Systemic Management of Tourism Projects for Sustainable Tourism Development

Although much attention has been paid to researching various aspects of management of tourist destinations and national tourism industries in general, there is still a lack of understanding how tourism projects can be managed systemically and sustainably. Therefore, the study aims to identify the specificity of tourism projects and highlight the ways how the project management methodology meets the needs of not just effective but sustainable management of tourism projects and how project management tools can help improve knowledge management in tour operating companies to diminish potential risks they face and increase their sustainability. In addition to a systemic approach to the analysis of tourist destinations, each tourism project can and should be also considered systemically characterised by a very high degree of variability, since each particular case of its implementation (i.e. its iteration) differs from the previous and subsequent ones, sometimes in a cardinal way. At the same time, it is important to understand that this variability is predominantly of anthropogenic nature (except for a majority of force majeure situations that were left outside the scope of the study). The used methodology is propped by four pillars – theory adaptation based on a comprehensive literature review and the method of typology, theory synthesis, and descriptive modelling, thus offering a different perspective for studying tourism projects. The applied systemic approach has yielded two results: first, it helped to elaborate a descriptive model of a tourism project, and second, the PM Triangle has been developed into a model that meets the requirements of tourism projects better and can be used as a fundamental tool for further conceptualisation. The two models suggested as research results are seen as integral parts of the author’s methodology of tourism project management and fundamentals of TMBoK with a particular attention to knowledge management and risk management.