Current Practice in Project Management an empirical study written by Diana White and Joyce Fortune - Essay Example

?Running Head: Article Review Article Review [Institute’s Article Review Introduction This paper is an attempt to conduct a critical and analytical analysis of a research article titled “Current Practice in Project Management – an empirical study” written by Diana White and Joyce Fortune. The research was conducted under the umbrella of Center for Complexity and Change in the United Kingdom and the research received a place in the International Journal of Project Management in the year 2002. Questionnaire was the basic research tool used in this survey research. Despite mailing 955 questionnaires, the study based its findings and analysis on 236 questionnaires since the response rate was a mere 23.7 percent. The focus of the research was to explore the critical success factors of project management, tools, techniques, and methods used by project managers and effectiveness, limitations, and side effects of the methods employed by project managers. The criterion for the managers to qualify as respondents was that they must have completed a project in the recent past and must reflect on the same while answering the questions (White & Fortune, pp. 2, 2002). Therefore, the focus was of the research was to explore the dynamics of project management from the perspective of the project manager so that the research could capture the glance and taste of practical and ground realities regarding project management. Furthermore, the research was also expected to highlight the current trends, patterns, and developments in the field of project management. As mentioned earlier, the focus of the paper would be not summarize this article briefly, but more importantly, it would be critical analysis of this research article which would be of prime importance. Discussion As mentioned earlier, that out of the 995 questionnaires sent to the respondents who belonged from 620 organizations from both public and private sector, only 236 returned for further processing. The data analysis revealed that out of the 16 project types, information technology projects dominated the scene with 25 percent followed by business or organizational change projects with 14 percent. Almost 37 percent of the projects were being carried out for a client organization and the rest were for the host organization (White & Fortune, pp. 2, 2002). Finance, insurance, and banking sector represented the most number of projects, however, when it came to client organizations transportation, and communication organizations were at the top of the list. The survey appeared to be highly skewed towards large organizations because 66 percent of the respondents identified themselves working for organizations with more than 1000 employees. Most of these projects were huge because a considerable percentage of these projects had hundreds of people directly involved (White & Fortune, pp. 2, 2002). Only 47 percent of the respondents had the title of “project manager”, however, almost 63 percent did confess regarding managing the project. 43 percent and 33 percent of the respondents stated that they were the main decision makers and they were involved in the decision making process. There was great deal of diversity when it came to project duration because there were projects that lasted only less than 6 months and there were projects, which were stretched out over a period of more than 61 months (White & Fortune, pp. 2, 2002). Almost 65 percent of these projects were of the duration of 6-24 months. Over 85 percent of the respondents that it was fair for them to classify their projects as successful with six or seven ratings at a scale of 1 to 7 with seven bring highly successful. Budgets, schedule and client requirements were top three criteria for measuring the success of projects. The research also attempted to explore the side effects, whether desirable or undesirable which emerged during or due to the project. Increased business/sales opportunities and greater knowledge of the business were the top two desirable side effects. Organizational conflicts, problems with stakeholders and technical limitations were at the top of the list of undesirable consequences. More importantly, based on the perceptions of the managers, the survey ended up identifying a list of critical success factors. Amongst these, the top five of them were clear goals and objectives, realistic schedule, support from the senior management, availability of adequate funds and commitment from the side of the end user. Answering the questions related to the methods, tools, techniques, models and others. It appeared that the respondents rated in-house project management methods, Gantt bar charts, project management software, cost benefit analysis, life cycle cost analysis, and lesson learnt files were at the top of the list (White & Fortune, pp. 3, 2002). The first, foremost, and noticeable shortcoming in the research methodology is its extremely low response rate, which may have led to the skewed in the responses. Furthermore, the researchers never mentioned how they attempted to cope up with the potential skewing of the responses. For example, the research shows that the project managers marked over 40 percent of the projects as successful (Eriksson & Kovalainen, pp. 168-169, 2008). Quite understandably, this is indeed a moderately high success rate and there is a probability that more managers who had recently successful projects were more motivated to voice their opinions and the managers who were facing problems with their projects or had faced recent failures, refrained from commenting on the same with these questionnaires. Once again, it was the responsibility of the researchers to ensure that their response rate is high enough to obtain the required sample (Johnson & Christensen, pp. 74-75, 2010). A considerable portion of the space devoted to the article was consumed by the various figures and graphs, which the researchers used to present various factors and results of this questionnaire. Without any doubts, the graphs presented a clear picture of the individual factors or questions but by relying only on bar graphs, the research failed to explore the links amongst these factors. Quite understandably, one cannot rule out the fact there may be correlation or even causation amongst the various factors (Kerzner, pp. 169, 2009). For