What About Coordination, Transparency and Anticipation in Projects? A Systematic Review of “Controlling” of Projects, Especially of Public Infrastructure Projects

Managing infrastructure projects remains challenging, and especially large infrastructure projects are often criticised for cost overruns and time delays. With the help of controlling, a peculiarity of German-speaking countries, project management and thus project performance can be improved since controlling ensures transparency within the project and supports coordination and anticipation. Furthermore, controlling can improve the quality of decision-making, the ability to respond and adapt to internal and external changes. However, research on controlling within German-speaking countries has been almost isolated from international research. Consequently, conducting a literature review is faced with linguistic challenges and requires some preparatory work. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to fulfil three ambitions: First, based on an introduction to public infrastructure projects, this chapter suggests requirement categories for the controlling of public infrastructure projects. Second, by specifying the understanding of controlling, a controlling system framework is proposed. Third, based on the categories suggested and the framework developed, this chapter presents a literature review on controlling of (public) infrastructure projects. Thereby, this chapter provides a common basis for developing an integrated controlling system. Furthermore, by structuring the selected articles based on the controlling system framework, initial experiences in applying the framework were gathered and requirements for adjustments were identified.