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The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of PRINCE2 (PRoject IN Controlled Environments 2) standard on customer satisfaction jointly with vendor relationship management capability in the information technology outsourcing (ITO) context. This paper further tries to explore the above underlying mechanism by studying the mediating effect of deliverable quality.

This paper develops a mediated moderation model to explain the underlying influence processes of PRINCE2 standard, vendor relationship management capability and deliverable quality on ITO customer satisfaction. By conducting a pair-wise survey of 260 project managers in seven Iranian firms, the model and hypotheses are empirically tested with the partial least squares method.

Our results suggest that firms benefit more in terms of IT costs reduction when they have a higher level of complementary investment in an external standard, especially through an interplay effect of the external standard and internal relational aspect. Firms can make business processes more amenable to outsourcing and facilitate monitoring of vendor performance and effective coordination with vendors. More interestingly, we find that this interactive effect is fully mediated by deliverable quality, which, in turn, directly increases ITO customer satisfaction.

This study adds some new knowledge and provides new views to study ITO customer satisfaction by addressing the importance of PRINCE2 standard. This study further enhances our understanding in terms of the underlying pathway through which the PRINCE2 standard jointly affects customer satisfaction with vendor relationship management capability and deliverable quality. With the effort of explicitly explaining the complex mechanisms, this study helps ITO managers proactively escort outsourcing activities and projects.

Projects are one of the main ways used to develop organisations and turn their strategic initiatives into a reality. To support project management, several entities (e.g. associations, institutes, etc.) provide standards, guides and project management methodologies. However, despite its wide coverage of project management knowledge areas, standards currently have no specific processes focused on planning and evaluating success. The absence of these processes can limit the vision of managers and their teams on what most contributes to the success of a project. Aiming at contributing to fill this gap, this paper proposes the integration of success management processes in the ISO 21500 standard.

To develop the integration model, a Design Science Research approach was adopted for the construction and evaluation of the resulting artefact.

The result is an integrated model and insights for its application in practice. The model aims to help managers and their teams to identify which success management activities need to carry out and how to integrate them with the other processes of the ISO 21500 standard.

The integrated model was applied in only one project. Another limitation is the difficulty in comparing the results obtained due to the small number of works focused on success management (namely related to planning, measuring, controlling and reporting success in practice) and its integration with project management standards, guides and methodologies.

The integrated model, based on success management and the ISO 21500 standard, is an important and original contribution to understand and achieve success in projects. This promotes a new vision of balanced management, directing the management effort to the areas that effectively contribute to success in each project.

Standards are written by practitioners for practitioners. It is therefore logical that project managers should comply with project management standards. Benefits management is a domain within programme management. The focus of benefits management is to deliver benefits of initiatives beyond the closure of a normal programme or project. This is not the case with projects within the information systems (IS) discipline, implying that IS programme and project managers are not adhering to standards. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the best practices associated with benefits management are applied to IS initiatives in order to maximise the benefits of these initiatives.

Senior and middle managers in South African organisations were interviewed to determine how benefits are managed within their various projects. The purpose of the interviews was to determine adherence to standards and especially benefits management and, second, to determine whether these organisations are achieving any benefits and ultimately value.

There is an overwhelming non-adherence to benefits management best practices within the IS discipline, and IS programme and project managers do not have the slightest idea how to perform benefits management. Irrespective of this, organisations do believe that they are receiving benefits and value from these IS projects.

The research was only done in South Africa with the specific focus of IS. The results are thus very specific and opens the door for more comprehensive research that focusses on various industries, countries and standards.

The results have several implications ranging from how standards are written to the professionalism of IS programmes and project managers. Organisations are not achieving the optimal benefits from investments. The fact that organisations do realise benefits from a broken process, implies that more benefits can be realised when the entire benefits realisation process is followed. Governance controls should also be put in place to ensure that programme and project managers are adhering to standards.

Standards are dominating the project management discipline and there is a general assumption that programme and project managers are adhering these standards. This research queries the value of standards as the results indicate that there is limited adherence to standards and best practices.

