Do Project Managers practice what they preach in the UK?

Various public and private organisations increasingly started to use projects to achieve business objectives but reported that results often fall short of goals. A number of formal project management standards for managing projects have been developed in recent years in the UK and globally, intending to improve such project outcomes through the use of these tools and techniques. However, our groundbreaking research examining this assumption has yielded mixed results and we found that the development and use of a set of metrics, tools and techniques have been a great source of inspiration for Project Managers who learned all these techniques through formal training.

When we assessed the use of project management (PM) practices in an empirical assessment, we found that Project Managers tend to have relative use of different practices and the link between the use of those practices and project success. We found that Project Managers having formal PM qualifications still tend to use traditional practices and sometimes believes that the practice does not have an impact on the project outcome.

Our analysis shows widely varying usage of different PM practices and differences in use depending on the context of the project. Further, our study indicates that the level of use of PM practices is indeed related to project success. Finally, the results suggest that the PM practices that make a difference may not be the most frequently used, means Project Managers tend not to practice what they preach.