THE INFLUENCE OF PROJECT SUCCESS ON THE OVERALL FIRM PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Since its dawn as a discipline in the 1950s, Project Management (PM) has been configured as a normative discipline mainly focused on the development and improvement of tools and techniques for managing projects. Both PM professionals and scholars believed that the achievement of project success depended on the correct application of the techniques already developed. However, despite the great sophistication of PM tools and the numerous articles that have been written about project success and the critical success factors, there is still a great percentage of projects that fail. A new stream of research is nowadays focusing on applying a business perspective to the study of projects and project-based firms. The main hypothesis is that projects are developed within the boundaries of a permanent organization and so the study of projects in isolation has to be at least complemented by research acknowledging projects as history dependent and organizationally-embedded. Given this new ontology, developing successful projects is a necessary but no longer sufficient condition to secure long term organizational performance. Based on an international sample of projects, this paper addresses the question of how project success contributes to the overall firm performance.