The public sector has a questionable reputation on their ability to complete large IT projects on time and within budget. At the Dutch government, unclear benefits and incomplete requirements, driven by political considerations instead of sound economic drivers, are often seen as the fail factors (Algemene Rekenkamer, 2007 and 2008). The IT project managers will have to deal with the entanglement of political, IT and organizational factors, whilst managing an IT project. In this document a subset of the entanglement is addressed. Particularly, the influence of political involvement to project managers‟ adaptive behavior. To address this problem the following research question has been formulated; how can adaptation behavior of IT project managers, within the Dutch government, be explained in situations of political involvement? The research question has been broken down in to three parts; political involvement, adaptive behavior of project managers and the Dutch government. Each part is explained within the theoretical background and their relationship to each other is tested by means of the Coping Model of Project Managers Adaptation (CMPMA). This model, – derived from Beaudry and Pinsonneault (2005) – provides insight into the adaptive behavior of IT project managers. The model represents the IT project managers‟ appraisals tp political involvement, combined with their adaptation strategy and its associated outcome. The adaptive behavior is grouped in to four general adaptation strategies: benefits maximizing, benefits satisfying, disturbance handling and self-preservation strategy. The CMPMA is subject to four projects within the Dutch government that have a large IT component. For each project, the project manager served as unit of analysis and in total the four cases yielded seventeen observations. All projects have a project maturity of several years and have been analyzed qualitatively. After analyses it became clear that, whenever political involvement leaded to an outcome, the project managers‟ adaptive behavior and their associated outcomes could be explained with the CMPMA. The model opens the black box of IT project management – within the Dutch government – and can be used as an instrument, by civil servants, for managing project to political involvement.