Project Management Journal review

February 11, 2014

Reviewing the December 2013, Project Management Journal

I enjoy dissecting project management research and attempting to translate the results for project managers. After reading the latest edition of the Project Management Journal (PMJ), I went back to read the mission of the journal.in essence, the mission is to advance the theory and practice of project management. After reading all six articles in the PMJ, I tried to digest a few nuggets of information that might be useful for a project manager in the field today. Here is what I thought might be useful for you.

In the first article (Inter-Team Coordination Patterns and Outcomes in Multi-Team Project;  

Perttu Dietrich, Jaakko Kujala and Karlos Artto) my most important take away was the coordination of teams within a project. The researchers identified three approaches; centralized, decentralized and balanced. The researchers were looking at how you, as the project leaders, manage your teams within your project team. How much control do you exhibit? Although you have to read very carefully to draw any conclusions for the research, I took away that project managers should adjust their management (control) over project teams depending on the task of the team. The more vague the task, the more inter-team contact is needed and more planning cycles. This does not appear to be new knowledge but reinforces the need for project managers to understand the profile of their project when develop the tools, processes and mechanisms for managing their project.

In the second article, (Complex New Product Development Projects: How the Project Manager's Information Sharing With Core Actors Changes Over Time, Lisbeth Brøde Jepsen) the researcher concludes that analyzing emails is a legitimate method for studying communication of project managers and that in this study the project manager changed communication patterns during the life of the project and these changes benefitted project success.

It was good to see professors from my alma mater, Western Carolina University. From Every Direction—How Personality Traits and Dimensions of Project Managers Can Conceptually Affect Project Success, Todd Creasy and Vittal S. Anantatmula.

This article appears to be a literature review. There was discussion of communication apprehension, innovativeness, self monitoring, conflict management, change orientation and Myers- Briggs Type. The authors concluded: “It appears that the soft skills of project management are gaining in perceived importance  ...” (p.46).  I would add that this might be related to an increase in the complexity of projects.

I started more doctoral work later in life and I believe this contributed to my focus on the relevance of research. Sometimes it is important to use a vocabulary that enables the researcher to be very specific in the use of terms.  The terms and language used in the PMJ is often vague and unnecessarily complex. More important there is a serious disconnect between the language used in research and the language used by project managers. I found some interesting reading in this month’s PMJ. What I did not find was anything that would be useful for a practicing project manager.

I am interested in your thoughts.

Russ