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 the International Project Management
Association (IPMA) and the Project Management Institute (PMI®) in an
important new collaboration between the world's two leading project
management professional societies. 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 prizes are jointly sponsored by IPMA and
PMI. The certificates show both organizations and both logos. IPMA was
represented by
Professor Rodney Turner
(former IPMA President and editor of the IJPM). PMI was presented by
Professor Christophe Bredillet
(editor of PMJ).
Photo (left to
right): Prof Rodney Turner, Dr. Alexander Kock, Prof Christophe
Bredillet, Prof Derek Walker RMIT University, Melbourne. Photo courtesy
of Miia Martinsuo.The jointly named and sponsored,
IPMA-PMI EURAM Best Paper Prizes are agreed to run also in 2011 and 2012
at EURAM. In 2011 an IPMA-PMI EURAM Best Student Paper Prize will be
added. The next EURAM conference will take place in Tallin, Estonia
during 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
Prof Hans Gerog Gemünden (pictured at left), 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."