Article2003

Soft systems: a fresh perspective for project management

78 citations0/0 files storedProceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Civil Engineering

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Complex Systems and Decision Making Construction Project Management and Performance Systems Engineering Methodologies and Applications

Abstract

Recent developments in the field of systems thinking show that conventional project management theory is essentially rooted in ‘hard’ systems thinking and there are now increasing calls to augment this theory with ideas and approaches from ‘soft’ systems thinking. This paper examines the essential differences between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems thinking through a comparison of their different perspectives on project management practice. The core ideas for a new perspective on project management are presented together with implications for the education and training of future project managers.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 78 citations exist upstream.

References

1987Educating the reflective practitioner 1996A Guide to the project management body of knowledge 1982Systems thinking, systems practice 1982Project management: A systems approach to planning, scheduling and controlling 1987CONTEXT AND ACTION IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE FIRM 1989Project management — A managerial approach 1979The Future of Operational Research is Past 1985From Optimizing to Learning: A Development of Systems Thinking for the 1990s

Cited by

2013Rethinking dichotomization: A critical perspective on the use of “hard” and “soft” in project management research 2007Multimethodology in series and parallel: strategic planning using hard and soft OR 2007Exploring Research in Project Management: Nine Schools of Project Management Research (Part 3)2010Problem-structuring methods and project management: an example of stakeholder involvement using Hierarchical Process Modelling methodology 2007Systemic environmental decision making: designing learning systems

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.