OR63: Contemporary Project Management

Contemporary Project Management has its main focus on human, organizational and contextual aspects of managing projects. PM draws upon various disciplines; in the meantime, project settings have been providing opportunities for them to explore new areas for their research and practice. OR has historically remained one of the disciplines most interested in certain aspects of Projects.

Project Management (PM) has its roots in Operations Research. For decades, the two fields were hardly separable. With the rapid growth in using projects as means of running organizations, PM has extended to a multidisciplinary field with an extensive body of knowledge. Contemporary PM has attracted interests from a wide range of disciplines, incluing OR, and has benefited from their contributions.

OR’s special interests and focus on modelling certain aspects of projects have been widely published and presented, particularly in non-PM journals and conferences. Previous OR conferences had seen these integrated within different streams.

OR63 (to the best of our knowledge) is the first time that Project Management appears as a standalone stream. This would be a unique opportunity for further extending and exploring the two fields’ historical collaborations in the light of what is now quite frequently referred to as ‘contemporary project management’ and research on it as ‘project studies’. Hope developing constructive conversations strengthens the collaboration, closes the gaps between their bodies of knowledge and ultimately suggests new areas of common interest.

We're now looking for project management and OR professionals, data scientists, professors, researchers, analysts, engineers, etc., to present at this event. Submit your 300-word presentation summary by the now extended deadline of the 25th of June to join our expert OR63 speakers!

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Contributions from either academics, the industry or the public sector are welcome!

The Contemporary PM stream aims at providing opportunities for discussing and linking the characteristics of the contemporary PM (as discussed in and by the PM community) with the OR developments most relevant and suitable for modelling such characteristics. We welcome novel talks and papers on fundamental subjects of applying OR in PM (rather than models and techniques for very specific aspects of projects, which could still fit other streams). Subjects could be on or around:

• collaboration between ‘contemporary’ PM and OR
• modelling for contemporary Project Management using OR
• advancements in/challenges of testing OR models with actual data in ‘contemporary’ project environments
• comparing/contrasting the epistemological approaches to research in contemporary PM and OR
• OR in ‘contemporary’ project environments: Enhancing Relevance and Practical Values
• publishing OR models in Project Management Journals

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Meet the stream organisers

If you have any questions, please contact one of the stream organisers below using their details listed. 

Ramesh Vahidi, 
University of Southampton
[email protected]