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How Calls for New Theory Might Address Contemporary Issues Affecting the Management of Projects

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Climate Emergency – Managing, Building , and Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals

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Abstract

Projects perform variably; several audits of programmes suggest that high levels of failure are normal. Several persistent issues negatively affecting the successful management of projects are observable in practice and include planning inaccuracy; failure to identify known risks; contract relationship issues; an absence of innovation; reporting inaccuracies; fallacious business cases; and challenges to effective team working. Suggestions made by prominent writers in the management of projects, selected for their interest in the rethinking management agenda, call for a rethinking of how the ‘project’ is conceptualised, suggesting that ‘normative project management’ as presented by the leading project management professional organisations in their ‘bodies of knowledge’ contains an implied theory of project, and of ‘project management’, and this is one that is incongruent with the ‘lived experience’ of project practitioners. Arguably this incongruence has a detrimental impact on the management of projects and their subsequent performance. It may be that alternative approaches that reconceptualise ‘project’ and ‘the management of projects’ might also offer important enhancing innovations for industry and project management in general. These re-conceptualisations might also be important facilitators of other technology adoption, precursors even. This desktop study compares the calls for new theory in project management with their potential to address the contemporary project management challenges evident in the UK. This study points to the need for project management to explicitly reject some of its earlier deterministic approaches and recognise that these failed approaches continue to hold back performance in practice. Examples of more radical non-deterministic approaches illustrate how the profession might enhance project practice and project outcomes with new approaches. A preliminary new theory of project is proposed: projects seek to create a valued outcome, as defined through facilitating a negotiation with the (open) social system that comprises internal (strategic) and external interests; acknowledging this will lead to an emergent (multiple) outcome(s) from necessarily multiple (and innovated) possibilities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of the Built Environment, Engineering and Computing, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

    John Heathcote

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  1. John Heathcote
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Correspondence to John Heathcote .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering, Leeds Sustainability Institute, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK

    Christopher Gorse

  2. Technological University Dublin, Dunboyne, Ireland

    Lloyd Scott

  3. Architecture and the Built Environment, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Colin Booth

  4. Architecture and the Built Environment, University of Suffolk, Ipswich, Suffolk, UK

    Mohammad Dastbaz

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Heathcote, J. (2022). How Calls for New Theory Might Address Contemporary Issues Affecting the Management of Projects. In: Gorse, C., Scott, L., Booth, C., Dastbaz, M. (eds) Climate Emergency – Managing, Building , and Delivering the Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79450-7_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79450-7_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79449-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79450-7

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