Identifying organizational variables affecting project management office characteristics and analyzing their correlations in the Iranian project-oriented organizations of the construction industry

Today, applying project management knowledge by project oriented organizations for optimal use of resource and increasing productivity is inevitable. An organizational entity generally called "Project Management Office" can be responsible for project management knowledge and systematic developer of it which can centralize and coordinate management of those projects under its domain. Since organizations have different contextual and structural dimensions, we expect different project management offices in terms of their structural and functional characteristics. This article is searching for variables in the context of organizations in construction industry which have significant relationships with project management offices' characteristics. So that by analyzing these relations we can design and implement more efficient project management offices. Finally, from 29 organizational context variables which had been thought to have decisive impact on project management offices' characteristics only 9 variables had significant impact on them in which this paper focuses on. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.