Benchmarking Project Resilience

Projects still suffer from low project management success rates, mainly due to events that occur during their life-cycles, which cause deviations from their main objectives. That is why, recent studies have begun exploring the concept of resilience in project management. These studies aim to reinforce current project risk management practices and improve the capacity of a project to deal with disruptive events. Therefore, this paper reviews first the literature on the concepts of resilience, and of organizational resilience in order to propose a definition of project resilience and to set its dimensions. Second, the development of indicators to assess project resilience is achieved by conducting semi-structured interviews with 10 senior project managers from different industries, in which, 10 case studies were explored and analyzed. As a result, a definition is proposed, and 10 indicators are established to assess two dimensions of project resilience: awareness and adaptive capacity. In future research, these indicators would require a rigorous validation in different project types. This provides project team members with a robust set of indicators with which they would be able to assess their project’s capacity to effectively and efficiently deal with disruptive events.