Situational Project Management

Chapter 3

A Typology of Projects

Russell Archibald^* correctly stated, in 2013, that a “globally agreed” typology (in his words: a project categorization system) is “urgently needed”. He further said that the absence of a typology often leads project managers to apply inappropriate “one size fits all” methods and that projects fail because of the lack of appropriate methods.

Project management is currently in a situation similar to chemistry before the discovery of the Periodic table in 1860, when Chemistry and Alchemy were often mixed. Biology was changed in a similar way when Linné developed his taxonomy in 1735. Before this moment, asking a student which species or genus he or she would want to relate his or her studies to would have been ...