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Classics in Project Management: Revisiting the Past, Creating the Future
Edited by Jonas Söderland and Joana Geraldi
1 Introduction
Isaac Newton once said "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants". The research community was mindful of this when considering project success. The field of project management has evolved in part because researchers have stood on the shoulders of such giants as Pinto, Slevin, and Prescott since their seminal contributions to the field in the 1980s. As the editors of this special issue noted, history is important and it is prudent for us to remember that when some concepts are raised as novel, they were actually brought to our attention years ago. In essence, history matters.
The subject of project success is at the heart of project management. Many factors impact the degree of project success. Project success is therefore among the top priorities of project managers and project stakeholders. It is not surprising then that the topic has interested academics and practitioners for decades and continues to be of relevance today.
The project management literature frequently refers to two components of project success (Authors; [25] Morris and Hough, 1987; [55] Wateridge, 1998; [53] Turner, 1999):
Project success factors , which are the elements of a project which, when influenced, increase the likelihood of success; these are the independent variables that make success more likely.
Project success criteria , which are the measures used to judge on the success or failure of a project; these are the dependent variables that measure success.
The popularity of project success is evident in the high citation rates on certain papers on the topic. Appendix 1 exemplifies a list of the top refereed journal articles with project success in the title and with over 100 citations (Google.scholar, as of December 2011). This top 15 list span the 1988-2011 timeframe. An amazing 2,790 citations for this period indicates the ongoing interest by scholars in the subject. Two of the 15 papers (13 percent) were by Pinto and his colleagues. 53 percent of the papers were in the top two project management journals (six of the 15 papers were in the Project Management Journal and two were in the International Journal of Project...