Research Methods for Project Management – supporting MSc students Joyce Fortune 7 November 2012

1. Research Methods for Project Management – supporting MSc studentsJoyce Fortune7 November 2012

2. Types of study Longitudinal study of live project Case study approach Survey Desk-based research

3. Longitudinal study of live project Problems of timescale Opportunity to study small, short projects

4. Case study approach Good for snapshot Has in-built shortcomings

5. Survey Interviews Questionnaires

6. Desk-based research Public/private sector differences Examples: National Audit Office, Department for Communities and Local Government, The Failure of the FiReControl Project (HC 1272, 2010-12) National Audit Office, Department for Transport, The completion and sale of High Speed 1 (HC 1834, 2010-12)

7. Opportunities available: Cross project comparisons Contribution of particular aspect Source data to apply approach, etc Source data to test theory

8. Selecting the type of study What is student trying to do? Practicalities Access Ethical issues How important is opportunity to disseminate in a particular way? Think about analysis when selecting and again before gathering data

9. White, D. and Fortune, J. (2002) ‘Current practice in project management – an empirical study’, International Journal of Project Management, 20.1, 1-11. Fortune, J., White, D., Jugdev, K. and Walker, D. (2011) ‘Looking again at current practice in project management’, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 4.4, 553-572.

10. 2002 Paper Survey designed to capture the ‘real world’ experiences of project managers in UK Paper-based questionnaire mailed to 995 project managers in 620 organisations Response rate 23.7% i.e. 236 respondents Each respondent asked to base answers on a recent project and: describe the project say how successful it was, identifying the criteria used to judge that success identify factors that were regarded as critical to the project’s outcome identify any side effects say what PM methods, tools and techniques were used and how effective each one was

11. 2011 Paper Survey designed to capture the ‘real world’ experiences of project managers in UK, Canada and Australia and enable cross country comparisons and comparison with 2002 results Electronic questionnaire distributed by email Continued sampling until 50 complete responses obtained from each country Same areas explored as in 2002 plus questions on qualifications

12. Need to think carefully about the design – best books are those aimed at social scientists Cannot expect other academics to supply their survey instruments – can be inferred very easily anyway Think about analysis when designing the survey

13. Dissemination White and Fortune (2002) 242 citations on Google Scholar 92 citations on Scopus

14. Recent examples: Software development agility in successful projects (A) Implementation of integrated healthcare information system projects (R) Current practices of project managers in Portugal (R) Construction projects in China undertaken by foreign companies (R) Construction projects in Vietnam (R)