Academic library work has often been project-based; however, the interest and adoption of formalized project management techniques has come late to these organizations. The desired outcomes of good project management systems include excellent communication, organized work in manageable tasks, clear expectations, and responsible management of resources.

With an aim to improve on these elements, a new focus on project management at the University of Minnesota Libraries provided a unique opportunity to showcase the development of an informal, in-house set of standard processes for a large, academic institution. Honoring the processes found within individual departments and divisions was key to the work of the Project Management Processes Task Force that created common language and standard processes for project development and implementation to support the growing focus on cross-divisional, cross-departmental projects.

The outcome of this work was to greatly streamline the ability of any staff member to successfully develop and move project proposals from idea to completion. Transparency of process led to stronger understanding of not only project status but also key stage gates and decision points to ensure projects stay on track in supporting the Libraries’ strategic planning. The clarity in scope and the outcomes of projects creates more potential for the Libraries to align their work with that of the University as a whole. Well-developed and implemented project management standard processes create stronger connections between all library units, through consistencies of practice and language, as well as shared expectations and outcomes, by both staff and administrators.

The University of Minnesota Libraries’ process for developing practical project management processes identifies the benefits of this approach for similar organizations as well as outlining specific methods for implementing a set of standards within academic libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how various approaches to stakeholder management, as well as sustainable development principles, are included in internationally‐used project management standards; and to consider the demands these approaches and principles place on project stakeholder management.

An analytical framework was developed based on stakeholder theory within general management, as well as on sustainability research. Desk research was carried out by applying the analytical framework to three project management standards: ICB, PMBOK and PRINCE2.

The research findings suggest that stakeholder issues are treated superficially in the project management standards, while putting stakeholder management in the context of sustainable development would ask for a paradigm shift in the underpinning values. The current project stakeholder practices represent mainly a management‐of‐stakeholders approach, i.e. making stakeholders comply to project needs, whereas a management‐for‐stakeholders approach may be beneficial.

As the analysis is based on document studies of bodies of knowledge, the authors cannot be sure to what extent the standards represent real‐life practices. However, the standards are developed by practitioners agreeing on common practices. Further, they are used to certify project managers worldwide. Therefore, the authors find it safe to claim that the findings are relevant when discussing project management practices.

The value of this paper lies in the enrichment of the understanding of project stakeholder management by applying concepts from general stakeholder theory and sustainable development research.

The purpose of this paper is to present the requirements for assuring the managerial capability of organisations implementing projects of public interest. It presents the case of Greece, and the family of newly developed set of standards concerning the managerial maturity of public organisations and the management of projects funded by European Union support frameworks.

Using the case study approach, the paper presents the current status in Greek public administration concerning project management. Further, it presents how the new set of standards improves public management and public organization maturity for managing projects.

The paper presents the problems faced and the drawbacks encountered from the management of large programmes and projects from public bodies in Greece. Further, it presents the structure of a system for assuring managerial capability (SAMC) in Project Management and how its application can improve management efficiency and effectiveness.

The paper presents a newly developed SAMC in project management that can be applied to public bodies and organisations managing projects. This system has been adopted by Hellenic Organization for Standardization as the new standard ELOT‐1429:2008.

The purpose of this paper is to improve understanding and practice of project management by assessing whether two of its core myths also prevail in international development (ID): first, that project managers (PMs) plan fully for project success, including implementation success and end‐user satisfaction; and second, that they can focus on “getting things done”, free of concern for strategic issues.

The analysis of a high‐profile World Bank project and of the policies and rules under which their PMs operate serves as a means to carry out the research. The authors uncover certain “facts” that challenge the myths that prevail in standard project management. Furthermore, they examine how these facts and the corollaries they produce guide the behaviours of PMs differently in the ID field.

