Managing projects in context: Responding to strategic drivers

Project management as a field of practice initially focused on the standalone project and on development of generic standards, largely ignoring context. This has been challenged by attempts to provide useful categorizations of projects according to their different attributes, including aspects of context, and there is increasing interest in application of different project management approaches according to project type. Recognition of project management as an organizational capability has been a more recent development, but models and standards for organizational project management have been subject to a similar one size fits all approach. Recent research into the value of project management highlighted the importance of “fit” whereby the internal and external context of an organization would determine the configuration of project management that would add value. This paper reports on research that aims to contribute to reducing the isolation of projects from context and raises the strategic positioning of project management by enhancing understanding of the strategic drivers of corporations in different industry sectors and the implications this may have for organizational project management capability.