Project Management Research Journal Article on Project Sponsors

Project Management Journal/ Research Articles:

When the research journals from Project Management Institute comes in I tried to explore the different research articles and see if I can pull out some nuggets for use of project managers.

I’ve been reading the February/March edition of the Project Management Journal. The first article discussed executive sponsor behaviors, Project Success and Executive Sponsor Behaviors: Empirical Life Cycle Stage Investigations by Kleppenborg, T., Tesch, D. & Manolis, C.

Essentially, the research involved re-looking at data from four previous studies them but one of the authors to discover the answer to what was labeled as two important questions. Over the duration of a project, does relative importance of compulsory executive behavior vary significantly at stages of completion? If you’re wondering what this means you’re in good company. After reading the entire article, I believe the authors want to know if and executive sponsor makes a contribution by doing something at various stages of the project. Second question asks over the duration of the project, does relative importance of the project success done mentions very significantly within and across different stages of completion? The author spent quite a bit of time discussing project success dimensions. At one stage it seems that they are indicating that success of the project means meeting cost, schedule, quality, and customer satisfaction goals of the project. They labeled this success dimensions. Later in the article they used different terminology to discuss success to missions and labeled these; the firm’s future, meeting agreements, and customer success. My understanding is they took the normal nomenclature of cost, schedule, quality, and customer satisfaction and develop their own terminology. They never explained why.

They justified the research in one instance I discussing the Standish group research that I’ve discussed a number of times and pointed out some obvious flaws in this research. I think the reason researchers continue to use this research is because the Standish group concluded that most projects fail. This is a great beginning for any research paper but the research is so flawed I believe it detracts from any conclusions that the authors may develop.

The authors included charts and tables with lots of percentages and data but there’s no real discussion with the charger cables being. There was neither a conclusion section nor a summary of findings section. There was in one paragraph summary of research contributions. In one example of findings in this section was “finding suggest, for example, that during the executing stage, project sponsor should focus on ensuring communications as a top priority and that such a focus will in turn enhance the most important element of success during this particular phrase the project- the extent to which a customer satisfied with the project deliverables.” Understand this to me the project sponsor to communicate a lot during the execution phase of the project.

I often wonder what we would want researchers to focus on as project management professionals. Until we can answer that question, I suspect researchers will continue to be defined terms and write articles that will be read by only a few people will probably writing their own articles on executive sponsorship of projects.

Russ