Towards a Holistic Approach to Strategic Project Management

Large projects can have large consequences, not only for those who use them, but also for the organisations and institutions that build and finance them. When successful, large projects generate revenues and benefit society, but when they go wrong society suffers and the organisations and institutions that are in the business of large projects confront financial difficulties and potential damage to their reputation. Interest in improving the planing, design, and delivery of large projects is therefore long-standing. It has generated a considerable number of case studies and prescriptions that focus on internal management issues such as engineering estimates, scheduling, systems, control, and contractual design. What is patently lacking is a ‘‘holistic’’ approach that gives managers an understanding of how to tackle the complexity of large projects as evolving systems that are strongly influenced by their real world context. This Special Issue brings together a group of papers that map out many of the key issues facing a holistic study of large projects.