Today a lot of attention is paid to project management. This is due both to the special importance of supporting strategic advantage (rapid changes, an objective reduction in the life cycle of modern products and an increase in dependence on customer needs can critically devalue the assets and potential of the organization), and to the need to find solutions to problems without disrupting the overall functioning and taking into account the risks associated with resistance to change. In management practice, projects are often equated with programs and interpreted as a set of pre-planned activities, which requires maintaining the "top" management, providing resources for the implementation of these activities. Meanwhile, the key in projects is budgeting tasks, results of operations, and not activities, individual operations. At the same time, within the framework of the tasks set, the set of their constituent operations should not be administered. If this condition is not met, then there will be no positive effects of the project associated with novelty (discoveries), changes, development. Another innovation of the 21st century for managing the development of organized systems is bimodal management. This article discusses the features of project management in private and public organizations when they use modern bimodal management, as well as the problems of functioning of a special project support structure — the project office. The author's approach to projects as a partnership is proposed, in contrast to a special organization of resource management and operations with a bias towards coordination and control activities, in principle alien to the idea of projects as activities of personally interested persons outside the framework of official or functional duties and powers. The article shows the restrictive conditions of the project method and proposals for overcoming them in the field of public administration.