About the Project
Firms are increasingly turning to project forms of organisation to help them address new and more complex business opportunities and deal with the challenges of rapid technological obsolescence, shortening product life cycles and cross-functional product development. Public infrastructure and services are increasingly delivered through diverse projects and programmes. Projects play a huge part in the process of innovation and change, yet despite their importance, they remain relatively poorly understood and may still be compromised by poor performance. This can only escalate as size and complexity increase. There are numerous examples of project failures (many of which are in the public sector) across a range of sectors including IT and software, transport, construction, and defence.
Development of appropriate project capability (Davies and Brady, 2000) is key to improving project delivery performance and can be understood as a core organisational capability for organisations in the twenty first century (Davies and Hobday 2005; Davies et al. 2011). This research will examine the development of ‘project capability’ within UK Government programmes. Project capability is an umbrella term which encompasses project management, programme management and portfolio management.
The role of project capabilities at various levels of the organisation, as distinct from capabilities in general, has received relatively little attention in the literature. Most research has been at the level of project, rather than organisation. Davies and Brady (2000) were the first to argue that project capabilities ranked alongside the ‘normal’ strategic and functional capabilities identified by Penrose (1959) and Chandler (1990). Project capabilities are distributed in many locations around the organisation and sometimes brought in from other organisations.
The definition of project capabilities is based on three dimensions identified in previous research (Davies and Hobday, 2005):
• strategic project capabilities - high level management skills and experiences which enable organisations to design and deploy projects for strategic purposes
• project structures - the ways in which capabilities are located and distributed within an organisation including informal structures and resources (e.g. key individuals and networks within organisations)
• project processes - including hard or tangible systems, procedures and tools such as published standard operating procedures, project management toolkits, IT systems, manuals and flowcharts and ‘soft’, or human, dimensions of project activity such as leadership, team motivation and communications.
These three subsets of capability are dynamic and changing and closely related to each other.
Within the UK Cabinet Office, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (previously the Major Projects Authority) has responsibility for building project delivery capability for public benefit and has instigated a programme to achieve this. This programme will provide the empirical data source for the doctoral research. The research will evaluate the meaning of success in a government context and examine the variation of performance across different kinds of projects and government departments, and between different project methodologies such as agile, hybrid and waterfall.
The researcher recruited for this project will work closely with the team responsible for the project capability building programme, conducting research within and across various government departments involved in different strands of the programme: leadership and governance; communities of practice; structure; and developing and deploying the workforce.
Funding Status:
This studentship is funded by University of Brighton and is worth at least £56,580 over 3 years, subject to satisfactory progress.
UK and EU students -
For UK and EU students this comprises £4620 per year (for 3 years) to cover annual tuition fees and a contribution towards living expenses of £15,480 per year (for 3 years).
International students -
For suitable students from outside of the UK/EU the funding will comprise £12,690 per year (for 3 years) to cover annual international tuition fees and a contribution towards living expenses of £6170 per year (for 3 years).
The value of the studentship will be raised to take into account any rise in annual tuition fees.
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