Strategic Management is a rigorous corpus of scholarship in the Academy of Management, as is Technology and Innovation Management. Project Management is found within Production/Operations Management, but is more generally led by the Project Management Institute, a professional trade organization. The volumes in this series intersect conceptually where all these fields meet, and in actual practice where Capital Projects are Planned, Budgeted, and Financed.
A main premise of this series is that corporations make internal capital investments through a standard budgeting process, where Capital Projects circumscribe the major efforts. For the most part the view in Volume I is Executive. The challenge becomes managing multiple Capital Projects, all guided by the same Corporate Strategy. There, a dynamic Project Management Organization can manage portfolios of projects that are “in synch” with the corporate imperative to create Economic Value-Added in a portfolio of competencies—thus, a PMO as a truly value-adding Organizational Capability. In the last chapter, the global best-practise approach to managing projects is reviewed, written for executives with the need to understand the Project Management challenge better.
In its totality, this volume takes the view that Project Management has grown from being a set of tools and techniques, and beyond being an approach to managing organizations with Capital Projects, to becoming a valid and dominant organizational function well-suited to the modern era that demands multi disciplinary innovation as a core capability and potential competitive advantage.