Page 68 - Global Project Management Handbook

3-4 STATE OF THE ART OF GLOBAL PROJECT MANAGEMENT

● In depth, it is going further into cost engineering, finance, specific aspects of risk man-
agement, earned-value management, scheduling methods, resources allocation, project
life cycle, processes, studying phases, types of projects, project portfolio management,
and maturity.

In addition, a number of books and papers explore issues that contribute both depth
and breadth in several technical, methodologic, and managerial dimensions. They aim to
fill a long-standing need for a comprehensive, unified, and practical description of the
field. Over the last 20 years, the profession has been working on its recognition. Both
standards and certifications have been addressed by professionals associations working
on both definition of the field and recognition of project management as a profession.
This demonstrates that the positivist perspective, if valid in a specific area, cannot pro-
duce answers to every type of problem and raises the need for a historical and contextual/
situational perspective.
Moving beyond a “one best way” to describe the field, Tanaka (2004), in the presenta-
tion of his historical view of project management models over four generations, offers
views on project management opportunities and challenges into the future. Project man-
agement models can be drawn from such attributes as project management structure and
methods, socioeconomic drivers that prompt the buildup of the model in question, typical
project management techniques offered by the model, primary application areas, and
mechanisms for popularizing the model. Tanaka classified project management models
into seven distinct models over the four generations (Fig. 3.1).
From the original “classical” model, project management has developed into the
“modern” model, which is divided into three submodels bearing characteristics particular
to relevant areas of applications, and then into the “neoclassical” model, which is a global
operation adaptation of the classical model, and then into the “strategic” model expected
as a project management model of this century. A hypothesis is that the “versatile” model
is forthcoming in which traditional general management will have been replaced by or
merged into project management.
One should be aware that the evolution of project management models does not nec-
essarily represent the incremental sophistication of project management methods and that
the value of project management models should be relative to the practicing industry
branch, organization, or individual rather than absolute. Thus incoming new models do
not necessarily replace existing ones.
These considerations lead us to define the method we propose in mapping the dynam-

ics of the project management field.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT FIELD IN ACTION

Theoretical Foundation
The analysis of the dynamics of science has attracted much interest. A qualitative concern
with scientific change can be found in a range of disciplines such as philosophy (Popper,
1959), social science (MacKenzie, 1978), history of science (Kuhn, 1983), and science
policy (Weingart, 1982). Although these many writers have advocated a wide variety of
theoretical perspectives, they all have one thing in common: They do not make use of
quantitative indicators in order to handle aggregated data. Quantitativists have worked in
a quite different way, using large databases to count publications, citations, and patents
(Garfield et al., 1978). And they share a common interest in the dynamics of science.