Project management researcher Lynn Crawford recognised
The International Project Management Association has presented the IPMA Research Achievement Award 2011 to Australia’s Professor Lynn Crawford (pictured).
Crawford is a well known international project management academic and practitioner and has many roles including Professor of Project Management at Australia’s Bond University, Visiting Professor status at Cranfield School of Management in the UK and as a director of Human Systems International, an organisation with the goal of facilitating a global network of member organisations and assisting them in assessing, benchmarking and improving their corporate project management capability.
Her research has focused on project and program management competence, the management of business change, and differences in project management practices across project types and industries, and has contributed thought leadership on project governance, strategy and complexity.
In the mid-1990s, Crawford won an Australian Research Council grant to study Development Assessment of Project Management Competence, one of the first and most significant government research grants awarded for research in project management. She subsequently receive funds for an Australian Research Council project conducted in partnership with the NSW Police Service on Soft Systems for Soft Projects, which addressed major organisational change.
Crawford was instrumental in the development of the Australian National Competency Standards for Project Management. “That was the start of performance-based competency standards in Australia; there was quite a lot of Federal Government funding to develop competency standards for the professions,” she recalls.
She was also a member of the Project Management Institute’s Standards Committee in the 1990s. In 1999, IPMA invited her to lead a Global Working Party on Standards, which later evolved into the Global Alliance for Project Performance Standards (GAPPS), an independent reference benchmark for alignment and mutual recognition of project and program management standards and qualifications.
“In the 90s I spent my time building project management knowledge locally. In the last 10 years my focus has been on contributing to project management internationally,” says Crawford.
Professor Crawford is a Life Fellow of the Australian Institute of Project Management and a member of the board of PMI’s Global Accreditation Center. She also chaired the program committee for the recent 2011 IPMA World Congress.
