Project management effectiveness as a construct: A conceptual study

Abstract

Project management has grown from being mainly a tool for large single projects, to being used by organizations for running multiple smaller projects on an ongoing basis. Since this trend has caused scholarly attention to expand from studying the project itself, to focusing on the organization’s project management capability, the absence of a coherent proposition of effective project management becomes evident. This study addresses and conceptually explores this shortcoming by blending success concepts in project management with the theory of organizational effectiveness, to propose a framework of project management effectiveness. The result is a multi-dimensional construct that has substantial support from the project management success literature and that compares well with the open systems thinking of organizational effectiveness. A selected group of project management experts gave strong support to the list of variables established to define the domain of such a construct.