1 WHAT SHOULD PROJECT MANAGEMENT BE BASED ON? Gregory Howell 1 & Hal Macomber 2 ABSTRACT Projects historically have been defined as temporary undertakings carried out by a single purpose organization. Projects and their management can be described and portrayed from a variety of perspectives, each founded on some conceptual basis, hiding or revealing various aspects, and opening or closing some possibilities for action. This paper joins the continuing exploration about the nature of projects and their management. The power of lean approaches in the materiel/information domain is well established and rests on solid conceptual foundations. In this paper we explore projects as human endeavors and how our humanity with all its capacities and limits opens possibilities for improvement. KEY WORDS Project management, Theory, Language Action Perspective INTRODUCTION This paper joins the continuing exploration about the nature of projects and their management. The power of lean approaches in the materiel 3 /information domain is well established and rests on solid conceptual foundations. In this paper we explore projects as human endeavors and how our humanity with all its capacities and limits opens possibilities for improvement. We will not, indeed cannot prove anything new about people rather we will reflect on what it means to be human from the perspective of Language Action (Winograd 1987) (Wiegand et al 2003). We have previously proposed that Language Action 4 (LA) contributes to the theory of project management and that it is time to move from an outdated approach to project management (Macomber & Howell 2003) (Howell et al 2004). In this paper, we reinterpret the nature of projects and propose that LA provides a general and powerful theoretical basis for understanding projects and their management. We then connect and discuss these claims in relationship to “Assessing and Moving on from the Dominant Project Management Discourse in the Light of Project Overruns.” (Williams 2005) and Managing Construction Projects: An information processing approach (Winch 2006), and more recently the BRI Forum discussion papers “Should project management be based on theories of economics or production?” (Koskela & Ballard 2006) and “Towards a theory of construction as production by projects” (Winch 1 Managing Director, Lean Construction Institute, 625 Main Street 1B, Louisville, CO 80027, +1-303- 408-1098. ghowell@leanconstruction.org (Also Partner, Lean Project Consulting) 2 Partner, Lean Project Consulting, 36 Kirkland Drive, Andover, MA 01810. +1-978-470-8994. hmacomber@leanproject.com . 3 We use the word to include all physical wherewithal: material, space, tools, and equipment. 4 Language action perspective holds that the world is brought forth in language, particularly through the use of speech acts, that is verbs that are action when spoken rather than those that are descriptive of action. The basic speech acts are: request, promise, assess (opine), assert (claim truth), and declare. See Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/spchacts.html .