The effect of project office and project review on project delivery capabilities
The bodies of knowledge that currently dominate the project management profession are primarily practice-driven, lack a robust theoretical foundation, recommend a one-size-fits-all approach and adopt a project level rather than an organizational level of analysis. In addition, despite the extensive guidelines and decades of practice and research, projects continue to under-perform. A growing body of literature has emerged which assumes that project performance is contingent on how the organization manages its portfolio of projects, and supports and develops its project methodologies and managers. Since business objectives change and emerge as the economy and business environment evolve, it is critical to be able to continuously align project deliverables with business objectives. The two mechanisms most frequently advocated in the professional practice literature to do that are project reviews and establishing a corporate project office.
The use of project reviews to control and monitor projects is ubiquitous but there is little empirical evidence on the effects of project review on project performance. Similarly, there is little empirical evidence on the benefits from establishing a corporate project office. Even without such evidence, there has been an increase in the use of corporate Project Management Offices (PMO). Against this high adoption rate, a significant proportion of senior managers (depending on the industry) rate their PMOs as ineffective. The normative question investigated in this paper is: What contingencies influence the effectiveness of PMOs and project reviews, respectively?
The research question ise investigated by comparing project performance in the construction and IT services industries. Differences in the level of project delivery performance across the two industries provide opportunities to explore the influence of industry context on project performance (Liu et al 2003; Sauer et al 2001). To compare project delivery capability (PDC) across industries, this study draws from the Information Processing View of Organizations (IPVO), Goal-Setting Theory and Social Cognitive Theory. Specifically, project reviews and project offices are modelled as information processing systems which provide different types of feedback to project teams. The effects of the project reviews and project offices on an organization’s capability to deliver projects are hypothesized to be contingent upon different levels of task uncertainty in the two industries.