A Systematic Literature Review: The Front End of Projects.

Research conducted by:

Professor Terry Williams, Hang Vo, Professor Andrew Edkins, and Professor Knut Samset

A collaboration between Hull, UCL and NTNU Universities

Published: 2019

The full PMI report is available here.

This report describes the results of a detailed, comprehensive, systematic literature survey on the front end of a project, commissioned by the Project Management Institute (PMI). It is the result of a collaborative project conducted by academics from University College London, UK, the University of Hull, UK, and the NUST Concept Research Program based at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The literature on the front end itself has been found to be fairly sparse; although the front end of a project has been shown to be critical to its strategic success or failure, this phase of a project’s life cycle is not well understood.

This report presents the literature on the concept of the front end, and defines a temporarily ordered structure of generic processes that form part of the “front end” and how these fit together as a coherent whole (see Figure 2). These start from the preliminaries to the initiative, then the project purpose (for various stakeholders), initial analysis and scenario analysis; the analysis of alternatives and choice of project concept; assessment of the project (scope; estimation of cost, benefits, and schedule; risk; technology and sustainability; and the project delivery system), finishing with setting up the project execution (finance, governance, and contracts).

The report then looks at the recent literature on each of these elements in turn, specifically as they relate to the front end of the project, to provide a reference for each of these elements.

This report does not take any specific theoretical stance, but is informed by a clustering of the seven “images” (Winter & Szxczepanek, 2009), keeping attention on the surrounding environment, the intended project benefits, and the temporariness of the project.

The report finishes with some particular areas where further research would be valuable.