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exception in publicly funded construction projects and that there is room for extensive improvement in
terms of project selection and planning. In 2016, the macro-economical value of project management in
Iceland was assessed, based on a method that had been applied in Germany one year earlier.

The Development of Project Management Organisational Support in Iceland
The Icelandic Project Management Association (VSF) was founded in 1984 and Daniel Gestsson became
the first chairman (Gestsson, 2014). One of the first assignments of this new association was to
participate in a Nordic project by Nordnet, to develop a list of project management concepts in the
Nordic languages. In 1987, a Nordnet conference was held in Reykjavik on "The spectrum of project
management." It was an interesting event, because it was held as a collaboration between IPMA and
PMI, the Project Management Institute of the USA (Gestsson, 2014).
In 1991, a handbook on publicly funded construction projects was issued by the Ministry of Finance. It
was written as guidelines for all the ministries to follow in all construction projects undertaken under
their providence. Later, regulations on official construction projects were written and formally approved
by the parliament. In 1997, the first IPMA certification took place in Iceland, with help from the German
project management association (Gestsson, 2014), and in 1997, the first project management office was
established in an Icelandic organization, in this case one of the three largest banks in Iceland,
Islandsbanki (Bjornsdottir, 2007).

In 1994, the IPMA launched an effort to coordinate the education of project managers and introduced
its willingness to develop a certification program for professional project managers. The Icelandic
Project Management Association (VSF) participated actively in this effort and Iceland became one of the
pioneer countries (Gestsson, 2014). In Iceland, currently, only one person, Sigurdur Ragnarsson for
Harpa Music and Conference Hall, holds a IPMA-A certification, 82 people hold IPMA-B certification, 184
people hold a IPMA-C certification and 1755 hold a IPMA-D certification (VSF, 2019).

In 2001, the first publication of an Icelandic Body of Knowledge on project management was written and
published with support from the Icelandic state, on the condition that it would be accessible to the
public (Gestsson, 2014). In 2002 the first woman was elected as chairman of VSF (Gestsson, 2014). A
research project in 2003 revealed that project managers in Iceland had quite diverse backgrounds
(Einarsdottir, 2003). A survey was done amongst members in VSF, and 52% of the respondents were
engineers, a lower ratio than was anticipated. In 2010, MPM students did an assessment of the project
management maturity in the Icelandic ministries. The conclusion was that there the project maturity
was very low — most scored 1 out of 5 with regards to most evaluation criteria — in all of the ministries
and much room for improvement (Ingason, 2010).

In 2012, VSF had the IPMA competence baseline ICB3 translated into Icelandic and used as both as the
Icelandic competence baseline in project management and as a foundation for the project management
certification system. Another milestone for VSF was in 2012, when the association hired its first
employee. This was a response to demands for increased professionalism in the operations of the
association, which has from the beginning been run mostly on a voluntary basis. In 2013, a handbook on
project management was issued by the Icelandic Prime Ministry, intended for use in all ministries when