New trends in project management

New trends in project management

Wawak, S. and Woźniak, K. (2020), "Evolution of project management studies in the XXI century", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 867-888. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-01-2020-0002

The objectives of the study were to demonstrate the suitability of methodology based on a text mining toolset for detecting trends in scientific papers and to find trends that were present in the field of project management during the research time span (2000–2019).

An approach based on text mining tools supported by expert analysis was adopted due to an extensive number of publications in the field of project management. The novelty of the approach lies in the proposed method of trends discovery instead of the commonly used trends predefinition. The use of computer support allowed the full texts of papers, and not only abstracts, to be analysed, which significantly increased the reliability of the achieved results. Overall, 3,544 papers from seven journals were analysed.

As a result, 43 trends were discovered including seven long-lasting, four declining, 17 emerging and 15 ephemeris trends. Trends were analysed in comparison with the results of previous studies and project management frameworks. New trends and potential gaps were discussed.

The results highlight the topics of research that gain popularity among researchers, and which are related to the current problems that arise in project management. Therefore, the results can help focus studies on the most important areas, as well as find new ones which are not so popular yet. The knowledge of current trends is also important for those project managers who seek to improve the efficiency of their work.

Table 1. Discovered trends

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Multicultural aspects of construction projects  
Research in project management  
Critical chain project management  
Trust in buyer-supplier relationships  
Programme management
Critical success factors
Knowledge management
New product development
Project management office
Public-private partnership
Risk management
  Role of project sponsor  
  Safety in projects
  Leadership, teamwork, team performance
  Project strategy  
  Bidding process in international constr. projects  
  Causes of delays in construction projects  
  Work-life balance  
  Earned Value based project monitoring
  Project portfolio management
  Stakeholder management
  Project procurement  
  Project coordination and network centrality  
  Virtual teams management  
  Change management  
  Ambidexterity and flexibility in projects  
  Contract negotiation and management  
  Business models  
  Relationship management in supply chain
  Temporary organization
  Governance and governmentality
  Project complexity
  Learning in project based organizations
  Boundaries in project environment  
  Role of project owner  
  Competence management and training  
  ERP implementation projects
  Building Information Modelling
  Project management maturity
  Megaprojects
  Agile portfolio management
  Disaster recovery
  Sustainable project manag.

The paper is available on Emerald Insight