Developing the new Dimension of Monitoring and Evaluation Processes Within Project Management

Under the circumstances of a more and more dynamic and complex business environment, effective project management (approached as a business process which involves certain objectives, a definite period of time for completion, and an estimated budget) may prove to be a key factor in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage on the market. However, two of the most important processes within project management cycle, the project monitoring as well as the project evaluation, are usually approached as side-activities by project managers and project management teams, which finally leads either to project collapse or to other critical symptoms. We may assume that there are not enough monitoring and evaluation tools for project managers, aimed to provide complete and relevant information about the progress of the project and that the present scientific approaches regarding project management are mostly focused on topics like resources' allocation, activities' scheduling, time management, forecasting various economic or financial indicators (IRR, NPV, Cost-Benefit Ratio, etc.), while topics like monitoring or evaluating the projects' progress, during their entire lifecycle, are leftin alternative and only tangentially debated. The paper focuses on reconfiguring the main instruments used for project monitoring and evaluation within the project cycle management, in order to make them suitable for a proper use during the entire lifecycle of the project. Most of the actual monitoring and evaluation techniques were discovered a few decades ago, and they are no longer compatible with the main elements of nowadays companies' corporate culture (stakeholders' commitment, corporate social responsibility, organizational culture, business ethics, leadership, corporate governance, environmental commitment, social awareness, etc.). Also, we analyse the strengths and weaknesses of the main monitoring and evaluation instruments used within project management, as well as the endogenous and exogenous factors which may influence the project objectives and we focus on certain improvements to the existing mechanisms, so that they become more effective and more suitable for performing adequate monitoring and evaluation processes. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]