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Peter Morris

Proceedings of ICE

Civil Engineering 150 May 2002Pages 82–90 Paper 12641

Keywords

management; planning and

scheduling; research &

development

is professor of construction project

management at UCL, professor of engineering project managenent of UMIST and executive director of

INDECO (InternationalManagement Consultants) Ltd

It would be fatuous to contend that thescientific method has been applied to themanagement of projects only relativelyrecently. There are countless examples of engineering and science being applied tothe management of projects right back toancient times, and most are very wellknown to members of the Institution of Civil Engineers, not least because so many

of them were major construction projects.It is a popularly held view that project

management originated in construction. If we are talking about modern project man-agement, as now generally understood,this is not strictly true. Virtually all thepractices, concepts and language of project management can be shown to havehad their origins largely in the US aero-

space agencies in the mid-1950s, althoughwith antecedents pre-World War II. Theywere developed primarily on programmessuch as Atlas, Polaris, Minuteman andApollo in response to the need to developnew ballistic missile capability on a highlyurgent basis to counter perceived Sovietthreats. Thereafter they developed by wayof Department of Defense (DoD) initia-

tives not least those following the arrivalof Robert McNamara as US Secretary of Defense in 1960.1

Apollo was hugely influential in pro-moting modern project and programmemanagement practices (Fig. 1). Theobjectives were clear—classic projectones—in President Kennedy’s words of 25 May 1961

Though there is reasonable agreement on most of the formaltools used for managing projects, there is still a range of viewson what constitutes the discipline of project management.Thispaper examines the knowledge we have of the discipline and, inparticular, how testable and public it is. It suggests that while the'hard systems' approaches of systems engineering and decisionsupport have had a seminal impact on the development of project management, 'soft systems' thinking also has animportant role, particularly at the front end of projects.Thehuman side of project management is also extremely important.The paper concludes that while we can certainly identify goodproject management practice, there will never be an overalltheory of project management. Indeed, the very notion ismistaken.

Science, objective knowledge andthe theory of project managementP. W. G. Morris

82 C I V I L E N G I N E E R I N G

Fig. 1. Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin photographed on the moon by Neil Armstrong on 20 July1969—a giant leap for project management (courtesy of NASA)




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SCIENCE, OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE ANDTHE THEORY OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT

‘To achieve the goal, before thisdecade is out, of landing a man on themoon and returning him safely toearth’.

The budget was less well publicised—$20 billion, of which $7 billion was contin-gency. The resulting effort by the NationalAeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) and its contractors was a heroicexample of engineering ‘systems’ manage-

ment. A strategy of how to get to themoon, and back, had to be developed (theinitial idea was first to build an orbitingspace station and to depart from there),engineering of the rockets, landing mod-ules and support infrastructure had to bedeveloped, and astronaut bio-behaviour inspace understood and designed to; and allwithin highly determined schedule and costconstraints. The programme objectiveswere substantively achieved—the cost was$21 billion.1

The resulting project managementapproach was hailed as the new manage-

ment paradigm—the answer to how totackle many of mankind’s problems

‘The first management approachborn of the nuclear age and the elec-tronics age.’2

Yet, in reality, the NASA approach wasfundamentally limited, for Apollo hadbeen a ‘closed’ systems programme in thesense that the programme was substan-tially shielded from external changes, suchas funding cutbacks or environmentalist

opposition.The ‘systems approach’ to the manage-ment of projects was one that haileddirectly from the application of modernscientific methods to management. Thehistory of the limitations of this applica-tion and the efforts we have been makingto adapt and enlarge upon it to deliverprojects more successfully is the theme of this paper.

