Systematic Review on Project Actuality
This work addresses the gap in understanding real-world project practices for project management researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing evidence without introducing new methods or data.
The paper conducted a systematic review to understand project actuality, a concept from the Rethinking Project Management agenda, by analyzing publications from 1994 to 2013, finding that it has been studied using various methods primarily in large organizations and public sectors in Northern Europe.
Nowadays much is written about how to manage projects, but too little on what really happens in project actuality. Project Actuality came out in the Rethinking Project Management (RPM) agenda in 2006 and it aims at understanding what really happens at project context. To be able to understand project actuality phenomenon, we first need to get a better comprehension on its definition and discover how to observe it and analyse it. This paper presents the results of the systematic review conducted to collect evidence on Project Actuality. The research focused on four search engines, in publications from 1994 to 2013. Among others, the study concludes that project actuality has been analysed by several methods and techniques, mostly on large organization and public sectors, in Northern Europe. The most common definitions, techniques, and tips were identified as well as the intent of transforming the results in knowledge.