Reconstructing Project Management Reprised: A Knowledge Perspective

In May 2013, Wiley-Blackwell published Reconstructing Project Management (Morris, 2013), a book I had been working on, I suppose, for over 40 years, about the knowledge needed to manage projects and programs effi ciently and effectively. I was invited to summarize the main points in the book in an article for Project Management Journal (PMJ)®, which is what this is. Many academic researchers are primarily interested in projects as examples of temporary organizations, rather than in questions about building a discipline for the delivery of goals. Indeed, they may well be skeptical about our ability to define the kind of normative or prescriptive nature of the knowledge that would be required for such a discipline, or the value of such guidance should it be available. Having spent many years in the ‘real’ world of delivering projects, I believe that there does need to be, and that there is, a discipline for managing projects; and further, that this discipline needs to be enlarged from how many perceive it today. Doing this will not be easy, but the result will be an enormously more useful and relevant body of knowledge. This thesis is explored in the book’s three parts. Part 1 traces how our knowledge of the field developed, and how the subject has come to be constructed in the way we think of it today. Part 2 takes this construct apart— deconstructs it—describing the range of functions and skills that collectively constitute the latest thinking on the discipline. Part 3 then looks at how these elements of project management may need to be recombined— reconstructed—to meet today’s needs and tomorrow’s challenges. We need, I argue, to focus more on enhancing value and influencing context, while making an effective impact and addressing the major issues facing society today. Except for Part 2, which is not reprised here, this paper more or less follows this structure but does so from the perspective of investigating what knowledge we need, as a discipline, to manage projects and programs, efficiently and effectively. Specifically, it investigates: • How our knowledge of managing projects (which, for brevity is often, but not always, taken also to cover programs) was ‘invented.’ (It was not ‘found’); • How robust that knowledge is, in the sense of being reliable and true; and • In what way and to what ends we should be using that knowledge, and why.