Defining project managementAn obvious place to start is to under-

stand what we mean by, first, a project,

and, second, management.There is a surprising diversity of views

on what is a project. Kerzner, one of thegurus of project management, characteris-es a project as having

‘a specific objective to be completedwithin certain specifications, withdefined start and end dates, fundinglimits (if applicable), and which con-sume resources (i.e. money, people,equipment)’.3

British Standard BS 6079, A Guide to

Project Management, defines a project as

‘a unique set of coordinated activi-

ties, with definite starting and finish-ing points, undertaken by anindividual or organisation to meet spe-cific objectives within defined sched-ule, cost and performanceparameters’.4

The Gower Handbook of Project

Management states that

‘a project is a cycle of activities withthe purpose of supplying, within defi-nite start and completion dates, aunique product, service or set of infor-

mation to a specified quality andcost’.5

The US Project Management Institute’sGuide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge defines a project as

‘a temporary endeavour undertakento create a unique product or service’.6

Although one could argue with the ‘def-inite start and finish’ idea, the gist is prob-ably clear. A project can be characterised

as a ‘unique’ endeavour—in the sense of aone-off—undertaken to accomplish adefined objective. Yet, in reality, the mostfundamental characteristic of a project issomething that is a direct result of thisuniqueness and yet which is hardly men-tioned in these definitions (pace Gower),namely the life cycle.

The one single thing whichdistinguishes projects from non-projectsis that all projects, no matter how com-plex or trivial, go through a common life-cycle development sequence. Wholeorganisations can be set up to achievespecific objectives within given time andcost constraints and that will consumeresources (the Apollo programme officewas not a project). But it is the act of going from concept through definition,

development, build, and hand-over—or,words to such effect, several differentlife-cycle models exist—that truly distin-guishes projects from non-projects. Thissequence is invariant (Fig. 2).

Management is an activity. It is theactivity of planning, organising, directingand controlling. It is about communicat-ing, about deciding, and about usingresources. In the words of the leadingmanagement thinker, Peter Drucker

‘It is a practice not a science. It isnot knowledge but performance’.7

If the only thing that really distinguishesprojects from non-projects is the lifecycle, arguably the only things that there-fore distinguishes project managementfrom other forms of management are themanagement skills and actions involved ingoing successfully through that life cycle.This surely is the case, though the word‘successfully’ is crucially important here.There is no point in progressing throughthe life cycle if the result is not successful.But the issue is, how does one define (and

measure) success?In fact, what precisely comprises thediscipline of project management variesdepending on the nature of the project,the role of the project manager, and thestage of the project life-cycle at which theproject manager is operating. Thus, man-aging say the landscape contract for a

83C I V I L E N G I N E E R I N G

Stage gatereview point




Concept Feasibility Definition ExecutionOperationand review

Fig. 2. Projects are distinguished from other activities by having a distinct life cycle




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power station will involve fewer issuesthan being the owner’s project manager of the station’s overall definition, construc-tion, and commissioning.

Most definitions of project managementwould agree that, at a minimum, there is

• integration of the work of othersneeded to assure project success

• application of certain project manage-ment practices.

It is the extent of application of thesepractices, and the nature of the integra-tion, that leads to differences in definition.

At its most basic, project managementinvolves some combination of scope man-agement, activity scheduling (time man-agement), and cost and resourcemanagement. This is, in effect, basic project control. Managing people is generallyan important aspect of most management;adding people management, includingcommunications, leadership and team-working, probably gives the basic set of

project management skill requirements.Before long though, technical and com-

mercial issues will probably be seen to beaffecting the chances of a successful project outcome and these too will needaddressing. Risk, and probably value, willneed managing on a systematic basis too.

In general, the nearer to the definitionstage of the project (the nearer to the‘front end’) and the higher the organisa-tional level one gets, the broader therange of issues that one will find oneself dealing with—issues of strategy, finance,

organisation, technology, control, people

and culture, commerce and contracts,community and environment, process andtiming, and so on.

Such a broad view of the discipline isactually rather daunting in its implica-tions. For what we are saying is that project management, at anything other thanthe basic level, might have to deal with anenormously broad range of issues—all theissues that present themselves as onemoves from concept to completion, and

that varies from one context to another.There can be no doubt that many of thepeople who are employed to manage projects do indeed find themselves having toaddress just such a broad range of issues.Critically, of course, they will generallynot see themselves as expert enough, noras having sufficient time, to work alone inall these different areas. Instead they willact as integrators of the work of function-al specialists. Their core competence, asproject managers, will be knowing how tointegrate the work of others, as the project evolves through its life cycle, in order

to meet the project’s objectives. This viewof the domain—the discipline—of projectmanagement is certainly more than that

normally put out by most of the basictextbooks on project management, manyof the business schools, and even theProject Management Institute itself.

