Project management in public research organization: strategic change in complex scenarios

Efficient organization of public research bodies is important to increase the production of scientific research, which is more and more necessary to competitiveness in modern economies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the new project-based organization of the biggest public research body in Italy. The analysis shows that, unless project management is properly designed and implemented within public research bodies, it tends to become unmanageable over time, creating conflicts, confusion, and prolifera-tion of communication channels, which lead to information log-jams. The reality is that the Italian Na-tional Research Council has never really implemented project management rules; as a matter of fact, be-cause of coordination and area problems as well as the public structure of CNR, it hybridizes project man-agement rules with the old organization since this is the only way to cope with a turbulent and uncertain domestic context.