Past and future of Project Cycle Management (PCM)

Abstract

Development projects have to be managed professionally, but decades of experience has highlighted the challenges of project cycle management (PCM). Development organizations have increasingly searched for alternatives to one of the PCM standards, the logframe. The plethora of PCM instruments has overwhelmed many development practitioners. This brief questions the trend of alternative approaches to PCM, including the logframe. It argues that the crux of good PCM lies in how the instruments are used, rather than the instruments themselves. Focus should not be on further multiplying instruments, but investing more in transferable skills of practitioners such as thinking in an interdisciplinary way and acting adaptively, enabling them to use any instruments in a given context.