Here the normal view is one whichaligns project management with ‘execu-tion management’: the accomplishment of stated objectives, most classically definedas accomplishing the project ‘on time, inbudget, to scope’—here is the objective,go do it. Here project management is not

seen as covering project definition, andtypically does not deal with technology,environmental or even commercial issues.

Bodies of knowledgeThe US Project Management Institute’s

Project Management Body of Knowledge6

(PMBOK®) (Fig. 3)—seen by many asone of the most authoritative guides towhat a project manager should know—identifies nine ‘knowledge areas’

• integration• scope

• time• cost• risk

MORRIS


Fig. 3. The US Project Management Institute’sProject Management Body of Knowledge isseen by many as one of the most authoritativeguides to what a project manager should know


Project integrationmanagement• project plan development• project plan execution• overall change control

Project scopemanagement• initiation• scope planning• scope definition• scope verification

• scope change control

Project timemanagement• activity definition• activity sequencing• activity duration estimating• schedule development

• schedule control

Project costmanagement• resource management• cost estimating• cost budgeting• cost control

Project qualitymanagement• quality management• quality assurance• quality control

Project human resourcemanagement• organisational planning• staff acquisition• team development

Project communicationsmanagement• communications planning• information distribution• performance reporting

• administrative closure

Project risk management• risk identification• risk quantification• risk response development

• risk response control

Project procurementmanagement• procurement planning• solicitation planning• solicitation

• source selection• contract administration• contract close-out

Fig. 4. Nine major knowledge areas are identified by the US Project Management Institute

‘‘ ’’project management, at anything other than the basic level, might have to deal withan enormously broad range of issues




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• quality• human resources• communication• procurement.

These align well with this view of project management as primarily executionmanagement (Fig. 4). However, deployingthese project management areas alone isalmost certainly no guarantee of ensuringthe accomplishment of the project ‘on

time, in budget, to scope’.For example, research carried out atOxford and in the USA in the 1980sshowed that many of the factors thatcause projects not to meet their scheduleor cost targets are not covered by thePMBOK® type model.8 Among this data,which showed the causes of why projectsfail to meet their baseline targets, are fac-tors such as

• client-driven changed specifications ororder quantities

• technology problems

• poor design management• external price changes• environmentalist and/or community

or political difficulties• geotechnical problems• weather• labour problems.

Few, if any, of these factors are evenaddressed today in much of the projectmanagement literature. Much of thePMBOK® material is helpful in managingprojects, but is not sufficient to managethem successfully (and may not always

even be necessary). This should be no sur-prise, as focusing on execution alone,without due consideration to context andstrategy, will invariably lead either to inap-propriately selected objectives or inoptimalstrategies for accomplishing them.

History is littered with examples. It wasthis insight which led to the enlarged viewof project management and that led to theterm ‘the management of projects’ as abroader way of representing the discipline:managing projects within their business orsocial context, managing them to achievebusiness success, managing—or at least

influencing—the project’s environment, orcontext, that can so affect outcome suc-cess, as well as the intra-project processes

and practices of definition and delivery. Itwas also this broader view of the domainof project management that informed theresearch at the University of ManchesterInstitute of Science (UMIST) andTechnology undertaken in developing thefourth edition of the UK Association forProject Management’s Project Management

Body of Knowledge in 1998–99 (Fig. 5).9,10

The Association’s view of project manage-ment (Fig. 6) is thus considerably broader


Fig. 5. The UK Association of ProjectManagement also publishes a ‘body ofknowledge’

3.0 Control3.1 Work content and

scope management3.2 Time scheduling/phasing3.3 Resource management3.4 Budgeting and

cost management3.5 Change control3.6 Performance management3.7 Information management

4.0 Technical4.1 Design, production and

hand-over4.2 Requirements management4.3 Technology management4.4 Estimating4.5 Value engineering4.6 Modelling and testing4.7 Configuration management

5.0 Commercial5.1 Business case5.2 Marketing and sales5.3 Financial management5.4 Procurement5.5 Bidding5.6 Contract management5.7 Legal awareness

6.0 Organisational6.1 Life cycle design

and management6.1.1 Opportunity6.1.2 Design and

development6.1.3 Production6.1.4 Hand-over6.1.5 (Post) Project

evaluation review[O&M/ILS]

