A Contingent Model of Project Organization and Management Research-in-Progress

There is a presumption in project management research and practice that project management follows a "one size fits all" model. This is manifested in the introduction of many prescriptive models by project management bodies such as the Project Management Institute and the Association of Project Management, to name a few. These generic models steer away from the differences across projects and focus only on the common aspects of projects. However, in many circumstances, the generic nature of such models renders them poorly equipped to deal with the challenges of organizing and managing complex projects. In this paper we present a contingent model that has the potential to deal with environmental variability and constraints. This model is based on two contingent factors: location of work and project complexity. It develops four types of projects based on two contingent dimensions and proposes a few related hypotheses.