional data they collected to further their own independent analysis. The articles included in this issue reflect a subset of these varied analyses and point to the breadth and value of the dataset collected as it contributes not only to our understanding of the value of project management, but also to project management practice in general. In total, we selected 10 articles from those submitted for consideration for this special issue. These 10 articles are all qualitative studies based on analysis of case-study data collected by a number of the individual data-collection teams. The full study involved 65 case-study organizations from 14 countries on 5 continents. The case studies represented in the articles in this issue are based in a range of countries, including Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Serbia, and the United States. One study focuses on an in-depth analysis of a single case (Zhai et al.), while most provide a small-scale, multicase analysis of all the cases collected by a casestudy team or set of researchers (Andersen & Vaagaasar; Cicmil et al.; Cooke-Davies et al.; Crawford & Helm; Eskerod & Riis; Hurt & Thomas; Lechler & Cohen; Mengel et al.). The final article provides a broad cross-case analysis of all 65 cases (Mullaly & Thomas). These articles cover the gamut of project management organizations, from mega-projects through entrepreneurial start-ups, high technology through local government, and include consideration of research and development, service, construction, and engineering organizations. Ultimately, each article explores the value of project management in a unique and informative manner through the application of a variety of theoretical and empirical lenses. The articles in this issue are grouped by concept. The first three articles deal most explicitly with how project management delivers value by facilitating the human side of managing projects. Eskerod and Riis describe the value of project management in terms of the efficiency, legitimacy, power and control, and satisfaction generated through the use of common project management models. Andersen and Vaagaasar examine the debate over whether value is best derived by implementing mainstream project management thinking or investing in developing unique approaches custom fit to the needs of the organizations. The focus of their discussion is on the value that project management delivers through improved communication. Mengel et al. study the value that particular human values embedded in project management implementations deliver to organizations. The second set of articles explores the role of different structural components of project management in delivering project management value to organizations. Lechler and Cohen explore the role of a particular organizational structure (steering committees) in assisting project management to deliver value to organizations. Hurt and Thomas seek to understand how the project management office structure delivers sustainable value Guest Editorial Janice L. Thomas, PhD, and Mark Mullaly, PMP