The Value of Project Management in the Public Sector
 

Lynn Crawford, Bond University
Completion Date: 2008
 

Project Summary

The Project Management Institute initiated and funded a major research project investigating the value of project management which was lead by Dr Janice Thomas and Mark Mullaly, of Canada. The project engaged 48 academic volunteers within a core team, as well as 17 case-study research teams on four continents around the world over a period of almost 4 years. The full study involved 65 case-study organizations from 14 countries including Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Serbia, and the United States. The project officially concluded with the delivery and publication of the major findings of the study in the monograph “Researching the Value of Project Management,” published by PMI in October 2008.

Professor Lynn Crawford of Bond University was a member of the core team of academics for this research project and specifically responsible for the conduct of four case studies undertaken in Australia. Each case-study research team was tasked with collecting a full set of common data from its case studies, as well as further contributing to understanding of value by applying their own unique interest lens to the study of this data and any additional data they collected to further their own independent analysis.

The aims of the Value of Project Management Research project were:
 

• To determine what organisations implement in introducing project management capabilities
• To evaluate what results are realised by organisations in implementing project management capabilities
• To understand how the value of implementations can be evaluated and assessed in determining the return on project management investment.

The government sector was selected for investigation by the Australia team as it can be seen as a specific context with distinctive characteristics that might be expected to seek and derive specific types of benefit from investment in project management. Therefore, this part of the research aimed to provide insight into expectations and realization of value of project management in the public sector context with particular reference to alignment with the demands of public sector governance.

The Value Project, as it became known, provided an excellent opportunity for international collaboration between researchers. One such collaboration resulted in a paper by Terry Cooke-Davies, Lynn Crawford and Thomas Lechler, titled “Project management systems: moving a project management from an operational to a strategic discipline” which won the 2010 PMI Project Management Journal® Paper of the Year Award.

Selected Publications

Thomas, J. & Mullaly, M. E. (2008). Researching the value of project management. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute, Inc.[This book includes reports on the four Australian Case Studies.]
Crawford, L. H. & Helm, J. (2009). Government and governance: the value of project management in the public sector. Project Management Journal, 40, 73-87.
Cooke-Davies, T. J., Crawford, L. H., & Lechler, T. (2009). Project management systems: moving project management from an operational to a strategic discipline. Project Management Journal, 40, 110-123.