Advanced

Alliancing benefits and challenges in infrastructure projects

Alliance contracting offers an unprecedented way to create a strong synergy between partners to deliver a project too complex for traditional ‘hard dollar’ procurement and delivery methods. It brings together several organisations including the client, such as a government infrastructure agency or utility; and non-owner participants such as a civil engineering firm and a constructor, as well as technical specialists as required.

Cloud computing challenges project management

Cloud computing is a very broad term for the ‘IT systems via the internet’ that hold the application technologies they run by an external party. Subscribers do not own IT infrastructure and are charged typically on the basis of per user per month.

Adopting cloud computing could have significant and potentially disruptive implications for project risk and governance frameworks in enterprise IT projects, given the current relative immaturity of this technology, lack of standards, and inconsistencies in the governance frameworks.

The changing face of portfolio management

Change is here to stay. Not so long ago, the accepted wisdom was that organisations would introduce change, stop and consolidate, then gear up to change again. Change was a disruption to normal. Today, organisations are in a state of constant change or “permanent whitewater” as leadership development expert Peter Vaille termed it. Today, ‘normal’ […]

An indigenous perspective of projects, community and culture

Any person who comes from one culture and is tasked with working with another should take into account other people’s needs and cultural diversity in a project, says Donald Christophersen of Morning Star Indigenous Inservices. “If you don’t realise that other people’s culture will have a huge impact on any activity, anywhere, how can you […]

Disaster management for project managers

Disasters, emergencies, crises—call them what you will, but there’s no doubt adverse situations need their own special treatment. If you think a disaster situation would be the perfect fit for a project manager looking for the thrill of a high pressure role, perhaps it would be wise to take a look at what disaster management […]

Why IT Projects Fail

It is true that IT projects have a phenomenal rate of failure? An examination of what makes IT projects prone to failure and what good project managers can do.

Alliancing trends towards Early Contractor Involvement

More than 12 years of alliance contracting in Australasia’s public infrastructure sector has yielded a range of relationship-based models to successfully deliver projects. The Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) contracting methodology in Australia is a unique form of collaborative contracting, inspired by the UK’s Highways Agency. ECI contracting has rapidly gained popularity since Queensland’s Department of […]

Social networks and projects in a dynamic environment

Traditional hierarchical structures inhibit the launch of projects in a dynamic environment. New research proposes a framework to support flexibility in new projects.

Planning for new and complex projects

How project delivery could be improved, if only project managers knew the value of project planning.