Chapter 1
Introduction
Every year, international cooperation provides aid to developing countries. During 2008, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members of the Development Assistant Committee (DAC) alone contributed around US $510 million (OECD, 2008).
According to Diallo and Thuillier (2005), most international assistance provided by governmental or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is provided via projects.
A project is defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI) as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.” (PMBOK® Guide, 2008) Projects are a special form of work organization aimed at obtaining specific results and objectives.
International development (ID) projects aim to improve living conditions in emerging countries by, for instance, enhancing agricultural, health, or educational systems.
ID projects are gaining increasing importance in the field of international aid to developing countries. Differently from emergency projects that have the objective to provide immediate assistance to populations hit by wars or natural disaster, ID projects usually take place in more stable contexts with the aim to improve living conditions in terms of economy, education, or health. For these reasons, ID projects are sometimes less visible to society, but statistics confirm a growing trend of money and human capital employed in ID projects (Diallo & Thuillier, 2005; OECD, 2008, 2009).
Despite their importance, limited attention has been devoted in the literature to the peculiarities of ID projects and to the best practices, approaches, and techniques of management. Several authors suggest the need for additional research (Youker, 2004), in particular regarding project management tools and approaches (Khang & Moe, 2008).
Researchers and practitioners agree that project management can be applied to different contexts, but also that some adaptations are necessary industry by industry (Besner & Hobbs, 2008b). As highlighted by Hanisch and Wald (2012), “No project can be studied comprehensively without considering its context: the congruence of a project to the external contingencies is considered to be a factor influencing the effectiveness of the temporary organization.” This shows the importance of considering the relevant contingencies in the study of best practices for project managers.
On the contrary, so far limited insights have been provided about how much project management standards are diffused among companies and other organizations (Ahlemann, Teuteberg, & Vogelsang, 2009), especially among those not belonging to project-based businesses like manufacturing and construction. This represents a gap that researchers and practitioners are trying to fill and that, over time, has brought extensions of project management standards adapted to specific contexts (Besner & Hobbs, 2008a). In fact, despite the universalistic nature of project management methodologies, different contexts show different approaches toward project management (Hanisch & Wald, 2012).
This could be particularly true for ID projects that present very peculiar characteristics (e.g., not-for-profit nature, high stakeholders involvement) (e.g. Youker, 2004).
As Youker (2004) suggests, “These projects are different from other types of projects for many reasons and the approach to implementation must also be different” from standard project management approaches that are embodied in the knowledge and practice guides of professional institutions. ID projects involve a large number of different stakeholders (e.g., donor agencies, government organizations, civil society, and local beneficiaries) (Diallo & Thuillier, 2004), and these participants usually have different perspectives due to national values and culture (e.g., a different concept of time) (Muriithi & Crawford, 2003). In addition to the complex relationship of the stakeholders involved, these projects are peculiar due to their social and not-for-profit nature and “the intangibility of the developmental results” (Khang & Moe, 2008). Moreover, project environments in developing countries are often difficult due to poor infrastructures and a lack of resources, which add to the complexity of these projects.
Given these peculiarities, in 1970, Baum introduced a specific approach for ID projects based on the “project cycle” (Baum, 1970) and specific tools (e.g., logical framework) have been developed in the following years (e.g., Baccarini, 1999). In recent decades, the project cycle approach has been adopted by development agencies because it offers a structured pattern of techniques that allow people to work together while bringing into focus the project’s objectives (Landoni & Corti, 2011). However, so far, limited attention has been devoted to the peculiarities of ID projects and the need for specific methodologies. Furthermore, few works have analyzed the standards used to manage ID projects and their diffusion.
