The Contribution of the Knowledge Areas to Project Success

Abstract

An increasing number of organizations operate through projects to achieve their strategic objectives. The main objective of this study is to analyse the degree of dissemination of the project management (PM) practices and their contribution to projects success. A survey performed to project managers aims to identify the extent to which the different knowledge areas and their respective PM practices are implemented and linked to projects success. The results achieved underlines that the practices related with cost, time, and scope management are the most well stablished. Furthermore, the study highlighted that other knowledge areas had an effect on projects success. Moreover, the project managers pointed out other less immediately reachable criteria for project success like end-customers and project team satisfaction or fulfilment of organizational objectives. The use of a multidimensional analytical approach to PM makes an important contribution in the analyses of the practices and factors that most contributed to project success.