The State of Victoria is one of the international leaders in New Public Management and is frequently compared to the UK, Canada and New Zealand. We expected it to be at the forefront of practice because it leads the world in the application of management techniques to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the public sector.

But our research shows us that even for those at the forefront of practice, many of the approaches with the most potential to improve project success have not been incorporated.

Our research, commissioned by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, showed billions of dollars were invested in projects in Victoria, and yet often the expected strategic benefits are not being realised. Research we have undertaken on the private sector suggests it struggles with exactly the same issue. (In 2008, fewer than 178 of the 2224 ASX listed companies (8%) report their IT investment, and there is no apparent requirement to report investments in soft projects). If one of the best performers does not have the tools to help it achieve its strategic goals, what are the implications for the rest of us?

We have commented earlier that the tools with the most potential to address this issue (portfolio management, programme management, project governance) are too immature in their current state to be widely adopted and overcome the issue.

The specific issue that needs to be addressed is to increase the flexibility of tools to:

1. provide feedback on the effectiveness of strategy, and
2. contribute to changing and refining of strategy as it is implemented and lessons are learned (current approaches are too mechanistic).

To advance the discussion, we have just documented our findings in our paper Governing programmes for strategic success – implications from Victoria submitted to the 2009 International Research Workshop on IT Project Management, a special interest group of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2009 (recognised as ‘the most prestigious gathering of IS academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world’). We are also considering presenting another version of this paper in Melbourne in Feb 2010.

This post extends the invitation to participate to the entire online community. We wish to go beyond project management and ‘find more appropriate programme and portfolio management approaches that can be adopted with confidence by senior decision makers’. All contributions will be acknowledged and there is the opportunity to incorporate them into an advanced course being developed initially for the University of Sydney.

Please read the blog posts on this site, download the academic paper and share your initial thoughts by posting below. I encourage you not to hold back, and to help shape an initiative that will improve education / health / police / environment / defence / business results by 4-8 times.

We all win if governments get better results with lower costs.

Tags: Governing programmes and projects, portfolio management, programme management, project management

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 9:46 am and is filed under Governing Programmes and Projects, Practice Areas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.