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An increasing number of organizations operate through projects to achieve their strategic objectives. The main objective of this study is to analyse the degree of dissemination of the project management (PM) practices and their contribution to projects success. A survey performed to project managers aims to identify the extent to which the different knowledge areas and their respective PM practices are implemented and linked to projects success. The results achieved underlines that the practices related with cost, time, and scope management are the most well stablished. Furthermore, the study highlighted that other knowledge areas had an effect on projects success. Moreover, the project managers pointed out other less immediately reachable criteria for project success like end-customers and project team satisfaction or fulfilment of organizational objectives. The use of a multidimensional analytical approach to PM makes an important contribution in the analyses of the practices and factors that most contributed to project success.

We are living in a period of enormous technological transformations and the organizations face new opportunities that the systems and information technology (IS/IT) implementations provide with the hope that these investments will help to increase productivity and business prosperity, meanwhile, several studies performed in public and private sectors have proven that the investments done in IS/IT have not brought the expected benefits. Some authors argue that the result of the studies that related investments in IS/IT and the increasing performance of the organizations in the last thirty years were far from true. In this paper the authors propose a link between the Benefits Dependency Network, from a Benefits Management approach, and a Strategy Map, from Balanced Scorecard, to improve the management of business benefits and to ensure that actions taken along the investment life-cycle lead to foreseen benefits realization. The goal of this integration is to build a framework that combines useful features of both methods. The authors sustain that they can be complementary. As a Strategy Map is committed with strategic alignment, communication and monitoring of strategy execution at all levels of an organization, a Benefits Dependency Network is aimed at explaining how benefits are going to be obtained through organizational change. Using the results of a case-study research, the authors explain how a Strategy Map can cross with the Benefits Dependency Network. The integrated contribution is meant to increase the investments effectiveness, giving to stakeholders the confidence on a clearer delivery path for their expected benefits.