"Although, in recent years, there has been an admission of responsibility towards other stakeholders, the maximization of shareholder value is still the key measure of a manager's success. The shareholder focus is rooted in a top-down, pyramidal type of structure, which maintains a strict control over managers and is based almost exclusively on financial results," he wrote recently.

The flaw in this kind of approach is that research has consistently shown that a short-term results focus on shareholder value and financial measures leads to a cul-de-sac. Researchers say financial-based tools are myopic instruments that undervalue overall strategic benefits against pure financial measures. These tools usually focus on strategic convergence (efficiency), rather than promoting strategic advantage (effectiveness). The result? Most strategic project decisions are still made based on strategic considerations that have little to do with tangible benefits.

Equally, more progressive and "enlightened" companies are now using a wider range of performance indicators like those promoted by the Balanced Scorecards that take into account a wider stakeholder perspective. But it is also vital for the project management community to comprehend the environment in which they manage projects. Organizations that view the business in a technical rather than business sense will miss opportunities because they cannot adapt, Thiry says.

Oh, Grow Up!

Overly-slavish adherence to the PMBOK also helps explain why so many organizations are at such a low project maturity level, Robb says. That is at least partly because the Body of Knowledge has nothing to say about how to run projects, who needs to be involved and what the various roles and responsibilities should be. Hence what is missing from far too many projects, and even project management offices, are agreed processes and a consistent methodology, she says.

"What I have seen in many organizations is that their project maturity level is relatively low and it's mainly because people don't know what they need to be doing next or how the project should be run," she says. "There's no selective agreed approach on running projects, so you can go into an organization and talk to 10 different project managers and they may all be familiar with PMBOK, they may all be project management professionals as well, they may even have a master's in project management. But if there is no consistent way of running projects then it's very difficult to capture lessons learned and look at where you are going wrong and how you can address that," Robb says.

Which brings us to another of the now-recognized missing links of project management: knowledge management.

Robb says that consistently and regularly capturing lessons learned is the height of good project management practice, but says she "struggles to see" how organizations can capture knowledge gained from projects without an agreed framework and a consistent approach to project delivery. Only those two ingredients make it possible to consider later how processes were run, and what went well and what badly.

Robb's approach is to develop a Lessons Learned log at each project's inception, to regularly review and reflect on how the project is running, and to document relevant information in conjunction with the other people who work in the project. But she reiterates that the approach only has value if the organization is consistently applying the same processes and methodologies to all similar projects.

"I have worked in an organization where everyone is running projects in their own way and manner, so any lessons I learned really applied to me, not necessarily to anyone else," she says. "If my approach is to make sure that a project executive is appointed at the start - and project managers are appointed at the start and the roles and responsibilities are clearly identified - but other people aren't following the same process as I am, then learning [my lessons] is meaningless to them. If they follow different processes surrounding their project, then I may not benefit from learning where they've gone wrong because I am not going through the same processes.

"Certainly organizations have got problems - and I think most would admit to this - with getting people to get the project work done effectively, saying consideration needs to be given to a standardized approach and consideration of the issues, so the project managers aren't running themselves ragged. But lessons learned are very much part of that," Robb says.

"If you talk to some of the big companies around, their reviews had revealed that they were making the same mistakes time and time again so they had to change the culture to become learning organizations in order to benefit from the mistakes of projects past."