ABSTRACT
Project management as a separate management profession with its own professional societies has been growing at a significant rate since the 1950s. There has been a related growth in the associated professional knowledge base, including a wide range of models, ‘techniques’ and ‘generic processes’. ‘Techniques’ for project planning can be interpreted as simple specific processes (SP): generic models embedded in a simple associated process which have been generalised to accommodate comparable contexts in all organisations. The SP for projects approach might be interpreted by some advocates of project risk management as a takeover of project planning which is likely to offend project managers. Paul Thornton indicated that his view of the role of the Projects Group (PG) meant that as of that day they needed to start working together as a single ‘PG planning team’ — the ‘PG planners’ or the ‘PG team’ when the contractions were useful.
