Rethinking IT project management: Evidence of a new mindset and its implications
Introduction
A recent study, called Rethinking Project Management [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] has highlighted the need for a fundamental re-appraisal of project management research. The study identified five directions for advancing research and was based on collaboration between academic researchers and practitioners. The five directions identified were: complexity, social process, value creation, broader conceptualisation of projects, and reflective practice. Each direction can be seen as enhancing conventional wisdom. Taken as a whole, they amount to a substantial, even radical, re-statement of the nature of projects and project management. While academics and practitioners alike may accept the appropriateness of each new direction intellectually, we need to articulate what this means to the project manager in practice. From the perspective of a project manager, there is the question of what kind of person would they need to be to embrace all five directions and attempt to integrate them into a coherent management approach. In short, we need to understand the mindset that will drive project managers to advance practice in the ways implied by the Rethinking Project Management (RPM) agenda.
Concurrently with the RPM research, we investigated how information technology (IT) project management has been changing and why. We interviewed more than 50 thought-leading practitioners across three continents. The IT sector was chosen because there has been such pressure for improvement that it was reasonable to expect to find evidence of innovation in practice [6], [7]. Our focus was on identifiable changes to project management. In conversations with us, our interviewees provided data that offer insight into how they themselves are rethinking project management. We distil what they told us into key principles and qualities of an emerging new mindset and compare it with the results from the RPM research.
The RPM researchers suggest that the agenda they have published is not definitive and may be refined, elaborated, supplemented or challenged. The contribution of this article to the emerging research agenda is to:
- 1.
Validate the directions defined in their agenda from our research in the IT sector.
- 2.
Advance the agenda by identifying elements not obviously incorporated in the five directions.
- 3.
Provide concrete examples that help to crystallise the agenda for one important project management domain – IT.
In positioning our findings in terms of a mindset, the article’s contribution to practice is to:
- 1.
Show how project managers have to think if they are to adopt an expanded and more sophisticated view of project management.
In Section 2, we justify our use of the five directions of the RPM framework as a basis for structuring our findings. We also describe research findings that support our view that IT is an important sector to examine both in its own right and as a lead indicator for other sectors. In Section 3, we describe our research and show that it is appropriate to analyse it in terms of a new mindset. Then, in Section 4, we describe our results as a set of principles of the new mindset and show that they support the RPM framework. We condense these principles into four personal qualities that help practitioners rethink IT project management. We propose two further directions for the RPM research agenda. Finally, we identify practical applications of our understanding of the new mindset.
Section snippets
Background
This section provides background in terms of relevant research and clarifications of terminology. We use the Rethinking Project Management research as a framework by which to structure our findings about IT project management. We discuss the notion of mindset. We clarify what we mean by IT project management and describe prior research findings that motivate our targeting the IT sector.
Study design
The objective of our empirical investigation was to better understand and articulate how leading project managers were rethinking practice in response to the growing demands imposed upon them. We started by interviewing a set of highly visible project managers (i.e. individuals who were recognised as thought leaders, who were asked, because of their experience and effectiveness, to rescue troubled, large projects, or who led corporate project offices). These initial contacts suggested other
Findings
Our findings are presented in two parts – a summary of changes in the IT project context that change the demands made upon project managers, and a more extended description of changes in project management and the mindset they exemplify.
Discussion
One goal of this article was to validate the directions defined in the Rethinking Project Management agenda in relation to the IT sector. This research complements that of the Rethinking Project Management researchers. Where those researchers have taken a high-level and top-down approach to identifying the issues that should define the future research agenda, our approach has been to discover from the bottom-up how project management is changing. We have used the concept of a mindset as a
Conclusions
The Rethinking Project Management agenda defined five directions for future research. Our study has examined IT project managers and made explicit a new mindset that promotes the reframing of IT project management. Articulation of the principles embodied in the new mindset confirms the appropriateness of the RPM’s five directions. It also suggests two further directions – projects as a knowledge process and projects as an emotional process.
As neither new direction has received much attention,
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