The Challenge of Managing Megaprojects

Leandro Alves Patah

Contingency theory, Megaproject definition, Megaproject management, Project classification, Project management, Project types.

This paper reviews the concepts of project management and megaprojects, emphasizing on how to join these topics and the challenges of managing this kind of project, because the standard methodologies are not specific for megaprojects and, until now, academic researches focus only in the general content of methodologies for megaprojects. So, the objective of this paper is to jointly discuss project management, megaprojects and the challenges of managing this kind of project. First, we review the project management concepts and standards; then we define megaprojects, considering that a narrow definition is not the best alternative and then we present the current discussions about managing megaprojects. As a conclusion, we suggest unfolding the emerging topics for managing megaprojects in specific process, documents, tools and templates, to create a new standard, otherwise project managers will keep unsuccessfully trying to adapt the traditional methodologies to their megaprojects. This work brings a theoretical contribution when reviewing the newest advances in this topic and suggests future researches in the development of a new megaproject methodology.

Received: 25 Nov 2020; Received in revised form: 20 Jan 2021; Accepted: 25 Jan 2021; Available online: 14 Feb 2021

10.22161/ijaers.82.19