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Project Leadership and Project Capabilities for Innovative and Successful Project Delivery
School Research Theme: Management of projects
Research supervisors: Prof Andrew Davies, Dr Vedran Zerjav
Start date: 25 September 2017
Numerous large infrastructure projects keep on missing the Triple Constraint yet, frequently, the deeper reason lies in the fact that project managers fail in their responsibility of leading and motivating workers or stakeholders, and dealing with potential problems. Furthermore, projects are erroneously considered unique and temporarily limited, and this entails knowledge and past experiences not being transmitted from project to project. Building project capabilities means improving both technical and specialised skills while developing relationships and soft skills, during the pre-bid, bid and post-project activities stage. In these contexts, an inspiring project leadership is a crucial successful stimulus for building project capabilities and improving the project performance, since it could motivate workers in collaborating and sharing knowledge or experiences with other people. That is, the research aims to understand how to build project capabilities in infrastructure projects through project leadership. It will be based on a case study methodology and will collect qualitative data through semi-structured interviews. To maintain consistency with the project capabilities theory, this project aims to analyse the dynamics of project leadership throughout the three different stages of infrastructure projects.
This research has the potential to contribute both in theoretical and practical terms. Firstly, project capability building is an innovative and recent theory which still requires to develop topics not yet explored, such as the role of leadership. Additionally, it will give practical recommendations for practitioners of disparate sectors, since its framework could be used as a strategic tool for project managers to improve project abilities and capabilities.