Project Governance as a systemic model of project organization: a literature review

There are various definitions of Governance in the Project Management literature. Major project management institutions, such as PMI and IPMA, provide their own definition of project governance. The most established standard is ISO 21500. What all the guidelines of the various institutions have in common is the lack of a quantitative and at the same time systemic governance approach, in other words a holistic method that can support a project throughout its entire life cycle. The aim of this research is to make an analysis of the scientific literature in order to find a method that is able to generate data by operating at a high level perpective. The first chapter of the thesis takes up the literature on engineering, economics and decision science, which dealt with governance in projects from different perspectives. The theories behind governance are presented to describe the causes of certain dynamics within an organisation or project. Such theories, although purely theoretical, are the necessary starting point for any project governance approach. The second chapter aims to identify the current state of the art in this direction through a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature. This study attempts to map the global research on quantitative and systematic models that can support project governance. Network analysis is used such a research tool for the construction of bibliographic networks to identify key elements within the literature. The reflection on this literature and on the cognitive needs of the thesis lead us to identify Social Network Analysis as the appropriate project governance analytical tool to find quantitative data through the use of networks of relationships. The third chapter present Social Network Analysis in detail arguing that studies of SNA provide interesting findings in the possibility to link the local actions and intentions of agents to the global behavioral patterns of the systems of which they are a part. In this way, the model of the SNA is illustrated and then the methods of collection and elaboration of the information are illustrated, through the presentation of any metric able to capture salient aspects of the relations.