Projects’ issue management

Almost no project can be delivered smoothly without facing some obstacles and issues during its lifecycle from concept till closure. This inevitable topic of “project issue management” did not attain the appropriate attention either in the literature or in the project management standards or implementation practices. This paper explores the current awareness status and level of implementation of the topic within the project management environment. The conducted survey revealed that this topic is immature and needs to be fostered through awareness, training, institutionalizing, automation and finally standardization. Within this context, a process flow is suggested to be a standard operating procedure to deal with issues during projects implementation. This flow is then verified and validated. To reinforce the topic, an index was newly developed and validated to show the status of issues within projects with the aim of inclusion of this index within the overall project health indicator. Finally, new knowledge area was suggested in a similar way of the American international standard of project management (PMBOK) as an initial trial for the PMBOK update process every four years. The local and international impact of having such a topic “project issue management” within projects was discussed showing some areas for implementation. Keywords: Project issues, Issue maturity, Issue index, Proximity, Issue management process