Browsing by Author "Lupson, Jonathan"

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    Accountability for public sector it projects and the senior responsible owner: a theoretical background and research agenda
    (2005-06-03T18:32:25Z) Lupson, Jonathan; Partington, David
    The history of public sector IT capital projects is littered with examples of projects that have been delivered late, or have exceeded their budgets, or have proved unsuitable for their intended use. Such projects include the computerised passport processing system, the National Insurance Recording System and the Libra project (Comptroller and Auditor General, 1999,2001, 2003). Other projects such as the Benefits Card Payment project (Comptroller and Auditor General, 2000) have been cancelled prior to completion after the expenditure of significant sums of public money, having made little progress over an extended period of time. These project failures and their consequent negative impacts on the delivery of public services have been widely reported in an almost continuous stream of newspaper headlines. This succession of revelations about the problems of public sector IT capital projects has been accompanied by high levels of political and public concerns that the benefits of the projects are lost and that large sums of public money are being wasted. In the first part of the paper we argue that there has been a historical focus on institutional accountability at the expense of research into individual accountability. We explore how and why the traditional doctrine of civil servant accountability has declined, with a resultant increased emphasis on both the accountability of civil servants and on managerial performance. We examine the effects of managerialism on the changing subject of civil servant accountability and on the emergence of the SRO role. We formalize our arguments by developing two propositions that illustrate the basic flaws in the SRO concept that arise from subjective and cognitive aspects of understanding. In the second part of the paper we explore the potential and limitations of five different approaches to the study of SRO accountability that might take into account its cognitive and subjective components. We conclude that one of the five - experientialism, or phenomenography - offers to overcome the limitations of the others. We present three further theoretical propositions using phenomenographic principles to illustrate the argument for the existence of a range of understandings of SRO accountability. We conclude that the subjective and cognitive limitations outlined open the way for further research into the field of accountability and the management of IT projects across the public sector.
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    Contextual Intelligence in Programme and Project Management: A preliminary framework for configuring resources to meet strategic objectives
    (Cranfield University School of Management, 2009-04) Maylor, Harvey; Murray-Webster, Ruth; Geraldi, Joana; Lupson, Jonathan; Giudici, Alessandro
    The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly it explores a key development from Operations Management, (Hayes and Wheelwright, 1985) and tests whether it provides insights into the practices of Programme and Project Management (PPM). Through an empirical study, it is found to provide a number of important insights, including that, in general, PPM is limited to a ‘stage two’ performance aspiration on the Hayes & Wheelwright four-point scale for competitive manufacturing, with a prevailing focus on conformance to standards. The resulting question is, ‘how does an organisation develop its PPM capability beyond stage two? Achieving stage three and beyond requires that resources are configured, not to conform to a standard, but to meet the strategic needs as defined by the organisation and any end ‘customers’ for the work. Secondly, the paper considers the research question, ‘what elements of an organisation designed for programme and project-based working can be configured to meet particular strategic requirements?’ It describes the investigation of this question in a field study of 11 cases to determine the nature of the elements of configurability, and hence to generate key decision areas for PPM. The results of this study provide a preliminary framework for determining what would constitute stage 3 - effectiveness in programme and project-based operations (PPOs). The paper concludes that the theoretical insights from Operations Management used in this paper offer a future direction for research on PPOs and sets out a research agenda.
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    Exploring projectification in the public sector: the case of the next stage review implementation programme in the department of health
    (Cranfield University, 2015-10) Schuster, Andrew; Lupson, Jonathan; Buchanan, David; Jenkins, Mark
    Objective: Public projects are used to delivery policy objectives. From a financial perspective, the Major Projects Authority (MPA) estimated a whole life investment of £488 billion for 199 major projects in 2014, only a small subset of the total number of public projects. Given the financial exposure, the impact of endemic public project failures could put the economic health of the nation at risk. This thesis studies the challenges facing public projects. It applies an organisational capabilities lens to investigate projectification, when organisations shift away from functional-based organising (FBO) toward project-based organising (PBO). Research Design: This study adopts an interpretivist research paradigm, with a constructionist epistemology and an idealist ontology, and employs an abductive research strategy. Structurally, it follows the Cranfield Executive Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) methodology, with a linking document that summarises three complementary research projects: a systematic literature review (SLR) followed by two empirical studies that investigate the Department of Health (DoH) during the early phases of the Next Stage Review Implementation Programme (NSRIP). The findings are derived from over 250 academic literature sources, 100 government publications and 41 semi-structured interviews. ...[cont.]
