Project Managers as Senior Executives Volume I: Research Results, Advancement Model, and Action Proposals

Can project managers actually become senior executives? If not, what can be done to allow them to climb the ladder? What are the odds? How can a project manager better design his or her career development to take advantage of these opportunities? These questions and more are answered in Project Managers as Senior Executives, the new newest addition to PMI’s ever-growing published library of research-based studies.

Based on face-to-face interviews with more than 40 senior executives and project managers from six countries, an extensive literature search, and online questionnaires, the authors, who are top project leaders in the project management community, provides empirical evidence and addresses three fundamental hypotheses and a series of nine research questions.

Project Managers as Senior Executives maps out a model for advancement for program and project managers and contributes new thinking on the emerging leadership of project managers as senior executives.

The research is published in two volumes. Volume I—Research Results, Advancement Model, and Action Proposals presents the results and proposals from the study and Volume 2—How the Research Was Conducted: Methodology, Detailed Findings, and Analyses contains the research-oriented materials from the study.

About the Authors

Jean-Pierre Debourse, PhD, MSc : Emeritus Professor, Université du Littoral; Director of the CEL.LAB, Universite du Littoral; Research Laboratory for Project Management and Entrepreneurship, Dunkirk, France; Founder and Director of a research laboratory on Entrepreneurship and Project Management at ULCO, with team members from 7 Universities; former Dean, ESC Lille School of Management and Professor Emeritus, the University of Lille. Over 40 years of experience in Project Management and Project Management Education, a founder of one the first PM Master Degrees in Europe in 1979, a founder of the Regional Development Agency of the North-Pas de Calais Region, the analyst for the Regional Council of Northern France of the projects competing for the Channel Tunnel, former CEO, Fonds Régional de Garantie.

Russell D. Archibald, PhD (Hon), MSc, PMI Fellow, APM Honorary Fellow, PMP : Globally-recognized author, consultant and educator on project management. His career spans more than 60 years with broad international experience in engineering, operations, program and project management; member number 6 of PMI; listed in Who’s Who in the World 1984; author of Managing High Technology Programs and Projects , 3 rd ed. 2003 (published in 6 languages), and co-author of Network-Based Management Information Systems (PERT/CPM), 1967.