The Investigation of the Generation of Intangible Benefits through Project Management

With the focus of this research on intangible benefits, the resource based view was used as the lens through which project based organisations were considered. It was recognised that intangibles contributed to the competitiveness of project based organisations as the review of extant intellectual capital literature revealed that intangibles help organisations to be competitive evidenced in the changing value contribution of intangibles to tangibles and the gap between market and book value due to globalisation and its manifestations.
A theoretical and empirical approach combined with an interpretivist approach grounded the research in extant project management and project management practice and addressed some of the criticisms of the RPM, CPM, BOKs and BRM. Theoretically, content analysis was applied on extant project management literature and empirically, five organisations consisting of contracting and single project client organisations participated in multiple case studies in two phases using questionnaires that collected both qualitative and quantitative data combined with deductive and inductive analytical approach to data analysis.
Demonstrated that the theoretically derived intangible benefits of project management fit broadly into organisational capital, human capital and social capital and a theoretical framework was also developed. Empirically demonstrated that the intangible benefits from project management deployment are types of knowledge and capabilities. The drivers of and attributes of intangible benefits established that intangible benefits are generic and contextual with implications for the contracting and single project client organisation. By analytical triangulation, it was empirically demonstrated that intangible benefits derived from project management follow the mature groupings of contracting and single project client. The logic to the generation of intangible benefits was developed and the theoretical framework empirically validated. Mapping the logic model unto the project management activities identified from a combined version of the PMBOK and the APMBOK, the approach to the generation of intangible benefits was developed.