About Us

We aim to address some of the most difficult and uncomfortable questions in megaprojects (major programs),^a including:

Why do project sponsors and managers keep repeating the same mistakes?
Why do established organizations staffed with the best minds, such as NASA, still fail?
Why is it that only 5 in 1,000 megaprojects are “successful?”^b
Why does the industry prefer using classical contracts (e.g., fixed-price) that are adversarial in nature and based on lack of trust?

Our mission is to:

Conduct research in megaprojects, such as large engineering projects (construction) and other transformational projects (i.e., non-construction, such as I.T.);
Suggest policies and strategies that can be implemented in the public and private sectors;
Conduct training for project and program managers;
Test new tools and technologies for use in megaprojects (e.g., augmented reality, artificial intelligence, block chain); and
Provide access to leading practitioners and academics in major programs (such as Oxford scholars and Oxford’s MMPM alumni).

We look at megaprojects through the lens of psychology. Major programmes in energy, transportation, aviation, and even international games such as the Olympics are becoming more complex and more expensive with an even greater ability to directly affect a community’s health and wellbeing, as well as wreak havoc to a company’s balance sheet. Megaprojects can bankrupt the most sophisticated companies or saddle a city or a country with huge debts for decades.

The construction industry has all the tools and technology at its disposal and yet the problems described above continue to occur. These technologies, which are mostly computer-based, are usually accurate suggesting that they’re not the ones needing scrutiny. We should be looking more at the various actors involved: their personality (makes decisions based on ego, reason, etc.), beliefs (based on data or fallacy), agendas (hidden or not), level of experience, political leanings, rewards, compensation, etc., so we can understand why they behave in a certain way.

There is a better way to propose, approve, plan, manage, and later operate megaprojects, and this is where we come in: through rigorous research and education. When dealing with a major program, project promoters need to understand the following: unlike relatively smaller projects that they might have worked on, a megaproject is not an isolated entity. A megaproject is a part of, and is heavily affected by a larger system (e.g., a country and its institutions and culture) with innumerable interacting sub-systems (e.g., citizens’ rights, indigenous populations, government transparency, natural resources, businesses, wealth equality, literacy rate, employment rate, regulations, etc.). If planned holistically, megaprojects do have the potential to improve a community’s quality of life by, inter alia, “shrinking the space” that divide cities, providing affordable energy, and offering housing accessible to many.

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Notes

^a “Megaprojects” are not just large engineering projects that cost US$ 1 billion and up. Transformational projects outside the field of construction, such as in information technology or finance that can bring about substantial change in the way an organization operates, or that can expose an organization to enormous risk that its very survival is at stake can also be considered as megaprojects.

^b Note that there are numerous ways to measure success. For simplicity and brevity, “success” is defined here as satisfying three criteria at project completion: 1) within budget; 2) within schedule; 3) able to reap the benefits and/or profit expected. These three are compared to the original goals when the project was initially conceptualized, not to the revisions that happen after the project has been started, i.e., “moving the goal post.”