Project Management Beyond Projects: an Outsider’s View on the Scope and the Foundations of the Discipline

Abstract

Increasingly specialized tasks with an organization of production which is more and more globalized require larger and larger amount of management services. The growing popularity of project management can be explained, partly by a growing demand for management services in general and partly by project management specificities. The conceptualization of production and the conceptualization of the firm have been a long-term quest in economic analysis. The first part of the paper contains some preliminary considerations on economic analysis. The second part describes the creation of value, using a value classification of products; this shows how industrialization and globalization generate a growing demand for management services and firms in order to organize production. The third part characterizes project management among other management disciplines. The fourth part demonstrates how certain production conditions in the new economy call for a growing use of methods of project management. The analysis presented is essentially empirical rather than normative in the sense used by Savage ( Foundations of Statistics ).