Integrated Project Management : A Support to Creativity and Innovation

This paper presents a synthesis of a framework of cooperative work directed towards creativity, innovation and decision-making. This framework is adapted to project management and integrates the concepts, methodologies and technologies, which aim at improving the economic and socio-technical performances of projects. The analysis and the interpretation of a number of previous researches and empirical studies show that the success of projects, particularly innovation projects, depends mainly on the capacities of the management team and stakeholders to anticipate and react. These capacities are related to the quality of the interactions which are the driving force of the generic processes of the project management, decision-making processes and problem solving, and which brings together individuals, tools, and knowledge. The research objective is to understand the nature of these interactions and to determine mechanisms and supporting tools to improve its quality. Improving the interaction quality leads to increasing the chance of success of the projects, particularly innovation projects, which are characterized by high level of uncertainty and complexity. The definition and the analysis of project processes, and the development of supporting tools are both carried out, in terms of research methodology, by the maintaining of a constant relationship between the practices and the abstraction work.