Adoption of project management practices: The impact on international development projects of non-governmental organizations

•We gathered data from almost 500 project managers working in the International Development field.•The results indicate the existence of different maturity stages in the adoption of project management tools.•The adoption of project management tools is an important factor in project success in both the short and long term.

International Development (ID) projects carried out by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are considered one of the pillars for providing assistance to developing countries, but these projects are reported to have high failure rates and their performance is often considered not satisfactory. Only recently researchers started to consider project management (PM) practices as possible remedy for the poor performance of ID projects. Following this direction, we have conducted a large-scale survey among project managers working for NGOs and dealing with ID projects to assess the extent of adoption of methodologies and tools. Moreover, this study assesses the impact of the PM practices on project performance. We present an analysis and discussion of the evidence from this international survey administered to almost 500 project managers. The results indicate different levels of maturity in the adoption of PM tools that are related to project success in both the short and long term.