A Review of the Evolution of Project Management in South Africa

Project management (PM) skill is in high demand across the world. There is a shortage of skilled project managers in South Africa as the demand for PM skills in South Africa has increased significantly across a wide variety of industries. This shortage is exacerbated by the significant volumes of investment in infrastructure and services. The advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), has initiated a digital transformation across industries, including the PM profession. This revolution will drive the evolution of the PM profession in the years ahead and lead to the emergence of Project Management 4.0. Through a bibliometric approach, this chapter examines the evolution of the PM concept in South Africa by reviewing the various paradigm shifts in the profession from an “old” traditional model to the current “new” paradigm. This was achieved by mapping key knowledge areas and co-occurring keywords by identifying trends in research on the PM concept in the built environment domain within a 26-year period in works indexed in the Scopus database. The chapter also examines the implications of the 4IR for the PM profession and how project managers can leverage on this latest wave of digitalization. Finally, the chapter predicts both the hard and soft skills that project managers will be required to have in order to thrive in the fast-paced digital era and to make a meaningful contribution to the efforts to attain national aspirations in South Africa. The study concludes by presenting thought-provoking and practical ideas for the South Africa PM bodies, PM researchers, and higher education institutions as they revamp and restructure their curricula and research agenda to align with the coming mandate of Project Management 4.0.