example, lets us say that there may a strong correlation amongst the respondents identifying themselves with the title of project managers, mentioning that they had great authority over managing their projects and then ranking their projects as complete success with the success rate scale of “7”. Another example could be that with a little digging, the researchers might have been able to find out the link between project duration and project outcome. It may have been possible that longer projects would be the least likely to be successful (Creswell, pp. 69-72, 2009; Lock, pp. 16, 2005). Therefore, the point here is that there may have been different correlations and causations, both strong and weak, and important and irrelevant but the same did not appear on the scene because the researchers relied on simple graphical representation. Most of the articles that make it to renewed magazines specifically use SPSS for the purpose of data analysis. The same may not only have helped to find out these correlations and causations but at the same time, it may have allowed the researchers to explore and use the data in so many different dimensions (Scott & Morrison, pp. 385, 2006; Gray & Larson, pp. 237, 2007). Most of the literature regarding using questionnaires as a research method agrees to the fact that it is preferable to fill out questionnaires in the presence of the researchers or concerned people because it helps the research in two ways. First, the presence of a person ensures that the questionnaire has been filled with the intended person and the presence of the person forces the respondents to submit correct, honest, and filled questionnaires (Lindlof & Taylor, pp. 214-216, 2010). Second, in the physical presence of the researchers or people administrating the questionnaires would increase the probability of respondents asking questions and demanding explanations regarding the questionnaires. Quite understandably, answering a handful of questions from respondents is better than obtaining unauthentic and unreliable results. Since this was a mailed questionnaire, a few shortcomings would have to be present (Creswell, pp. 69-72, 2009). Nevertheless, researchers have found out a way to cope with this issue. With questionnaires that have been filled in the absence of the researchers, they would randomly recheck those questionnaires. The numbers of questionnaires rechecked depends entirely on the doubts and resources of time and money available at the disposal of the researchers. The idea is to trace back the respondents of questionnaires are verify their identity and their responses. For example, a project manager may have asked his assistant to fill out the questionnaire on his behalf. Even a phone call lasting just a couple of minutes would tell the researcher about the authenticity and honesty of the responses of the respondents. Recurrence of unreliable questionnaires may mean that researcher will have to undertake the research all over again. Nevertheless, there were no traces of the same in this research (Lindlof & Taylor, pp. 214-216, 2010; Lock, pp. 16, 2005). One of the most important objections raised on the overall research would be rooted in its research approach and philosophy. Proponents of the positivist school of thought may not raise as much objections on the overall research philosophy as the proponents of interpretivist research methodology. Intrepretivism is philosophical school of thought, which, unlike positivism believes that the access to absolute truth and knowledge is almost impossible because the data and information available to always gets corrupted because the receiver and the transmitter always interprets the information in their own way (Creswell, pp. 69-72, 2009). Everyone has certain biases, presuppositions, predispositions and mindsets, which go on to affect their views and perceptions, which mean that there is almost no objective information available to the disposal of the humankind. Even if there were any such “objective” information, the person who would acquire it would corrupt the information in the process of acquiring it by assigning his or her own meanings to that information (Lindlof & Taylor, pp. 214-216, 2010). More importantly, for researchers, it implies that rather than trying to focus more on the scientific tools and methods, the researchers must try to understand the backgrounds of the respondents and the context in which they are obtaining that information. The point here is that research has tried to focus too much on the “what” aspect rather than focusing on the “why” and “how” aspect (Johnson & Christensen, pp. 74-75, 2010). There are no doubts in the fact that the questions, variables, ratings scales and others would have different meaning to every respondent. Therefore, rather than generalizing data, the research should have tried to focus on a few respondents by taking a case study approach which would have allowed the research to gain more depth and reliability. It would have been much more insightful and resourceful if the background, upbringing, experience and other human factors could have come into consideration while analyzing these findings (Scott & Morrison, pp. 385, 2006; Lock, pp. 16, 2005). Another possible problem with this research is rooted in the fact that the researchers allowed the project managers themselves to be the respondents. They problem with taking such an approach is that “project managers” and other concerned people with the projects are always too close to the actual projects to see them objectively. For example, it is possible the events that had taken place in the recent past would have gone on to affect the responses of these managers. For example, a project manager who recently was able to complete a successful project solely because of extensive support from senior management may have gone on to list that factor as the most critical success factors (Cohen, pp. 14-15, 2007). However, that manager may know deep down inside that all the previous project success, even moderate or mild successes were actually a product of effective monitoring and feedback and team building. This is called halo effect and the probability is that this may have distorted the results. A better approach in this regard would have been to observe and interview these respondents, which would have definitely created better and reliable results (Lindlof & Taylor, pp. 214-216, 2010; Meredith & Mantel, pp. 