Verktækni - 2019, Síða 101

101

Economic importance of projects
The first proposal to outline the projectification of societies in financial terms was made in 2015, when
Wald et al. designed a method for assessing the economic impact of projects and applied this tool to the
German economy. The share of project work in relation to total work in an organization is used as an
indicator of projectification. This is an input-oriented measurement and can be applied to all types of
projects, both external and internal, and it can be applied to all kinds of industries - independent of
organizational factors. In this study, an undertaking is defined as a project if it fulfills a set of specific
conditions: there is a specific target for the project, it is limited in terms of time, it requires specific
resources, there exists an independent organization for the project, the project consists of non-routine
tasks, it has a minimum duration of four weeks and at least three participants. 500 private and public
organizations in Germany participated in the study, and the results show that the proportion of project
work in total working hours in Germany in 2013 was 34.7% and estimated to rise to 41.3% by 2019. The
assessment method and the results of this research are thoroughly described by Wald et al. (2015).
Why is it important to understand future development?
It is said that we need to know the past to understand the present and to plan for the future. Planning
for the future is of utmost importance in modern times, not only for organizations that want to define
their policies and create strategic plans, but also for societies who need to ensure that they build up the
necessary infrastructure and support to maintain their competitive advantage and ensure the prosperity
of their citizens. The economic weight of projects underlines the importance of enhancing professional
project management in all layers of society, and this development must be monitored regularly in a
systematic and consistent way to prepare for the future.

In the first two papers of this series, we have shed light on the development of project management in
Icelandic society and its weight/importance in the economy at the present time. It is now time to look
ahead and assess how things will evolve in the near future, and in this paper an attempt will be made to
map the most important future trends regarding project management in Iceland. This information is
valuable for organisations who wish to build up their infrastructure and resources to compete in a
business environment that is characterised by continuous change and increasing demands. An
understanding of future development is also valuable at state/national level, for those who define
official policy and set laws and create frameworks for the use of public funds. Last but not least,
understanding future development is necessary for educational institutions who need to keep up to
speed and review and renew their emphases/priorities and offerings—in order to ensure that they can
provide future students with the best possible education and training.

Literature – the future of project management
Morris (2013) gave an overview of how the discipline of project management has developed from the
middle of the 20th century to the present time. Stages of this development include the planning and
control stage with its focus on early planning and control tools, and the focus on engineering complexity
and urgency, and this was the major focus of project management until the late 1970s. Organisation
theory and the concept of the temporary organisation was introduced in the 1990s, and this was also
the time when the project management associations published the first versions of their bodies of
knowledge. Enterprise-wide project management was introduced as a concept in the last years of the
20th century, but around the turn of the century, agility gained more and more attention. According to