Adoption of Project Management Practices in Public Organizations

Abstract

The paper studies the adoption of Project Management (PM) practices in Greek public organizations through the study of small-medium Greek Local Governmental Organizations (LGOs). Specifically, it studies how PM practices are applied to small-medium sized LGOs and the factors that are preventing the adoption and the implementation of these PM practices in such organizations. A field study was carried out, using the research methodology of 360˚ feedback. More specifically, the views of all different stakeholders were collected and analyzed systematically with the use of semi-structured interviews. The conclusions of this work are that the factors which are blocking the implementation of a PM system, in a small-medium LGO, are grouped in two categories: the factors that are related with the adjustments of the standards to the structure of the LGOs and the inhibiting factors of the internal environment of the LGOs (concerning project management).