Abstract EN:

According to Standish Group (“Chronicles CHAOS” – 2004) the rate of failure of the projects in various industries varies between 61 and 92%. Why a project can fail? … The historical approach of the project management based on a normative approach showed its limits. From the questions of effectiveness of the current normative approach of the project management, we carried out a review of literature which led us to conclude that the discipline needs a handing-over on epistemological and methodological level. The routine way of the interpretation of the current normative approach tends to darken the deontology of the discipline. Thus, through our first tudy, mobilizing the “grounded theory”, we wished to exceed this instrumentalist vision. Started from an observation on the limits of the current project management, we were brought to analyze a true project (the mission of tramway of Bordeaux) and discovered the importance of the duality for a project, built on dimensions of the structural theory. The research undertaken near the mission of the tram indeed allowed us to highlight the importance of an approach based on the process of the structuring. We thus saw emerging two poles evolving jointly: the structure and the actor. Thus we could, by the means of the grounded theory approach, distinguish some theories which potentially can bring additional options in the exploration, the exploitation and the project management: the theory of conventions; the neo-institutional theory and the structuration theory. The neo-institutional theory refers mainly to the structure, the conventions’ theory refers to the actor. However, the project management represents the management of a particular structure which is subjected to the contextual constraints (time and space). Our final choice was thus made on the structuration theory which we consider as more adapted for investigating the project management with its constraining and habilitating consequences. We then focused ourselves on the applicability of the theory of the structuring in a concrete situation of the management of the project. Our objective was to propose a structuralist approach while veloping the use of an abductive reasoning. Thus we went back again on the ground (Service “Payroll” of the accounting department - University Victor Ségalen Bordeaux 2) to create (and observe) a new service in the accounting department, following the passage of the universities to the responsibilities and widened competences (RCE). This ction-research approach fell under a scientific expedition dissimulated for reasons of objectivity in which our role was that of not-declared observer. By this work, we consolidate our idea that the classical approach (normative) of the project management restricts the analysis with parameters which do not take account of the context in which the project evolves. We lean towards a management of good sense which it calls upon the concept of reflexivity of the actors as evoked by Anthony Giddens in the structuration theory. That corresponds to faculties of the actors to position in a context and to act according to their knowledge and competences, and not necessarily according to the decided objectives. In the case of the project management this becomes a crucial factor.