THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS
Project Management Consortium

Message from the Director

There are a number of exciting new ideas being developed in the research arena that have the potential to materially change the practice of project management. The Project Management Consortium (PMC) at the University of Texas at Austin translates research into practical approaches and then tests these ideas against the complexity of real-world problems. We are made up of faculty from different schools in the university who share a common passion—changing the practice of project management through the practical application of research. We all spend a significant amount of time refining our research in real projects and dealing with the inevitable messy complications. With one foot in the research community and the other firmly embedded in the practice, we can bridge the gap.

Experience and research have taught us the conventional project management paradigms are not always relevant in the modern business environment. Managing the project’s triple constraint of cost, schedule and scope has long been considered the “Holy Grail” of project management; while this is still very relevant in certain projects, it can be a guarantee of business failure in others. Managers are learning that project success requires more than merely applying the time-tested methodologies of the past or, for that matter, applying them more efficiently by leveraging information technology.

I invite you to visit our PMC website to see what we are doing. We are confident that the PMC is an organization in a unique position to help create a new and more effective paradigm for project management.

Britt Freund, Ph.D.
Director, Project Management Consortium