6.6 Organisation stucture6.7 Organisational roles

7.0 People7.1 Communication7.2 Teamwork 7.3 Leadership7.4 Decision making7.5 Negotiating and

influencing7.6 Conflict management7.7 Project management

competency7.8 Personnel management

Opportunityidentification

Design anddevelopment Production Hand-over

Post-projectevaluation

Concept/feasibility/marketing bid Design, modellingand procurement Make, buildand test Test, commission,startup Operation and maintenance/integrated logistics,Project reviews/learningfrom experience

1.0 General

1.1 Project management1.2 Programme management

1.3 Portfolio management1.4 Project context

2.0 Strategic

2.1 Project success criteria2.2 Strategy/project

management2.3 Value management

2.4 Risk management2.5 Quality management2.6 Safety, health and environment2.7 Ethics

Fig. 6. Summary of the UK Association of Project Management’s body of knowledge




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MORRIS


than that of the Project ManagementInstitute (see Table 1).

Not only is the ‘management of projects’ view of project management broad-er, it has an almost revolutionary impacton the way one thinks about the relation-ship between performance and the project objectives. It is, in fact, much moreclosely aligned with the project sponsors’,or owners’, perspective. Here the issue isnot so much simply whether the project

will be accomplished on time, withinbudget, and to scope, but whether thebusiness success—the success in meetingthe project’s key performance indicators(KPIs)—justifies the effort, and the risk,expended in undertaking the project.

Indeed, it could be that the originalbaseline targets are no longer relevant—that it is in the sponsor’s business inter-ests for the project to exceed its baselinecost, schedule or scope targets. The ideaof improving performance rather than just achieving the initial baseline targets isnow being captured in new ‘maturity’

models of project management.11, 12

Establishing these targets at the front endand managing the evolution of the projectto achieve optimal business success isincreasingly a theme of contemporaryproject management practice.

There is much interest, and work, inmelding traditional project managementknowledge, of defining and delivering asuccessful outcome as it evolves throughthe project life-cycle, with the knowledgeof the sponsor’s business objectives andoperating characteristics. Not only does

this new, broader view take project man-agement further into the front end (con-cept)—and, indeed, the back end(operations and even decommission-ing)—of the life cycle, with contemporarymoves towards a much more integratedsupply chain (partnering, framework con-tracts and so on), it brings the whole project organisation into a more sophisticatedview of what successful project accom-plishment means.

Exciting though such an opening-up of project management might be, it adds fur-ther urgency to the question of what the

discipline really comprises. Is the disci-pline now becoming so broad that it isstill really tenable? Can any one personunderstand the features of managing projects at such a strategic breadth, in so

many different situations, so that we cantruly expect to discern and articulategeneric best practice for the discipline asa whole? Should the scholar of the disci-pline be expected to understand thewhole range of its application? Should thepractitioner be expected to be competentin all of its aspects?

If the answer is, in practice, almost cer-tainly ‘not entirely’, then how far do we

go? If the need to understand how tomanage projects successfully is genuine—and there is ample evidence to suggestthat it is—what are the elements of thesubject? How is it to be codified and

learnt? Can we be predictive in the usualway that knowledge enables us to be?

What is the theory of project manage-ment?

Scientific knowledge and projectmanagement

Engineering applies knowledge of math-ematics and the sciences to develop waysto use economically the materials and

forces of nature for the well being of soci-ety. Engineering is more than just develop-ing design concepts: it also entails theefficient realisation of designs. A profes-sional engineer must understand and apply