106-107, 2008). Much to our surprise, the research article does not contain a literature review. Literature review always remains at the heart of research papers, which lay down the foundation for research paper by presenting the secondary research and already available data regarding the research topic. Literature review does not only provide introduces the topic and the major developments with regard to the topic to the date but it also shows that how the shortcomings of the already published material and how the current research makes an attempt fill that gap. More importantly, the literature review also informs the reader about the importance of the topic and the worldwide attention that the chosen topic has already received from renowned experts of the field (Scott & Morrison, pp. 385, 2006). In addition to the absence of literature review, a formal analysis and discussion part was also missing the research article. The researchers paid all their attention on listing their research findings. The article would have been much more insightful, helpful and worthy of reading, if the researchers would have tried to analyze and discuss the findings and their implications. Furthermore, the researchers had the option of comparing and contrasting these findings with the numbers, figures, and statistics available from the previous researches and literature but for the most part, they refrained from doing so. Nevertheless, this compare and contrast would have helped the article to tell the readers about the latest development, shifts, and changes that have taken place in the field of project management. Furthermore, by attempting to answer for the differences in the results, the researchers may have found important causation and correlations between the variables (Cohen, pp. 14-15, 2007). Regardless of the above-mentioned shortcomings, it is important here to acknowledge that the researcher did a good job when it came to designing a sample, which was spread over to many industries. There are many types of projects and projects have different meanings, dynamics, methods, and approaches in different organizations and industries. Therefore, it was imperative to ensure that the responses gathered must be the representative of projects from many organizations spread over various industries. Despite the low response rate, the research was able to gather a sample of 236 respondents belonging from more than 20 different industries. Furthermore, considering the scenario of a decade back when project management was receiving attention from all corners of the globe, more and more organizations were using their resources to make themselves as project organizations, more, more project managers were being recruited, and project teams were becoming the order of the day. However, this sudden shift towards project management was creating a sense of ambiguity and confusion and many people in the corporate world were not sure about the dynamics of project management (Cleland & Ireland, pp. 84, 2006). This article came at the right time along with the series of other articles, which tried to make project management simple for the public. At the very basic level, this article must have played an important role in ensuring that the people who about to experience the world of project management for the first hand could have some basic knowledge about project management, its scope, limitations, tools, approaches, techniques, methodologies, critical success factors and others (Eriksson & Kovalainen, pp. 168-169, 2008). Conclusion Towards the end, it is understandable enough to conclude that there are some crucial shortcomings in the article, both in terms of the research methods and the findings. These shortcomings create serious doubts over the authenticity of the research article and force other researchers to reconsider several times before citing or listing this research in their literature review. The research may have been conducted with a tight budget or time schedule because at almost every other step of the survey, there appears to be room for improvement (Meredith & Mantel, pp. 106-107, 2008). The article fails to follow the basic outline for research articles, which includes a comprehensive literature review and analysis and discussion portion. Furthermore, since the researchers did not use SPSS or any other advance statistical tests for data analysis, therefore, there are many unexplored and hidden causations and correlations amongst the mentioned variables. On top of all these, the research methodology has a lot of room for improvement. A research methodology with focus groups and face-to-face interviews would have allowed the researchers to gain a better understanding behind the reasons and motives of the perceptions of respondents (Cohen, pp. 14-15, 2007). Nevertheless, it is important here to acknowledge here is that the diverse sample spread over many industries was an important strength of the research article. Furthermore, the simplicity with which the data, figures and results have been presented make it perfect for the basic understanding or beginner level understanding of project management and its dynamics (Gray & Larson, pp. 237, 2007). References Cleland, David, & Ireland, Lewis. 2006. Project Management: Strategic Design and Implementation. McGraw-Hill Professional. Cohen, Louis. 2007. Research methods in education. Routledge, Creswell, John. W. 2009. Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. Eriksson, P., & Kovalainen, A. 2008. Qualitative Methods in Business Research. Sage Publications. Gray, Clifford F., & Larson, Erik W. 2005. Project management. McGraw-Hill/Irwin. Johnson, Burke, & Christensen, Larry. 2010. Educational Research: Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Approaches. SAGE. Kerzner, Harold. 2009. Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. Cengage Learning. Lindlof, Thomas R., & Taylor, Bryan C. 2010. Qualitative Communication Research Methods. SAGE. Lock, Dennis. 2007. Project management. Gower Publishing, Ltd. Meredith, Jack R., & Mantel, Samuel J. 2008. Project Management: A Managerial Approach. John Wiley & Sons. Scott, David, & Morrison, Marlene. 2006. Key ideas in educational research. Continuum International Publishing Group. White, Diana, & Fortune, Joyce. 2002. Current practice in project management - An empirical study. International Journal of Project Management. Volume 20, pp. 1-11. Read More