The reflective practitioner is a concept developed by Donald Schon to describe how professionals really go about solving problems. To meet the challenges of their work, they rely less on textbook theory or prescriptive guidance than on the kind of improvisation learned in practice. Relating this concept to projects leads us to ask questions about how project practitioners deal with the complex, messy and ambiguous situations and events that characterise their working lives. The standard resources of project management – Bodies of Knowledge, Standards (eg Prince2), etc – do not answer these questions.

See Schon D (1983) The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books, New York.

Sensemaking in organisations, a concept developed by Karl Weick, is concerned with the creation of reality as an ongoing accomplishment, people making retrospective sense of the situations in which they find themselves, and hence shaping organisation behaviour. It is relevant to ProjectCraft at a number of levels:

• that the concepts of the project and its lifecycle are themselves a form of sensemaking about the complex world of work

• that people engaged in projects are perpetually making sense of the project - its scope, its purpose, their role in it, etc

• that this web site and the concept of ProjectCraft are an endeavour to make sense of the shortfalls in the performance of projects.

See Weick K (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage, London

The work of the research network 'Rethinking Project Management' has made major contributions to our understanding of projects. This network, which was based in the UK and operated over a two-year period between 2004 and 2006, brought together leading academics and senior members of the project management profession from the UK and around the world. The format adopted for the network meetings was one in which people practising projects presented their stories, which were then intensively interrogated and analysed by the academics present. This led to an in-depth search for explanations for the behaviours, events and outcomes described by the practitioners in their stories.

The primary academic output from the network is a Special Issue of the International Journal of Project Management (see resources page).

Link to the rethinking project management web site.