From the Editor
Authors: C. Bredillet
Year: 2011

In this issue of the Project Management Journal, the reader will explore understanding better the contribution of project management to organizational performance, discovering the necessity to move beyond the old reigning paradigm of single-loop project control, raising the question whether PMP® certification leads to better performance, learning how to develop project management competence through a course based on service learning and an experiential learning approach, supporting new product development with the use of “dormant knowledge,” and increasing performance of virtual new product development projects. The articles rely on a wide spectrum of research paradigms and approaches: positivist and constructivist; quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods; statistics, empirical investigations, and case studies; system dynamics model; and experimentation. As I like to emphasize, this exemplifies the richness of the field and shows the diversity of applications for possible research perspectives. Aubry and Hobbs propose “A Fresh Look at the Contribution of Project Management to Organizational Performance.” Their main goal in this article is to offer a better understanding of the contribution that project management makes to organizational performance. Based on the Competing Values Framework and on the in-depth examination of 11 case studies, the authors reveal the plurality of paradoxical perspectives and contrasted results. A key to performance is decision making. AbdelHamid (“Single-Loop Project Controls: Reigning Paradigms or Straitjackets?”) shows that the dominant mental model playing in project decision making is a simplistic single-loop view of causality. Ignoring multiple feedback interactions and being insensitive to nonlinearities lead to missing to address properly what project management is, creating a multiloop nonlinear feedback system, and to poor performance. Three insights helping to improve project decision making are provided. Can Project Management Professional (PMP) certification be the answer? Starkweather and Stevenson suggest that “PMP® Certification as a Core Competency [Is] Necessary But Not Sufficient” in this article. They investigate the relationship between project management certification and established project management core competencies in the IT industry. They test two hypotheses in order to determine the valuation of the PMP® certification as a core competency and as an indicator of project success. Both hypotheses are rejected, leading to discuss recruiters’ and IT executives’ suggestions for improvement in the delivery of the project management body of knowledge. But beyond certification and reflecting on the AbdelHamid paper, project management education plays a major role in the development of relevant competence. Dixon’s paper (“Service Learning and Integrated, Collaborative Project Management”) discusses how to develop project management undergraduate courses based on experiential and service learning—a community-centric problem-based learning methodology where students address real community issues and problems. The paper, comparing and contrasting the first three offerings of this course, provides helpful lessons learned and encourages a hands-on method for learning project management. Knowledge is not only about people, but also about organizations. Creating, storing, and using organizational knowledge (old and new) from research and development in new product development projects is of primary importance. Tukel, Kremic, Rom, and Miller advocate “Knowledge-Salvage Practices for Dormant R&D Projects.” They demonstrate that knowledge left over from projects that have been killed at different development stages may carry considerable value. In order to facilitate the use of this “lost” knowledge they propose the creation of a knowledge bank. They test the feasibility of this concept by developing and running a simulation using system dynamics modeling. But if organizational knowledge is a key factor in new product development projects, some other factors may lead to a superior level of performance: Strang (“Leadership Substitutes and Personality Impact on Time and Quality in Virtual New Product Development Projects”) concludes that transactional leadership and some personality attributes increase project scope quality and time performance in research based on the surveys of over 1,000 team members. Enjoy reading this issue! ■