PMI PMBOK APM BOK

1.The project management framework 1. General

1. Project management framework

4. Project integration 10. Project management

None 11. Programme management

2. Project management context 12. Project context

10.3. Performance reporting 20. Project success criteria

Included in 4.Project integration management 21.Strategy/project management plan

None 22.Value management

11. Project risk management 23. Risk management

8. Project quality management 24. Quality management

None 25. Health, safety and environment

5. Project scope management 30.Work content and scope management

6. Project time management 31.Time scheduling/phasing

9. Project human resource management 32. Resource management

7. Project cost management 33. Budgeting and cost management

4. Project integration management 34. Change management

10.3. Performance reporting 35. Earned value management

Small section in 10.2 Tools and techniques for 36. Information management

information distribution

None 40. Design, implementation and hand-over management

None 41. Requirements management

7.2 Cost estimating 42. Estimating

None 43.Technology management

None 44.Value engineering

None 45. Modelling and testing

None 46. Configuration managementNone 50. Business case

None 51. Marketing and sales

None 52. Financial management

12. Procurement 53. Procurement

None 54. Legal awareness

2. Project management context 60. Life-cycle design and management

9.1. Organisational planning

2. Project management context 66. Organisation structure


2. Project management context 67. Organisation roles


10. Communications management 70. Communication

9.3 Team development 71.Teamwork

2.4 General management skills 72. Leadership

2.4 General management skills—influencing 73.Negotiation

2.4 General management skills—problem solving None

None 75. Personnel management

Glossary None

Table 1. Comparison between the ‘bodies of knowledge’ publications of the US ProjectManagement Institute (PMI PMBOK) and the UK Association of Project Management (APM BOK)reveal that the latter has a broader view of the subject




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the basic laws of mathematics (Fig. 7),physics, chemistry and other ‘hard’ sci-ences, and also the ‘soft’ sciences such aseconomics, sociology and management,for the planning, designing, managementand operation of engineering works. Someof these laws, particularly the ‘hard sci-ence’ ones, are very familiar to us. Butwhat about the softer ones? What indeed

are the ‘laws’ of management? How objec-tive and scientific is our knowledge of project management?

Comte, the founder of modern sociolo-gy, proposed that sciences could be placedin a natural order in which each sciencepresupposes the less complex scienceswhich precede it, but shows its own irre-ducible laws. For Comte, this order was

• mathematics• astronomy• physics

• chemistry• the biological sciences• sociology.

The problem for the later sciences inthis sequence is that the number of vari-ables—the complexity of the issue beingtreated—increases dramatically so that itbecomes harder to apply the classicalmeans of scientific enquiry. These arethose of acquiring publicly testable knowl-edge of the world through the processesof reductionism, repeatability, and refuta-tion. We reduce the complexity of the

world into experiments, and these may bevalidated in that they are repeatable, andwe build knowledge through refutation of our theories.

The challenges in applying the scientific

approach to sociology are several. Thereare many viewpoints by which the realworld can be reduced to experimentalform. Repeatability is often very difficultor even impossible. Predictions may beextremely tenuous, not least because of the vagaries of human beings and theirpropensity to act differently.

If sociology has these difficulties, what

of management? No one claims there tobe a science of management. There is abranch of management called ‘manage-ment science’ but this is about the appli-cation of scientific method tomanagement—hypothesis building, mod-elling, measuring and evaluating, with theaim of improving the model, and hencethe performance of the thing beingmodelled. Critical-path scheduling andwork-study are examples of managementscience applications that help us on a day-to-day basis in the management of engi-

neering works.Management can also be aided by sci-ence through the applications of

• technology—computers, telecommuni-cations

• psychological tools—psychometrics,team building

• organisation ‘theory’—the contingencytheory of organisation structure beingcorrelated with its core tasks and itsenvironment, for example.

Some of the aids and insights into the

practice of management can indeed bereduced to a repeatable and refutableform. But management itself is far frombeing a robust body of scientific knowl-edge, in the way say that physics or chem-

istry is, in the sense that there can bereducible, repeatable and refutable lawsof management. Indeed, we do not neces-sarily even have agreement on whatwould constitute management.

So, the breadth of application of man-agement in general makes any claim to ageneral scientific basis particularly diffi-cult. But projects are in many ways quitespecific, structured forms of organisation,and project management is generally high-

ly ‘goal orientated’ and deterministic.Given the much more restricted intellec-tual scope of projects and project manage-ment compared with management ingeneral, might there not be a greater pos-sibility of a theory, or theories, of projectmanagement?

