Managing the institutional context for projects

Project Management is widely seen as delivering undertakings ‘on time, in budget, to scope’. This conceptualization fails however to address the front-end and its management. Addressing this moves the discipline to a second, more strategic level. This paper proposes a third level of conceptualization: the institutional level, where management is focused on creating the conditions to support and foster projects, both in its parent organization and its external environment. Management here is done for and on the project rather than in or to it. We show that management at this level offers an enlarged research agenda and improvement in performance.