An Asia-Pacific Comparison of Project Management Capabilities

Projects are an interdisciplinary planned work that involves various business disciplines, such as finance, human resource management, accounting, quality management, and strategy. Because project management is important for organizational and national growth, this research aims to compare project management capabilities among various Asia Pacific countries and identify strengths and weaknesses in each country. This comparative benchmarking analysis can allow organizations in various countries to improve relatively weak areas. For this purpose we collected survey data from 1,166 projects in seven countries the broad in Asia-Pacific region: India, Malaysia, Japan, Russia, Singapore, New Zealand and Israel. Most questionnaires were from organizations in the software industry (32.8%), government (15.1%), and construction (11.6%). As different types of project are conducted in each industry (e.g. a software project in a construction company), we also report on project type distribution. The projects in the sample were mainly of the following types: software (25.1%), services (24.2%), engineering (15.8%), and construction (14.5%). To measure project management practices, this research uses the following two conceptual project perspectives (Andersen, 2016): (1) Task perspective of a project manager focuses on delivering a project within the predefined time frame, budget and indicated quality measures, (2) Organizational perspective focuses on creating value for the project funder. To operationalizes these project perspectives, we use two relevant project management dimensions included in the Project Management Planning Quality (PMPQ) model (Zwikael and Globerson, 2004): project management practices (consists of nine practices representing knowledge areas of the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of knowledge) and organizational support practices (17 practices derived from the literature). This model was selected because it had been validated and utilized extensively in the project management literature (e.g. Chin and Pulatov, 2007; Masters and Frazier, 2007; Zwikael and Sadeh, 2007; Papke-Shields et al., 2010; Zwikael and Ahn, 2011; Rees-Caldwell and Pinnington, 2013; Zwikael et al., 2014; Feris et al., 2017). Respondents were asked to rate the extent to which each of the practices were adopted on a 5-point Likert scale, where 1= extremely low usage; 3= moderate; and 5= very high usage. A comparison of project management capabilities of all 26 project management practices among the sample countries shows that overall India adopts project management practices at the highest level, including having the highest scores in 21 out of the 26 project management practices. Russia and Malaysia perform project management practices at the lowest level. Japan project mamangers require more support from their senior executives. In Israel, communications management is the most important area for improvement, and in Singaport it is human resources management. A detailed comparison and practical recommendation will be discussed at the conference.