Project and Portfolio Management Approaches in the Smart City: An Empirical Investigation

Smart cities are among one of the trending subjects of the 21st century and discussed by the high number of different parties around the world. In spite of all these discussions and studies on the subject, project management approaches of the smart city initiatives haven’t been studied extensively and the gap in the literature glitters explicitly. This work has the overall objective of exploring the relationships between project management practices and how cities develop, implement, and manage their smart city efforts by focusing especially on two attributes; smart city organizational approaches of the cities and the project portfolio management preferences. Precise objectives of this research are to find out whether smart city projects initiated by local governments or by private organizations, to determine whether city offices involved in smart city initiatives organized as project management offices or not and to measure the level of maturity of project portfolio management in smart city offices. For achieving these objectives, a comprehensive survey was conducted to city governments and an empirical analysis was made. In the light of this analysis, best practices and approaches used by cities were tried to be identified and some suggestions have been made to the cities working on smart city projects. We believe, this work will enlighten the relationship between project management practices and smart city projects and will become a useful guide for the local governments dealing with smart city projects.