Understanding the antecedents to project management best practice - lessons from aid relief projects

This study makes explicit assumptions that underpin sound PM practice that forms the required infrastructures for PM practice. It compares best PM practice with PM practice on distressed and troubled projects that takes place within the context of post-disaster relief projects where there is a notable absence of characteristics of required identified PM antecedents. It reviews traditional project management and international aid and development methodologies such as the ‘Logical Framework’, Project Cycle Management and Evaluation and looks at the best in each.

This research highlights a set of practices that may be universally applied in principal, with actual implementation dependent upon the project context. It also concludes that, if recognised, these contexts can be planned for and strategies and processes applied to minimise their disruptive influence and enable a positive outcome.

The understanding of the antecedents to project management was best understood through pragmatic action research, and within that, reflective practice and soft systems methodology in a structured, but open way and evaluated and then validated through rigorous cycles of research to objective outcomes. The methodologies and models that resolved this enabled sensible, workable, impacting outputs, both internally within practices and externally through different environments and contexts.