Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 15th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Main Conference Theme Author(s) Anna Baranskaya Lomonosov Moscow State University Moscow Russian Federation Title Project management in public administration of transitional countries File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract During the last forty years project management (PM) gained popularity both in business and governmental spheres. The developed countries have realized the importance of PM methodologies in terms of effectiveness and productivity. The developing countries or transitional countries consider the usage of PM as the spirit of new public management, so that it does not have any advantage for public administration. We should argue whether it is really the spirit of new public management or in fact the tendency of returning to the methodologies that were in use few decades ago. The point is that the modern development of PM has begun in the forties of the XX century exactly in public administration in the USA. And only then due to the tendencies in the environment business started to adopt these techniques. Nowadays societies in the developed countries can be called project-oriented. Projects are applied in local governments and in new social areas, such as municipalities, associations, schools and even families. Management by Projects becomes a macro-economic strategy of the society to cope with complexity and dynamics and to ensure quality of project results. As for transitional countries, the popularity of PM is much lower and the situation is heterogeneous. We can divide transitional countries into three main groups: countries that strive to reach the level of the developed ones (the usage of PM is higher then in other groups, but lower then in the developed countries); countries that have their own way of the development and backward countries (almost do not use PM). We cannot speak about the usage of PM in the third group, because this countries need to make other changes in different spheres of life before starting to introduce PM techniques, so that we would focus on the first two groups. In these two groups the situation is similar and the differences relate to the degree of PM’s usage in public administration. Nevertheless, the benefits of PM in such countries will be the same as in the developed ones: o Results-oriented public administration; o Improved productivity; o Higher service user satisfaction; o Reduced costs; o Improved utilization of resources; o Better management of risk; o Projects delivered on time; o Projects delivered on budget; o An auditable methodology. The differences will be in the process of introduction that is to consider peculiarities of a country. The reasons why transitional countries employ PM in public administration to the low extent relate not only to the lack of understanding, but also to the barriers of its introduction laid in the sphere of opposite interests of the society and governments. While in the developed countries the government serves to the public and it is a stable apparition, in the transitional countries the government is searching for its role in the society, that is why it possesses its own interests that mostly contradict to the public ones. Governments in transitional countries not always perceive such beneficial changes in public administration, which PM brings, because they are contrary to their interests. However, these improvements in techniques of public administration are necessary and inevitable if the country is aimed at the development. All mentioned above do not mean that transitional countries should give up other improvements in public administration and concentrate only on PM perceiving it as a panacea. Introduction of project management methodologies should proceed together with other transformations. Only in that case it will have such an effect as in the developed countries.
