Project Management Journal

This article highlights the characteristics of articles on project success published between 1986 and 2004 in the Project Management Journal (PMJ) and the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM). The analysis covers references, concepts like project management success, project success, success criteria, and success factors; features of the samples, data collection, and analysis techniques used; and professional disciplines. The results show that research on project success is characterized by diversity except in epistemological and methodological perspectives. The article suggests a shift to project, portfolio, and program success and concludes with a discussion on the traditional state of the research, criticizes its assumptions, and offers alternative metaphors and recommendations for future research.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) plays an important role in the training, career development, and recognition of information systems (IS) project managers. Indeed, not only do IS professionals account for a large proportion of the PMI constituency, but PMI is also influential in the training of IS project managers. This study explores further the contribution of PMI to IS project management by means of its main publication outlet, the Project Management Journal (PMJ). To do so, the contents of the 39 IS project management articles published in PMJ during 1988-2005 were analyzed. The article focuses on the following dimensions: the relative importance of IS project management articles published by PMJ; the profile of the authors of IS project management articles in PMJ; the main issues, in terms of IS project management, covered by PMJ; and the major gaps, in terms of IS project management, in the coverage of this domain by PMJ.

The Logical Framework Approach (LFA) has proved to be a valuable tool for project approval, design, and evaluation. However, a few pitfalls make it hard to use within today's project management framework and to integrate with other project management tools. This article proposes an updated version of the LFA to improve its compatibility with today's corporate culture, project management framework, and tools. We propose to call the updated tool the Logical Framework Approach-Millennium (LFA-M). The LFA-M is a seven-step approach leading to the development of the Logframe-Millennium (LF-M), a five-column and four-line matrix describing major project commitments and providing an overall understanding of the project. It was successfully implemented at the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. The LFA-M fits well within today's project management framework and corporate culture and leads easily to other project management tools.

This research explores information technology (IT) project managers’ reuse of knowledge associated with soft skills when managing user expectations. Through interviews with IT project managers, several themes emerged: novelty of problems, conditions within the organization, types of available knowledge, and methods for reusing knowledge. Within this study, we discovered the need for additional research on how social norms and organizational conditions encourage or inhibit knowledge reuse. Furthermore, we identified a difference in the usefulness of knowledge captured in formal repositories according to levels of project management experience. The findings confirm, extend, and illuminate the current research associated with knowledge reuse in IT project management.

Uncertainty is an important but difficult to quantify challenge for project managers. Despite this, some project characteristics associated with uncertainty are quantifiable and can provide project managers with clues to the amount of uncertainty in a project. This article shows how the following project characteristics can be quantified: (1) interdependencies among activities, (2) limited information about activity durations, and (3) unfamiliarity and variety in project work. Data from two example projects are used to demonstrate the calculation and interpretation of the resulting three uncertainty descriptors.

Emerging trends indicate that programs are being used to deliver benefits that may not be fully harnessed from single sets of uncoordinated projects. To support this movement, it is essential to have suitable measurement frameworks to assess the contribution of these activities and supply decision makers with valuable data on whether their objectives are being realized. This paper introduces the Multi-Objective Realization Method (MORE) to help measure the strategic contributions of programs. The main principles of MORE underline the importance of a formal strategy to elicit and develop program objectives and to frame those objectives within defined measurement dimensions.

Although A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK^® Guide)—Fourth Edition identifies nine Knowledge Areas that project managers should focus on while managing projects, it does not indicate the relative importance of each of these Knowledge Areas. However, such information can be of great significance in helping project managers determine how to use their available resources most effectively. This article investigates the relative importance of the project management Knowledge Areas used during the planning phase of a project and their impact on project success. Results presented in this article are based on a field study that involved 783 project managers from different countries and industries. The study revealed that the Knowledge Areas with the greatest impact on project success were Time, Risk, Scope, and Human Resources. However, these results have been found to be sensitive to the industry in which projects were undertaken. Differences among industries are described and discussed in the article.