Rethinking Project Management was a research network of academics and practitioners seeking to identify new directions for how the discipline might be extended and enriched for the 21st century. Their trigger was concern about conventional project management theory and how it relates to the growing practice of managing projects across different industry sectors.The final report was published in 2006.
“The main proposition behind the network is this: as the world of project management practice continues to develop across different industries and sectors, the subject of project management is now attracting major criticisms, and the gap between conventional project management theory and the developing practice is widening. There are also increasing calls for the identification of new research perspectives and new research topics from other related disciplines. It was against this background that UMIST and UCL submitted a research proposal to the EPSRC proposing a new network to help rethink this emerging discipline. The principal argument of the research proposal was not that conventional project management theory should now be abandoned, but rather there is a need to extend, enrich, reshape and develop this field beyond its current intellectual foundations.”