There are certainly examples of projectmanagement benefiting from scientificknowledge. Network scheduling is a clas-sic example. We can model a sequence of activities and predict when the whole set,the work package, will be complete. Wecan even add risk and develop contingen-

cies, using probability theory to estimatethe total contingency that should be puton the overall network. There are socio-logical, or at any rate organisational,insights too. Organisation theorists haveshown, for example, that projects tend tomeet their baseline targets more frequent-ly if organised on a full project ratherthan on a matrix or functional basis.13, 14

Significant parts of project managementcan therefore be developed along ‘theory’lines with reasonable scientific rigour—if you do this, the result is likely to be better

than if you do not. We can also identifygood/best practice principles—for exam-ple, it is helpful to break the project intoits component ‘work packages’ whenplanning it—although there is little that isscientific or even theoretical about suchstatements.

So, to what extent can we develop areliable public knowledge of project man-agement and how useful might suchknowledge be? Consider first the historyof the application of the systems approachto management. We can see clearly howover the last 30 to 50 years the hard sci-

ence approach has accommodated theneeds of the soft sciences in dealing bothwith the uncertainties that people bring inpredicting outcomes, and in agreeingobjectively what is reality.



Fig. 7. Professional engineers need to understand ‘hard’ sci-

ences, such as mathematics, as well as ‘soft’ sciences, such aseconomics, sociology, and management

‘‘ ’’management itself is far from being a robust body of scientific knowledge




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MORRIS

The systems approach tomanaging projects

Of all the approaches that have con-sciously sought to bring the rigour of thescientific method to management, that of ‘systems thinking’ has probably been thewidest and arguably the most influential.Its impact on project management hasbeen enormous, and illustrates both thepossibilities and the limitations of the sci-entific method.

A system may be defined as any entity,conceptual or physical, which consists of interrelated parts. Systems thinking stemsfrom several routes. Two particularlystrong ones are those from

• the study of complex organisationalentities (systems), as in biology, eco-nomics, sociology and organisationtheory where new and important char-acteristics emerge the higher the levelof analysis—so called emergence andhierarchy

• engineering, particularly from work to

do with control and communication(cybernetics).

It is understanding the way that systemsbehave—particularly ‘open’ ones (thosethat purposefully interact with their ‘envi-ronment’ as opposed to ‘closed’ ones,which do not)—that has led to severalrevealing insights into the way systemsorganise and manage themselves. We cansee the impact of systems thinking on project management both in ‘hard’ systemsengineering and decision analysis ways

(systems engineering and systems analy-sis), and in ‘softer’ areas of organisationdevelopment and organisational learning.

In organisation theory, for example, thesystems approach underlies the work of the ‘socio-technic’ school based at theTavistock Institute in London, many of whose ideas can be—and have been15,16—imported directly into our thinking of project management.

The ‘hard systems’ approach is essentiallyan engineering one about how to perceive,design, evaluate and implement a systemto meet a defined need. It is highly congru-

ent with the ‘execution’ view of projectmanagement—or the ‘closed’ projectworld of the Apollo programme. Its influ-ence on the formulation of modern projectmanagement terms, practices and

approaches has been seminal, as we sawearlier, not just because of what NASA,the Air Force and the Navy did with it, butin that it was then so heavily promoted byRobert McNamara at the DoD, along withthe management science type decision sup-port tools that McNamara brought withhim from Ford. By the mid-1960s, the(hard and decision support) systemsapproach had given rise to almost theentire vocabulary of modern project man-

agement.The interesting point however is that, aswe have seen, the ‘execution’ view of project management is increasingly beingrecognised as not being the full view, andnot always even the appropriate view, of the discipline. At the front end of projectdefinition, for example, we often havequite messy, poorly structured situations,where objectives are not clear, where dif-ferent constituencies have conflicting aims,and where the way forward requires visionand leadership as well as hard analysis anddesign. Not only this, but the organisation-

al context within which projects are con-ceived and delivered is increasinglydecentralised and fluid. While the hard,engineering driven approach to systemsmanagement previously advocated for project management is still generally appropri-ate, we need to augment it with a subtler,more emergent view for these fuzzieraspects of projects and their management.

Soft systems methodology was devel-oped for such situations. Soft systemsactually grew out of the frustration of try-ing to model the management of the

Concorde project (Fig. 8) within the shift-ing political context of de Gaulle’sresponse to Britain’s application to jointhe Common Market.17 Soft systemsmethodology builds and trials a numberof potential models of ‘purposeful activity’that appear relevant to making progressin a given situation. The testing is itera-tive. In essence, it becomes a learning sys-tem.

