Investigating the effects of project management issues on control systems within public organizations

This paper aims at analysing the concept of bureaucracy within project groups. The notion of project that will be applied refers to situations in which members come from different functional units, goals are assigned in advance, and members have wide degrees of freedom in order to define patterns of action to reach the goals. Our aim is to analyse the use and the implementation of project teams within public utilities in Italy. There is a huge amount of research focused on the theme of project organization, stemming from the idea that project can be considered a tool to increase the degree of flexibility within bureaucratic and functional organizations, whereas in other few researches project management is supposed to stress the level of bureaucracy (Swan and Robertson, 1998). It is interesting to consider that, apart from the New Public Management School, there are not so many studies on PM focused on the public sector (Crawford et al., 2003). At the same time, it is clear that it could be very interesting to go in depth in the analysis of the impact produced by project management within public organizations in terms of more/less flexibility and adaptability. Nowadays, anyway, in Italy public utilities are typically bureaucratic and mechanic organizations (Viney et al., 2004; ILO, 2003; Rockman, 2000).