From project management to managing by projects: learning from the management of M&As

Over the last decades, projects have spread across many, if not all, industries. In academia, though, project management (PM) research remains seemingly disparate and distant from literature(s) concerned with managerial phenomena we would yet tend to label as projects, including e.g. IS, innovation, organisational change, M&A. As part of a movement aiming at integrating PM with related knowledge areas (Söderlund, In Press; Kwak and Anbari, 2009), this paper provides a comparative analysis between the literature on Project Management (PM) on the one hand and Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) on the other hand. Our analysis has two goals: to identify potential areas of mutual learning and exploration to the benefit of both streams of research; and to search for conceptual bridges across contexts that can be labelled as ’projects’. More specifically, we identify and establish one particular link: apply the concepts of ‘projects’, ‘programmes’ and ‘portfolio management’ to M&As.