Senge and his colleagues have built onthese insights but added greatly, not leastby recognising the active role that peopleplay, particularly in generating visions of

the way forward (the emergent system).18

Senge is concerned with how organisa-tions build effective long-term change.Organisational learning is the only viable,self-sustaining means of achieving this, he

believes. Senge uses five ‘disciplines’ forconceiving and effecting sustainablechange

• personal mastery• mental models• building shared vision• team-based learning• systems thinking.

Systems thinking is the ‘fifth disci-pline’—the integrator of the other fourdisciplines.

What both Senge and the soft systemsschool insist upon is that where the sys-tem is not yet well defined, perceptualtools can be employed to help elicit viablevisions and build consensus. The organi-sational psychologist, Karl Weick, hadalready argued that we tend not to con-struct reality out of theory but out of experience: much of ‘organisational reali-

ties’ have a subjective origin.19

Senge goesfurther, using Argyris’ insights to showhow teams, and leaders, can shape andadd to a vision and powerfully create themeans for its realisation:20, 21 a practicethat is increasingly familiar in the waythat behavioural expectations and perfor-mance targets are set in alliance and part-nering based projects.22

It is not that there is no place for hardsystems and management science typetools at the front end of projects—farfrom it—but that care needs to be takenin these early, fuzzier stages in developing

visions and models of the project.Iteration is probably necessary. There is aneed for inclusivity. The project managerneeds to use these ‘softer’ tools, but do sowithin a ‘hard’ framework of


Fig. 8. Soft-systems methodology was firstused for managing the politically sensitiveAnglo–French Concorde project (photo cour-tesy of Richard Hunt, http://www.propnet.free-online.co.uk)




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• decision point milestones• integration with corporate plans• requirements capture• modelling (financial, engineering, sup-

ply chain, scheduling, etc.)• benchmarking• value optimisation (value manage-

ment), and so forth.

This broader view of project manage-ment is creating a broader systems

approach to project management. Indoing so, it is making Comte’s point thatsociology (and management) can nevergenerate the same reducible, repeatable,and refutable public knowledge as the‘hard’ sciences. The role of people inmanagement puts limits on our ability todevelop predictable outcomes and, tosome extent at least, we see the manageri-al world, and shape our perception of it,through mental models.

Project management, like managementitself, is thus not a science, in the full orproper sense of the word. Our knowledge

will always be, to some extent at least, per-sonal and experiential. The best we can dois to offer guidance in the form of tools,aids, heuristics, approaches, insights—andsome scientifically objective theory.

How useful then is our knowledge tothe practice of project management? What role does knowledge have in thediscipline?

Knowledge and the theory,andpractice, of project management

Knowledge management is a vogue sub-

ject. Spurred significantly by the need to‘continuously improve’, it is increasinglybeing recognised as an important thoughoften under-managed organisational asset.Once said, this seems obvious.

But what is knowledge? How does itdiffer from information? Work at UMISTon the use of information technology inknowledge management in construction—the KLICON project23—has shown thedifficulty of pinning down such a ubiqui-tous and slippery concept.

Information is data interpreted in agiven context; knowledge is the cognitive

ability to generate insight based on infor-mation and data. In practice, the distinc-tion between information and knowledgeis a lot less clear than that between bothof these and data. For what is information

to one person may be knowledge toanother; and what was knowledge in onecontext may only be information in anoth-er. It is a common mistake to assume thatone understands the context when in factone does not understand properly, andthus what was taken to be predictiveknowledge in fact is not.

Knowledge is tacit as well as explicit.Tacit knowledge is personal knowledgeembedded in individual experience; it

involves intangible factors such as person-al belief, perspectives, and values. Explicitknowledge is ‘readily available’—it can becodified and structured in a way thatmakes the knowledge easily transmissible.Much that is really useful in projectknowledge, however, is in people’sheads—it is tacit. Many argue that itsvalue diminishes substantially when it is‘downloaded’ and made explicit.

