Tailoring project management practices for decision making: an in-depth comparative study

The efforts to successfully complete projects lead to the development of various project management (PM) standards, best practices and guidelines, issued by different organisational bodies. These PM practices, when appropriately implemented, lead to a better project performance. However, studies on how to adopt and adapt such practices according to management needs, remain limited. In this paper, we are going to focus on how to map the project requirements with the suitable PM practices to support the PM decision making. To respond this question, we put forward an in-depth comparative study amongst the well-established PM practices considering a set of features to pick out their challenges, limits as well as their applicability. Through this comparison, we extend the discussion of PM practices features by contrasting them to three distinct categories of requirements which are technical, contextual and behavioural. This analysis allows us to map each category to its corresponding practice(s). Our finding provides comprehensive recommendation guidelines to both practitioners and researchers in order to improve their decision making in line with the project environment.