At the last European Academy of Management Conference, an important European conference for management researchers, the IPMA-PMI EURAM Best Paper Prize was handed over to the best paper in the Project Management track. The conference took place in Rome May 19-21, 2010.
The prize was jointly sponsored by IPMA and PMI. The activity is based on the agreement between IPMA and PMI to cooperate on Project Management related research.
The IPMA-PMI EURAM Best Paper Prize went to a joint paper by Daniel Jonas, Alexander Kock and Hans Georg Gemünden, researchers from the Berlin Institute of Technology, and was entitled "The Impact of Portfolio Management Quality on Project Portfolio Success".
The award ceremony took place in the plenary of the conference, the 21st of May, in order to provide visibility to the Project Management community. In the ceremony it was explicitly mentioned that the prize is jointly sponsored by IPMA and PMI. The certificates show both organizations and both logos. IPMA was represented by Professor Rodney Tuner (former IPMA President and editor of the IJPM). PMI was presented by Professor Christophe Bredillet (editor of PMJ).
The jointly named and sponsored IPMA-PMI EURAM Paper Prizes are agreed to run also in 2011 and 2012 at EURAM. The next EURAM conference will take place in Tallin, Estonia, in June 1-3, 2011.
According to the abstract of the paper: This study demonstrates the prognostic relevance of portfolio management quality for project portfolio success on a longitudinal sample of project portfolios with multiple informants over a period of two years. Results show a strong positive influence of portfolio management quality on project portfolio success. Since many firms struggle with the management of a project portfolio, practitioners and researchers are eager to learn which factors shift project portfolio success. But changes in management practices take some time to have an effect on portfolio success. Therefore it is interesting to know how portfolio success can be predicted and how possible indicators of eventual success look like. Thus we propose a process-outcome model of project portfolio management, with which the success can be anticipated by the quality of the portfolio management process. We conceptualize and empirically validate portfolio management quality as a multi-dimensional construct consisting of information quality, resource allocation quality, and cooperation quality. This paper offers practitioners an empirical test of a measure for three quality dimensions of the portfolio management process, while scholars can use our concept to estimate performance effects of management instruments in future empirical studies.
According to Professor Hans Georg Gemünden (pictured below), Chair for Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) at the Berlin Institute of Technology and one of the paper’s authors “This paper is part of our large research project on “Success Factors of the Management of Complex Project Landscapes". Project management really suffers very much from the fact that its relevance is not adequately addressed on the corporate board level – I know several DAX 30 executives of German firms and have been on the corporate control level of a 50,000 people firm, and a private bank – and therefore really know what I am talking about. We had also empirical studies on career systems in project management, and we are very well aware about the power issues and politics when it comes to delegating enough power to (a) single project and single program managers/senior managers/directors, and to project portfolio managers, because in order to empower these managers others have to give up power. But I personally witnessed how many millions are lost in neglecting these issues in major firms, and our empirical research can clearly document this.”
“It is not ‘project management’ which suffers,” he continued. “Rather, it is the firms which suffer, the people which are laid off, the private and public customers who get inferior deliveries of products and services, and the shareholders who get less value."
Professor Gemünden concluded, “I see the role of scholarly research to address the issues in strategic project management to document the really big value creation or really big loss potential - in the end we are talking about billions, not millions – that is provided by the informal (leadership, championship, team-work, community-building and knowledge sharing, culture) and formal management systems (strategies, structures, governance, processes, actor roles, methods, competence standards and IT support). In providing research on these issues and in teaching and diffusing our research results, we as researchers can definitively make a difference.”