The role of structural factors in determining project management success

Abstract

Despite all of the attention that has been paid to the strategic concerns of more repetitive operational contexts over the past few years, almost all of the research on project management has remained focused on various aspects of network manipulation. For any project where the simple application of network techniques could be inappropriate or dysfunctional, the continued oversight of strategic issues is unfortunate. This paper addresses several strategic issues involved with the structural aspects of project management and finds several of them significantly interrelated with project success and the implication of particular project management control systems. The structural variables that are studied include: organizational structure, managerial authority, and scale of the project. The study draws on data collected by a mail survey of 103 development projects in 30 different firms.