Finally, a recent research by McKinsey and Devex (Lovegrove, Gebre, Lee, & Kumar, 2011) confirms that ID projects often lack efficiency and effectiveness and, as previously noted, it would not be enough to diffuse and foster the application of standard project management techniques in ID projects. Analyzing 100 ID projects sponsored by the Asian Development Bank and hosted by several Asian countries, Ahsan and Gunawan (2010) found that there are several specific causes of delay or cost overrun, and project managers have to be aware of these and trained to address them in the best way. Ika (2012) is more specific about this problem and identifies three problem areas in managing ID projects (structural/contextual problems, institutional/sustainability problems, managerial/organizational problems) that are not correctly addressed by project managers because of four “traps” (one-size-fits all trap, accountability for result trap, lack of project management capacity trap, cultural trap).
Considering these difficulties in managing ID projects, in this work we aim at answering the following questions:
- What are the peculiarities of ID projects?
- How do these peculiarities translate in specific methodologies and tools?
- Do development agencies work with the same standard or use different ones?
- How significant are the differences between them and how can they learn from each other?
- Are these standards adopted in NGOs?
To answer these questions, we rely on the results of a three-year research program already published in scientific journals and conferences and on an original research that has taken place in 2011–2012, thanks to a PMI grant. Furthermore, we rely on our own experience as volunteers in small NGOs devoted to international development.
In particular, thanks to the research grant, we engaged in an effort to understand the peculiarities of ID projects with a survey of the existing literature and interviews with project managers in NGOs and relevant institutions and organizations.
Then we examined and compared the guidelines developed both in the private and public sector regarding the management of ID projects.
Furthermore, we were able to conduct an extensive survey of project managers in NGOs to understand the diffusion of the methodologies and tools.
The book has been written to present the results of these analyses and to support the development of the field. The authors assume that the reader has a basic knowledge of the fundamentals of project management; basic information regarding the tools and concepts used in ID projects are reported. This work is thus suited for project managers willing to enter in the international development field and for project managers and other actors working in the this field interested in deepening their knowledge of specific project management methodologies and tools.
We therefore frame this book as both an academic publication (reporting on cutting-edge research into project management) and a work that we hope many practitioners in the international development field and in other fields can find useful.
The book is organized into four parts.
Chapter 2 presents the context and the peculiarities of international development projects. It introduces the fundamental definitions and explains the role of international development activities and organizations such as international organizations, governmental agencies and NGOs. Furthermore, in this chapter we define international development projects and identify and describe their five peculiarities through a literature review and interviews to experts.
Chapter 3 presents the history and the characteristics of specific methods and tools developed for ID projects. In particular we focus on i) the project-cycle management (PCM) introduced by Baum (1970) that has become a standard practice for development agencies (Biggs & Smith, 2003 p. 1743); and ii) its core tool (i.e., the logical framework). The logical framework is widespread nowadays among ID project managers and it is often considered as a stand-alone tool (Couillard, Garon and Riznic, 2009). In this chapter, we also discuss the limitations of these tools and briefly introduce some of the new tools proposed in the literature.
Chapter 4 presents the governmental and private guidelines that have been developed to support the diffusion and the adoption of specific methodologies and tools in ID projects. In the first part of this chapter, we compare the project management standards adopted by five of the main worldwide governmental agencies. The analysis is based on an original framework consisting of four dimensions, which represent the main elements of a project management system in international development projects. The comparison shows the common aspects and differences in the management of these projects in order to highlight the limits of the adopted methodologies and propose further research. In the second part of the chapter, we compare the private guidelines among themselves and with the PMBOK® Guide developed by the Project Management Institute, which is with one of the most widespread project management standard. In this second part, we focus on highlighting the way in which the peculiarities of ID projects have been translated in specific guidelines and the complementarities with the standard guidelines.
Chapter 5 reports the results of the international survey we administered to almost 500 ID project managers on the adoption of methods and tools. First of all, we focus on the characteristics of projects managed in this field in order to evaluate the variation that can be found. Then attention is paid to the practices adopted by organizations and specifically we evaluate the extent of application of specific methodologies by project managers in this field. Specific attention has been given to the use of the logical framework, since it is a commonly adopted methodology in ID projects. In the end, we focus on the relationship between practices and performance; in particular, we analyze which practices influence more significantly project and long term performance.
Finally, Chapters 6 discusses the main results of our research programs and the main possibilities for further research.
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