Verktækni - 2019, Qupperneq 82

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importance and application of project management will increase in the near future. This sends a clear
message to both industry and the public sector on what kind of strategic and tactical alignments and
what kind of professional competences are needed for future economy and society. Furthermore, the
study describes - and deploys - two methods that can be used to measure the importance and trends
within the project management profession and as indicators of what has been named “projectification”
of society.
Keywords: Profession, GVA, impact, application, future trends.

Introduction
Observing the development of the project management profession from starting off as a rather narrowly
defined technical undertaking, to becoming a world-wide profession has been fascinating. The birth of
the project management as a formal discipline is traditionally seen as a product of the Cold War
(Kerzner, 2009) when the so-called superpowers competed in an arms race to build weapons and other
armaments. Large projects were planned and deployed both in the US and the USSR to design bombers,
ballistic missiles, submarines and weapon systems. In the US, where the more scientific take on project
management is was born, projects were often a complex interplay of a number of stakeholders: the
military, government, public institutions, contractors and sub-contractors. The enhancement of the
planning procedures led to techniques like the development of the Critical Path Method (CPM) and the
Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) and other the recognizable early signifiers of project
management.
When executives in a search for managerial techniques that could be used to cope with the increasingly
volatile business environment, discovered project management, interest in the discipline grew steadily.
This interest, further, created the need for references and conceptual clarifications, a process that
indicated increased “projectification”, a concept first used in 1995 by Cristophe Midler (Midler, 1995).
Originally, the concept referred to a trend that Midler noticed in the Renault car factories and that
manifested in the transition from the traditional functional organization in the 1960's to project
orientation and coordination in the 1970's. It also referred to the deep impact these changes had on
task definitions, hierarchical regulations, carrier management, functions and relationships with
suppliers. Since then the term "projectification" has in an organizational context been used to describe
the path towards the managerial adaptation, or transformation, of a conventional management to a
project-oriented organization. It has also, still further, been used as to descript the growing trend within
developed societies to build increasingly on projects and project management for further actualization.
Morris (2012) described the evolution of project management as a move towards system engineering
and interest in the “project manager” as an attempt to cope with the human and social challenges of the
dynamic system that projects inevitably are. Arguably, the focus on the project as a vibrant organization,
rather than as a set of methods, established a turning point in the evolving of the profession. Morris et
al. (2012) also describes three major paradigms, or “waves”, in the development of project management
as a discipline. The first wave was characterized by normative methods, tools and techniques; the
second wave by projects as temporary organizations, with methods to work with risk and contingency,
planning, and models that were used to rethink project management.
The third wave has seven characteristics; (1) interest in the history and distinct theory of projects and
project management; (2) increased awareness of the importance of context or how a project is a part of
the social and sectoral enterprise; (3) interest in understanding how projects and organizations are
linked; (4) interest in how strategy and projects are linked; (5) interest in how projects are used as