Insights from Project Management Award Winners: Case Studies of Best Practice in Project Management

This book is intended to become an essential reference for project, program, portfolio managers, their executive sponsors and partners, and project business owners. The book has been written because the project success rate has NOT improved significantly over the past 60 years. This suggests the project management Standards and guidelines being used are inadequate. This book of case studies of project award winners takes a fresh look at successful projects and distills the essence to guide managers on how others have succeeded, the keys to their success, and any unwritten success factors that are missing or underemphasised up till now. This book breaks new ground because there is currently no consensus on what constitutes success, and consequently there is even less consensus on how to achieve success. So, we first take a hard look at the evolving understanding of success and synthesise a huge body of work to propose a definition that is likely to stand the test of time and not further complicate the issue. From the 31 different ways that people might mean when we talk about success, we propose three major categories for what we should now mean when we discuss success: short-term project plan success (outputs), medium-term business success (outcomes) and long-term societal success (impact). Then we identify and synthesise the factors that lead to success. Currently, there are at least 47 factors that have been identified by practitioners and academics that are thought to lead to success. This number is unworkable as guidance for practitioners and unreliable because there is very little empirical evidence that any of these factors lead to success. This book systematically examines which factors lead to project plan success, which factors lead to business success, and which factors lead to societal success. What we found was the conventional wisdom is misleading with its emphasis on planning and hard skills at the project manager level. The case studies illustrate how actions at the top management level have more impact on whether a project would succeed in delivering business outcomes and societal impact. Specifically, top management had to lead in vision, clarifying the goals. The cases show how successful top managers are personally active in steering the project to achieve the goals and create the culture where this would happen. Different governance mechanisms can be used such as KPIs, rewards for performance, regular and ad hoc meetings, etc but top management has to be proactive and committed. The contribution of this book is to synthesise the academic research and practitioner guidance to comprehensively identify and illustrate best practices that lead to project plan, business outcome, and societal success. It is a book for the times and essential reading for anyone trying to introduce change through projects to solve a business or societal problem.