While the management of projects is rapidly gaining importance in the current fast pace economy, there is a growing dissatisfaction with its theoretical underpinnings. Rooted in an exploratory micro-analysis of the practices of 86 project managers, our study demonstrates that project managers engage in 10 core practices, which together imply that manag-ing projects 1) is only partly about planning and scheduling, 2) is locally situated in specific types of projects, 3) is an activity aimed at a continuous recoupling of diverse practices, and 4) is shaped by project contexts, which act as tempo-rary points of intersection for social practice. Together, we propose these practices form a set of building blocks for a practice-perspective of project-based organization, presenting an alternative to the theoretical paradigm currently do-minating the field.