In the ID field, and contrary to the standard practice in project management, it is found that: PMs are not involved in overall planning, and are limited to implementation planning, because they lack the necessary latitude. Hence, they practice project implementation as the art of avoiding making mistakes as they juggle donor procedures and guidelines. Second, PMs are well informed about the overall strategy of their project, which is articulated by the donors and the beneficiary country, but they are limited in their ability to contribute directly to its success. Thus, they may fail to deliver the intended development strategy even if they “get things done”.

This paper argues that these two core PM tenets are convenient myths at best, given the asymmetrical distribution of power, the strong front‐end activity, and the procedures orientation of international development projects.

This paper addresses questions regarding the nature and the content of the work of PMs in the context of ID. In contrast to other sectors, projects are found to be linked more clearly to the higher strategic issues, and yet PMs are less empowered to contribute to them. Thus, all stakeholders may have to revise their expectations regarding what PMs can realistically do in ID. These findings are relevant to scholars and practitioners alike.

The value of this paper lies in examining the basic question of “what PMs do”. Although ID has been project‐oriented since the 1950s, this question has not received much attention in standard PM literature. In assessing “what PMs do”, the paper also brings into question “what project management is”.

The objective of this paper is to provide a description of the model for standardized project management developed by the Project Management Institute (PMI), as applied to digital library projects.

Using the PMI model for project management, the paper develops a context for managing digital library projects according to the PMI's standard methodology.

The paper finds that by using a standard methodology increases the likelihood of delivering projects on time and on budget.

This paper will be of interest to digital library project managers as it fills a gap in the literature by providing an accessible overview of the major components of standard project management methodology as defined by the PMI.

The success of projects clearly relies on project management personnel and particularly on project managers. Their performance and capacities are based on the achieved competencies. The purpose of this paper is to address possible discrepancies between the views arising from the research results and standards of practice related to project managers’ competencies.

For reaching the aim of the study, a comprehensive literature review, covering previous studies and related standards of practice was conducted, and analyses of competencies in the studies and standards of practice containing the rank of competencies based on frequency of appearance were developed.

The findings are proposing four discrepancies between the results of previous studies and standards of practice: commonly existing/missing competencies; uneven priority of some competencies in the view of researchers vs standards of practice; uneven degree of consensus on the importance of competencies; and research results are more context-oriented than the standards of practice. In addition, 98 project managers’ competencies were identified, from which 68 were qualified as weighty ones. Moreover, a categorization of project managers’ weighty competencies was developed. Finally, a list of competencies of relevance for different project types and their targets is presented.

The findings of this study provide a contribution with respect of present knowledge over project managers’ competencies by recognizing certain discrepancies between research results and standards of practice. Another contribution of the study is the comprehensive list of competencies together with considerations of their relevance in different project contexts and in different project types.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a systematic methodology to manage asset data flow between building stakeholders throughout building life cycle using the Construction Operation Building Information Exchange (COBie) standard.

A literature review of the relevant building information modelling (BIM) for facilities management (FM) studies including the gaps and challenges of producing COBie data is analysed. Then a standard project management methodology by Project Management Institute (PMI) is introduced as a theoretical framework to map the different areas of managing COBie data as a project in coordination with Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Plan of work. This theoretical background is coupled with an inductive approach through the placement within a construction company (Bouygues, UK) in the UCLH construction project to produce the conceptual framework that is aligned with industry needs.

The lack of well-structured approach to manage COBie data throughout building life cycle causes many problems and confusions about the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders in creating and managing asset data. This confusion in turn results in incomplete and low-quality COBie data at the handover phase which hinders the ability of facility managers to use these data effectively in the operations phase. The proposed conceptual framework provides a standard project management process to systemise the data flow among all stakeholders.

The proposed framework is developed in liaison with a large construction company, so it is well aligned with an actual industry approach to managing COBie data. Furthermore, it provides a systematic step-by-step approach to managing COBie as a project that could be easily implemented in actual construction projects.

The paper introduced a novel approach to manage COBie data using a standard project management methodology based on an actual live construction project perspective coupled with project management theory.