Scientific knowledge—publiclyrefutable knowledge—is explicit knowl-edge. Tacit knowledge is private knowl-edge, and private knowledge, by

definition, is not scientifically testable(for scientific knowledge is public knowl-edge). Much of what is valuable knowl-edge about management, and projectmanagement, is thus inherently not scien-tific, unless and until it becomes explicitand can be addressed according to scien-tific practice.

Schon has examined the way that man-agers, and particularly professionals,develop knowledge and learn.24 If there isno authority figure to turn to, then,according to Schon, professionals work in

continuous cycles of

• hypothesis development• action• reflection.

Schon calls this ‘reflection in action’.The point is that managers, like other pro-fessionals, learn through practice.

The insight is telling. In management,formal knowledge—‘authority’—is impor-tant but is not the only means of learning.In practice-orientated jobs or domains, themajority of people learn most effectively

by doing (particularly when they get intotheir twenties and beyond), although froma base of more formal knowledge. Weick’spoint comes in again—in organisationspeople create their version of reality often

more out of experience than from theory.19

There are thus limits to how far scientifi-cally objective knowledge can illuminateour understanding of how to manage.

Most professional, or ‘competency-based’, jobs, like management or engi-neering, in fact recognise that to becompetent one needs a mixture of appro-priate formal knowledge, skills, andbehaviours. This is the route that the project management societies have gone

down in establishing project managementcertification schemes (analogous to theengineering institutions’ qualificationsstructures).

There are many who will always ques-tion the effectiveness of certification pro-grammes in assuring competency,particularly where, as we have seen, somuch of valuable knowledge is not likely tobe explicit. Indeed, the ‘bodies of knowl-edge’ produced by the various associationsare, in reality, no more than frameworksoutlining the ‘knowledge areas’ that theassociations believe project management

practitioners should be knowledgeable in.They are ‘guides’ to other knowledge, bethat knowledge in books or out in the larg-er world of experience.

Competency is generally defined as theability to perform in an effective and con-sistent manner. As one of the componentsof project management competence,knowledge should be important. But isthere any evidence that having formalproject management knowledge helpsmanagers to perform effectively? Manybelieve so.25 But is there any objective evi-

dence that formal project managementknowledge correlates with the ability tomanage projects better? Hardly any infact, although the professional societiesbelieve that their examinations of experi-ence, where this happens, does testaccomplishment.

What many practitioners are now look-ing for, particularly those charged withdeveloping project management compe-tencies within companies, is at least someevidence to show that the application of formal project management knowledgeand practices produces better project out-

comes. The current data on this are onlyslight. 8,10,25-28 There are no data yet thatdemonstrate a causal relationship betweenthe application of formal project manage-ment and project outcomes.


‘‘ ’’managers, like other professionals, learn through practice




IP: 128.250.144.144

MORRIS

ConclusionIs there then a discipline of project

management? What part does knowledgeplay in the discipline? Is there a theory?

There is a discipline in the sense that

• there is substantial and, in places, sig-nificant literature on it

• there are defined ‘bodies of knowl-edge’ on it (and there are also manydozens of universities that research

and teach it)• there are many people who believethat they practice it

• there are professional societies whopromote it and who examine andqualify people in it.

Knowledge, both explicit and tacit, iscentral to our understanding of this disci-pline. We know the characteristics of projects and project management pretty well,we have some general lessons on whatkinds of actions lead to projects havingsuccessful outcomes, and we know what

tools are helpful in the management of projects.

However, projects vary hugely and sodo people’s roles on them. The overallscope of the discipline is thus quitedauntingly large, particularly if trying tounderstand how ‘best practice’ should bebest applied—that is, ‘best appropriatepractice’.

So, is there a theory of project manage-ment? No, there cannot be a single theory.Project management, like managementitself, is too broad a subject for there to

be a single theory. Indeed, even the hardscientific subjects do not have a singletheory. They have theories of particularthings—the laws of Newton, Faraday andEinstein, for example—but not one over-all theory.

Project management, like managementitself, is similar—some areas are suscepti-ble to the methods of scientific enquiry togenerate testable ‘public knowledge’,some are much less so and will alwayshave a large element of unpredictability.

Not, then, a theory of project manage-ment—indeed, the very notion is mistak-

en—but some theories. And knowledge,both tacit and explicit, of best appropriatepractice that, if applied, should lead toimproved chances of successful projectoutcomes.


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