Improving Project Delivery in Government

The aim of this PhD research programme is to identify good benefits governance in major, complex projects across the public/private/not-for-profit sectors, especially in relation to benefit realisation responsibility and accountability within whole-life; whether benefits governance is recognised as a core capability and to identify core capabilities and core rigidities (Leonard-Barton, 1992); to highlight success and failure and the contributory factors for benefits governance including culture, behaviours, enterprise and project data, technology, process, structure, capability, etc; to identify long-term benefits performance monitoring challenges and the mitigation of those challenges; to identify appropriate ownership and accountability of benefits across the project lifecycle from early stage set-up and investment decisioning through project delivery and whole-life asset management.

This PhD research programme also has the following objectives:
-To explore existing literature on project benefit governance
-To explore existing data on project benefit successes and failures, and to understand trends for benefits realisation success and failure
-To research organisations in the UK who are successful in benefits governance for accountability and ownership, monitoring, reporting and realisation post-project delivery, and to understand how they achieve this
-To identify existing models, tools and techniques in use by those organisations in the UK who are successful in benefits governance for accountability and ownership, monitoring, reporting and realisation post-project delivery
-To understand the implications of benefits governance at three levels for: the project delivery organisation, the individual project practitioner, the professional bodies representing the project community
-To develop new, or refine existing, benefits governance tools and techniques to complement existing benefits frameworks and models, and to provide more clarity into how benefits can be better managed and realised throughout the project lifecycle and into whole-life
-To develop a maturity model focusing on benefits governance - which will include themes such as ownership, accountability, monitoring, reporting and realisation post-project delivery - to help organisations develop their own capability, processes, structure, behaviours and culture in this arena.