Editorial
Towards a theory of Project Management: The functions of Project Management

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Section snippets

Scope Management

Premise 1 says that a project is a temporary organization to which resources are assigned to do work to bring about beneficial change. In order for that to happen, the change required must be defined and its delivery managed (Corollary 6 and Premise 3), and in order for that to happen, the work required to be done must be defined and managed. Thus:

Corollary 11

Scope Management is an inherent component of Project Management.

Premise 3 and Corollary 7, together with Premise 1, imply that the objectives must be

Project organization

Premise 1 says that resources are assigned to the project to do the work to bring about the change. We have also identified seven roles associated with Project Management. Appropriate people and other resources need to be identified and marshalled to the project to fulfil these requirements.

Corollary 14

Project organization is an essential component of Project Management.

At any level of breakdown we will need to match roles and responsibilities and the skill requirements to the products and work at that

Quality Management

We have identified above that the project deliverable must function in the desired way; that it must perform. We will specify how we expect the product to perform, and what standards it should meet. We must then ensure that the specification and standards are met, that the output functions as required, and that the desired outcomes are achieved. That is Quality Management.

Corollary 15

Quality Management is an inherent component of Project Management.

Empiricism 1A: Configuration Management is a useful tool

Cost managament

Premise 2 says that the project should provide value for the owner, that is the benefit should justify the cost of the resources used. In order for this to be achieved, the cost must be kept within bounds. It does not necessarily have to be less than some arbitrary budget, it just has to be kept within bounds justified by the desired benefit.

Corollary 16

Cost Management is an inherent component of Project Management.

Now, the field of cost and management accounting has developed methods of monitoring and

Time Management

Also for the outcome to be of benefit it must be obtained within certain timescales. There are at least three ways in which time can have an impact:

  • 1.

    Sometimes the output only has the desired benefit at a certain time. For instance in event management (such as a sporting event) there is a defined time at which the event must start, to the nearest minute. If the project is late, all the benefit is lost.

  • 2.

    Sometimes the output only has the desired benefit over a limited market window. For instance new

Summary

This month there have been no new premises or roles, just one more lemma, six more corollaries and two pieces of empirical evidence drawn on.

  • P1:

    A project is a temporary organization

  • P2:

    which the owner creates to create value

  • P3:

    The temporary organization is governed on behalf of the stakeholders

  • P4:

    Governance is defining the objectives, the means of obtaining them, and the means of monitoring performance

  • L1:

    A project consumes resources to do work

  • L2:

    to deliver an output

  • L3:

    which will be operated to achieve a beneficial

References (3)

  • PMI

    Guide to the project management body of knowledge

    (2004)
There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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    In the prevailing stakeholder literature (e.g. Donaldson and Preston, 1995; Phillips et al., 2003), the organisation is seen as a univocal and unique actor (the focal organisation) responsible for identifying and managing stakeholders. Similarly, in the current project management literature, stakeholders and their management are studied from the perspective of one focal organisation (for example, the controller in the case of Callan et al. (2006), the owner in the case of Turner (2006) and the decision maker in the case of Vos and Achterkamp (2006)). However, building upon the different PPP definitions (based on for example definitions from the HM Treasury (1998), the World Bank (2003), the European Commission (2003)) and so given the shared finances, risks and responsibilities in different stages of most PPPs (Koppenjan, 2005; Kwak et al., 2009), as well as the potentially diverging objectives of partners involved, we may expect a higher stakeholder complexity in terms of number of relationships and intensity of stakeholder interactions.

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