Public sector project management inefficiency is a serious problem for many countries, in particular for post-communist states and developing economies. In those countries, direct government investments and various types of government support for private investments form an essential part of national development programs. Project management in the public sector of economics has the long history of developing and improving methods that enable decision-makers to allocate budget resources in the most effective way possible. New public management (NPM) and public value management (PVM) have followed traditional public management. Approaches to public management have changed from the single performance objective of managing inputs and outputs to multiple objectives such as “service outputs, satisfaction, outcomes, maintaining trust and legitimacy” (Smith, 2004, p. 77). Effective project management in the public sector should improve “the ability to achieve outcomes while providing traceability, transparency, and accountability” (Crawford and Helm, 2009, p. 73). The importance of project management is explained by the need for a guarantee of receiving value from budget expenditures.

Public sector project management differs from its private sector counterpart and hence faces additional challenges. The point to be considered in detail is the issue of providing transparency as one of the key elements of project governance. Government agencies are forced to demonstrate “accountability and transparency while effectively implementing policy and adapting to change” (Crawford and Helm, 2009, p. 73). “Public administration institutions are under pressure by stakeholders for performance and transparency” to make viable investment decisions (Pilkaitė and Chmieliauskas, 2015). For those countries where practices of project management in the public sector are still undergoing a process of formation, more transparency is required in the formof clarifying project evaluation procedures and providing clear information to the public.

Plenty of studies are devoted to various aspects of public project management, such as the strengths and weaknesses of the project management process and the governance of public investments. Authors argue that principles of project management, such as transparency, performance management, and efficiency should be broadly introduced at both the state and the local administrative levels (Vrečko, Žnidaršič and Kovač, ۲۰۱۵). Various authors have examined the adoption of project management practices in public organizations (Fitsilis and Chalatsis, 2014), the efficacy of performance management (Poister, Pasha and Edwards, 2013), and the impact of performance management on project success (De Carvalho, Patah and De Souza Bido, 2015). Cross-country and cross-industry comparisons of Argentina, Brazil and Chile enable authors to identify areas that play a key role in project performance. Despite the fact that the authors base their conclusions on the analysis of business units from the abovementioned countries, there is no doubt that the factors they identified are also important for public sector projects. These factors include project complexity, which interferes with project success, and industrial sector, as project risk varies across industries. One more factor that significantly influences project performance is national environment (De Carvalho, Patah and De Souza Bido, 2015).