Good management practices in public projects: the project-view of an administrative unit in a Federal Institute of Higher Education

The public management has been facing changes in order to provide public services with higher quality to Society. In this context, public project management has become an importante ally to guarantee more efficiency and effectiveness to public management. This research aims, based on a bibliographic survey and a study case, to identify on the literature what is understood as good management practices, critical success factors or keyprocess factors when it comes to public project management. Furthermore, this study also analyzes the activities of an administrative unit in a Federal Institute of Higher Education to identify which activities can be classified as a project, and in this way could be enhanced or improved with the suggestions found on the literature. The results of the study revelead that the good management practices identified on the literature could be applyed on the administrative unit of the study case to reduce the bottleneck of the processes. There is a clear relation beetween the difficulties reported by the public employees and the critical success factors identified on the literature. Therefore, the implementation of such practices and factors could result in a higher efficiency and effectiveness to the public management. The study highlights the lack of padronization, the lack of monitoring of the execution and the difficulties on communication as bottlenecks of the processes. On the Other hand, it also emphasizes the good practices, such as the support from the top managers, the importance to monitor and control de processes, the incentive to innovation and the promotion of a clean and effective communication. New research opportunities are suggested.