Browsing by Author "Kirkham, Richard"

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    Benefits realisation: case studies in public major project delivery with recommendations for practice
    (Taylor & Francis, 2025-01) Williams, Terry; Vo, Hang; Bourne, Mike; Bourne, Pippa; Kirkham, Richard; Masterton, Gordon; Quattrone, Paolo; Toczycka, Carolina
    Public projects are enablers of policy and are often framed within a political context characterized by the unpredictable, emergent, ambiguous and contextual; this creates tensions around conceptualizations of project performance and project success. Public projects are generally authorized based on a favourable benefit-to-cost ratio, so ex-post scrutiny of realized benefits is crucial to effective evaluation. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that sometimes, the focus on project delivery may come at the expense of benefits realization. This paper describes part of a wider programme of research into benefits realization in public projects. We present ‘deep dives’ into 3 UK projects and draw on a formal theoretical base to consider questions such as ‘what is a benefit?’, ‘how good are we at defining benefits/beneficiaries?’, ’how can we manage and capture evolving benefits in complex environments?’; ‘how do we recognize and accept complexity while the environment changes?’ and ‘what effects does this have on our understanding of benefits realization?’. This paper presents an analysis of the case studies and provides a synthesis of the main findings. We make eight recommendations for professional practice in the field of benefits management and set out some conclusions relevant to the wider discourse on the evaluation of investment in public projects.
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    A cross-national comparison of public project benefits management practices – the effectiveness of benefits management frameworks in application
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019-09-25) Williams, Terry; Vo, Hang; Bourne, Mike; Bourne, Pippa; Cooke-Davies, Terry; Kirkham, Richard; Masterton, Gordon; Quattrone, Paolo; Valette, Jason
    Benefits are the principal reason why an organization may seek to enact change through programmes and projects. The discipline of identification, definition, planning, tracking and realization of benefits is recognized to be instrumental in achieving organizational strategy. In this study, we describe the results of a cross-national comparison of public sector benefits management (BM) practices in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA. It explores ‘BM practices in action’, considering to what extent ‘espoused’ or ‘mandated’ frameworks are actually practised and perceived by their users. Employing qualitative analysis, semi-structured interview data were analysed from 46 participants with experience in sponsoring, managing and/or reviewing government projects. The results expose considerable variation in the adoption and standardization of BM frameworks from inter and intragovernmental perspectives. We evidence a strong focus on benefits identification across the data set, specifically at the outset (the business case stage seeking project approval) and observe deterioration in focus as the project or programme progresses through the authorization (or assurance) approval gates towards close-out and operations. The results further emphasize the prominence of political interest, leadership buy-in, a benefits-driven culture and a transparent benefits reporting mechanism in the implementation of ‘effective’ BM frameworks
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    Performance measurement in project management
    (Elsevier, 2023-09-14) Bosch-Rekveldt, Marian; Bourne, Mike; Forster, Rick; Kirkham, Richard; Pesämaa, Ossi
    This special collection of papers on performance measurement reports a diverse and broad spectrum of research that challenges conventional views on the ‘age-old’ problem of reconciling tensions between ‘project success’ and ‘project management performance’. A project is often seen as an agent transforming something from a problem to a solution (Locatelli et al., 2023), but the problem of understanding performance remains. Problematisation typically begins with a process to integrate disintegrated areas, value different perspectives that may seem puzzling; present concepts that may seem at odds; introduce coping strategies and increase awareness of biases.