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As top management support is considered one of the critical success factors in project management, effective executive involvement can significantly improve project success. However, the literature does not provide organizations with a clear list of effective top management support practices to achieve this type of support. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to highlight the top management support processes, which highly contribute to project success.

As it is expected that results vary among different project scenarios, data were collected from 700 project managers and their supervisors in seven industries and three countries – Japan, Israel, and New Zealand.

Results reassure that top management support is significantly correlated with project success. Results also show that different top management support processes should be implemented in any industry and culture.

The paper introduces and discusses a detailed list of critical top management support processes for each industry and country, and concludes with introducing best practices to support these processes.

Games are an effective teaching and classroom training tool, since they allow students to practise real‐life events. In the area of project management, most games focus on the planning phase of a project. The current paper aims to describe a new game, called PEG – Project Execution Game. The uniqueness of this game is its focus on real world problems during the project's execution.

The Project Execution Game provides the “players” with a set of realistic, but unexpected events that occur during a project, in order to enhance their problem‐coping capabilities and decision‐making skills as well as hone their general reactions. The game is designed for either one or several teams competing among themselves. The game's validity was tested on 185 undergraduate students in their advanced project management course. Statistical results about the simulation's contributions are presented in relation to several aspects of project management.

The conclusion from the study is that a game is an effective tool for teaching the unstructured area of project execution, and gives the student a taste of real‐life experience.

The Project Execution Game can be implemented with students in project management training sessions. With this game, the students gain more practical relevant experience, as compared to alternative teaching techniques. Furthermore, the game can be used in organizational training to improve project managers' techniques and experience in reacting to unexpected events. Finally, it can also be used with project managers practising before the actual execution of a big project.

This paper suggests effective and interesting ways of teaching project management in order to better train project managers. By simulating realistic competitive conditions, the concepts learned and solutions generated in the classroom can be transferred to the outside business environment.

To identify the industry in which projects are best planned and executed and use it as a benchmark for improving project planning in other industries.

Based on data collected from 280 project managers, project success and quality of project planning were evaluated and analyzed for four industries – construction and engineering, software and communications, services, and production and maintenance.

Quality of project planning was found to be the highest in construction and engineering organizations and the lowest in manufacturing organizations. This is a result of a few factors, among them the intensive organizational support which is offered to project managers working in construction and engineering organizations. The other three industries limit their support mostly to tactical aspects, such as the purchasing of project management software. The high quality of project planning in the construction and engineering organizations resulted in their ability to complete projects by almost half the cost and schedule overruns, as compared to organizations belonging to the other industries. Finally, results of the industries in Israel and Japan are compared and analyzed.

Findings are limited to the four industries included in the study.

If organizations, not belonging to the construction industry, wish to improve the probability of success in project planning and execution, they should follow methodologies commonly used in the construction industry.

This paper introduces a valid field study, exploring project management practices in four industries and identifies the one which may be used as a benchmark for the others. It also identifies specific strengths and weaknesses in project management within the explored industries.

Delineating where stability occurs in a contract provides the window of opportunity for procurement officials to positively affect cost and schedule outcomes. While the concept of a Cost Performance Index (CPI) "stability rule" has been routinely cited by Earned Value Management (EVM) authors since the early 1990's, more recent research questions the veracity of this stability rule. This paper resolves the controversy by demonstrating that the definition of stability matters. We find a morphing of the stability definition over time, with three separate definitions permeating the literature. Next, an analysis of Department of Defense contracts for both cost and schedule stability properties finds that the veracity of the stability rule is intricately tied to the definition used.

Tools that project managers use while managing project teams are insufficient. This probably contributing to the large number of projects that fail to achieve their objectives within the desired time and budget to the full satisfication of the customer. An inovative approach for the identification of the main reasons for these failures and the ways to prevent them are described in this paper. The paper introduces several solutions for project team building and management, based on an interdisciplinary approach and theory known in the Gestalt cycle of experience. In spite of their differences, the humanistic process of need fulfillment and the project management approach have a lot in common. The present paper demonstrates that both team decision making and project management methods use similar processes. Hence, applying the well known mental barriers and solutions from the Gestalt cycle of experience may reduce the currently high percentage of project failures. The paper finally introduces several areas in which project managers can focus on when dealing with managing a project team.

The paper responds to calls in recent research for a model that shows how the business case should be used throughout the project's lifetime to achieve sound governance and thereby project success. The aim of the paper is to advance theory about the effective use of the business case.

Besides the processes and information required, the literature identified 43 organizational facilitating factors, structured into 5 categories, which are required for effective use of the business case. To offer a useful model, the authors' approach was to do a factor analysis, based on existing survey data, to reduce the number of facilitators and to validate their categorization.

The findings of the paper were as follows: (1) the classification of the proposed facilitating factors was validated; (2) the number of facilitators needed to ensure that the business case is used effectively was substantially reduced and (3) a “business case effectiveness model” is proposed to clarify the relationship between the organizational facilitating factors, the business case processes and the information required to effectively use the business case.

This is the first time that a business case effectiveness model has been proposed. Besides consolidating business case theory, it can be used to guide people and organizations on simple, affordable ways to improve their use of the business case to achieve sound governance and hence business/information technology project success.

This study aims to offer a bibliometric analysis of the already substantial and growing literature on global virtual teams (GVTs).

Using a systematic literature review approach, it identifies all articles in the Web of Science from 1999 to 2021 that include the term GVTs (in the title, the abstract or keywords) and finds 175 articles. The VOSviewer software was applied to analyze the bibliometric data.

The analysis revealed three dialogizing research clusters in the GVTs literature: a pioneering management information systems and organizational cluster, a general management cluster and a growing international management and behavioural studies cluster. Furthermore, it highlights the most cited articles, authors, journals and nations, and the network of strong and weak links regarding co-authorships and co-citations. Additionally, this study shows a change in research patterns regarding topics, journals and disciplinary approaches from 1999 to 2021. Finally, the analysis illustrates the position and centrality in the network of the most relevant actors.

The findings can guide management practitioners, educators and researchers to the most meaningful clusters of publications on GVTs, and help navigate and make sense of the vast body of the available literature. The importance of GVTs has been growing in the past two decades, and Covid-19 has accelerated the trend.

This study provides an updated and comprehensive systematic literature review on GVTs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the first systematic literature review and bibliometry on GVTs. It concludes by suggesting future research paths.