Early Project Appraisal

Abstract

From its earliest days project management was holistic, covering the overall project life-cycle, from the initial development phases into hand-over and operation. In the 70s and 80s however this changed and the discipline came to be seen predominantly as an execution function, focussing on delivering the project ‘on time, in budget, to scope’. This emphasis, crucially, misses two important things: most of the causes of projects failing are to be found in issues arising in the front-end defi nitional stage of the project; and setting the project targets is a vital part of managing the project. If we want to be really effective in improving project management performance we should therefore be focussing on the front-end. Yet we hardly understand what the management compe-tencies there look like and we have very few training or education programs focussed on it.