ABSTRACT

Value, and particularly how it is created and captured in organizations, is an area of interest in many management disciplines (Lepak et al, 2007). Despite, or perhaps because of, the complex nature of value, a research project to understand what value project management delivers to organizations was initiated by the Project Management Institute in 2004. In May 2005 a team of international scholars and practitioners embarked on a major quest to understand what organizations invest in when they attempt to improve their practice of project management, how context influences these decisions and what benefits they receive from this investment, and then to ‘measure’ and ‘quantify’ this value. Over the next three years an in-depth, mixed methods, cross disciplinary study of 65 organizations worldwide elaborated new perspectives on the value project management can and does bring to organizations. In the process, we contributed to both our understanding project management’s value proposition and processes of value creation and capture in organizations (Thomas and Mullaly, 2008).