Page 66 - Global Project Management Handbook

3-2 STATE OF THE ART OF GLOBAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

capture of the the project management field and its dynamics. Results of a study based on
an analysis of the EBSCO Business Source Premier Database will be presented and some
future trends and scenarios proposed.
The main following trends are confirmed, in alignment with previous studies: continu-
ous interest in the “cost engineering” aspects, ongoing interest in the economic aspects
and contracts, how to deal with various project types (categorizations), integration with
supply-chain management, and learning and knowledge management. Furthermore,
besides these continuous trends, we can note new areas of interest: the link between strat-
egy and project, governance, the importance of maturity (organizational performance and
metrics, control), and change management.
We see the actors (professional bodies) reinforcing their competing/cooperative
strategies in the development of standards and certifications and moving to more
business-oriented relationships with their members and main stakeholders (governments,
institutions such as the European Community, industries, agencies, and nongovernment
organizations) at least at a central level.
According to a prospective study (PMI, 2001), the estimated population dealing to a
certain extent with projects is of 16.5 million worldwide. The number of project man-
agement practitioners is around 2 million, with an increase of about 20 percent per
year. About 220,000 people are members of a project management association, and
105,088 people hold the PMP certification (PMI Fact Sheet, January 2005), 18,416
hold an International Project Management Association (IPMA) 4 level certification
(IPMA, retrieved February 26, 2005, from www.ipma.ch/managers/). The growth rate of
PMI membership is around 24 percent per year. In the meantime, project management
has to satisfy the diversified needs of application areas with a variety of industries or
organizations, and US $10 trillion are spent globally on projects. Thus the importance
of projects and the number of people involved in various projects keep on rising.
This leads us to question the evolution of the project management field. Indeed, the
project management discipline and the scientific field should be the basis for the devel-
opment and use of bodies of knowledge, standards, certification programs, education,
and competencies and, beyond this, as a source of value for people and of competitive
advantage for organizations and society. Thus the need to characterize, define, and
understand this field and its underlying strengths, bases, and development is paramount.
For this purpose, we propose to provide some insights on the current situation. We
will refer to the sociology of actor networks and qualitative and quantitative scientomet-
rics leading to choice of the coword-analysis method in enabling us to capture the project

management field and its dynamics. Results of a study based on analysis of the EBSCO
Business Source Premier Database will be presented and some future trends and scenarios
proposed.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT: A KNOWLEDGE
FIELD NOT THAT CLEAR

First, hypothetically, it might be useful to assume that the project management knowl-
edge field does exist. Consider Audet’s definition (1986) with respect to the behavior of
professional bodies, authors, and academics:

A knowledge field is the space occupied by the whole of the people who claim to pro-
duce knowledge in this field, and this space is at the same time a system of relationships
between these people. Those persons are competitors to gain control of the definition of
the conditions and the rules of the production of knowledge.