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    Exploring shared leadership in a UK public sector programme
    (Cranfield University, 2010-02) Bates, Simon; Lupson, Jonathan; Denyer, David; Turnbull James, Kim
    This thesis considers shared leadership in a UK public sector programme. Many UK public sector change initiatives are delivered through programmes. In recent years, the practice and academic domain of programme management have developed from within the established discipline of project management. The leadership of projects has been widely studied, both conceptually and empirically, but programmes are substantively different. Shared leadership is a relatively new conceptualisation of leadership which may be valuable for the study of leadership of programmes. The thesis uses a case study of one programme to explore shared leadership in this environment, primarily based on 15 interviews and observation of meetings and events. In particular, it focuses on the leadership tasks of setting the vision and establishing and structuring the programme. The study helps to improve the characterisation of the emerging theoretical concept of shared leadership by adding empirical evidence. It supports the conceptualisation of shared leadership as a plural, processual, diagonal and lateral influence-based phenomenon by unpacking the above leadership tasks into their constituent activities and interactions. It provides evidence for the mechanism of “numerical action” through the seamless transfer of leadership and contributes to the discussion on the nature of “concertive action”. It also highlights the propensity of organisational actors to attribute artefacts of leadership to individuals. It supports the conceptualisation of leadership in such an environment as hybrid or integrated, combining traditional vertical with shared leadership. In light of this, it proposes a dual processual and artefactual approach to the study of leadership. It does not support defined, complementary roles and structures as important for effective programme leadership. It provides useful guidance to programme management practitioners and stakeholders from seeing their own experiences and environments through the lens of shared leadership.
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    From imposed to the co-developed governance processes in IT captive offshoring engagements
    (Cranfield University, 2013-04) Abulokwe, Nneka Nancy Lorraine; Lupson, Jonathan
    This thesis examines the impact of governance process development on engagements between onshore and offshore subsidiaries of multinational IT services organisations. Offshoring is a significant global phenomenon. Over the last decade, there has been substantial growth in the number of organisations setting up ‘captive’ (wholly owned subsidiaries) centres in offshore locations. The desired benefits of greater coordination, leveraging and sharing of knowledge have, in many instances, failed to materialise for these IT services organisations. These failures arise from a variety of causes including a lack of intra-organisational processes to coordinate and manage work, weak alignment between the parent organisation’s strategic objectives and those of the subsidiary, and the inability to navigate cross-organisational and cultural barriers. This thesis comprises three interrelated projects. The first established that organisations develop offshore subsidiaries in order to obtain one or more of a number of complex and interrelated set of strategic objectives. The second project, through the use of grounded theory, demonstrates that within one IT services organisation, imposed governance processes do not facilitate communication and engagement between the onshore and offshore subsidiaries. Cross-cultural and organisational differences inhibited the engagement between the subsidiaries, thus contributing to the failure to achieve the desired benefits of offshoring. Organisations engaged in captive offshoring are faced with two apparently contradictory sets of issues: a set of highly desirable and interrelated strategic benefits and a variety of operational challenges that arise from the imposed nature of the governance processes. The third project, a case study of a similar IT services organisation, examines how these apparently contradictory issues were resolved. The results show that it is the co-development and implementation of governance processes based on the informal working practices of both the onshore and offshore teams that enable the operational challenges established in the second project to be resolved and thus provide reconciliation between these and the achievement of the strategic benefits that drive offshoring. This thesis concludes that co-developed and implemented governance processes are a key factor in the mitigation of the deleterious effects of cross-organizational and cultural working and adds the notion of co-development and implementation of governance processes to the academic literature on the governance of outsourcing.
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    Performers, trackers, lemmings and the lost: Sustained false optimism in forecasting project outcomes - Evidence from a quasi-experiment
    (Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam., 2011-12-01T00:00:00Z) Kutsch, Elmar; Maylor, Harvey; Weyer, Birgit; Lupson, Jonathan
    The consistently successful delivery of projects remains an ambition that many organisations do not achieve. Whilst the reasons behind project failure are many, one recognised factor is the ‘planning fallacy’ – over-optimism in the planning phase of a project. Whilst the planning phase of a project may be a battle for acceptance and resource allocation, the execution phase is a battle for delivery. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data gathered from a project management simulation, this study set out to establish whether optimism bias persists beyond the planning phase and into the execution phase, and, if so, to explore the reasons why. The results confirm the extent and impact of optimism bias in initial project planning. More importantly, the contribution of this study is to demonstrate on-going or sustained false opt
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    A phenomenographic study of British civil servants' conceptions of accountability
    (Cranfield University, 2007-02) Lupson, Jonathan; Partington, David
    In the United Kingdom civil servants have traditionally been accountable to their managerial and political superiors for probity and due process in the execution of their duties. Recent parliamentary and administrative reforms have changed this view. Individual civil servants are now additionally accountable to a range of external groups for the results of their work. This change is reflected in the role of Senior Responsible Owner (SRO), a civil servant accountable to a management team for the achievement of a predefined project outcome. This thesis challenges the idea that accountability is a unitary concept that can be defined by others and delegated in this way. The subjective nature of human understanding suggests theoretical grounds for the existence of different conceptions of accountability among different individuals for a given outcome. In this research I have applied the analytical approach known as phenomenography to the study of these different conceptions. The approach has been widely used, mainly in fields outside management, to establish the bounded number of qualitatively different ways in which a given aspect of reality is conceived by different individuals. Analysis of interviews with 30 SROs from 12 government departments revealed four different conceptions of accountability, each with multiple attributes. The conceptions can be arranged in a hierarchy of increasing richness and complexity. This research contributes to theoretical knowledge of the concept of accountability in the field of public administration in four ways. First, the study adds time to the known attributes of accountability. Second, the study confirms sanctions as an attribute of accountability. Third, the hierarchy of four conceptions of accountability throws new light on the subject that calls into question the unitary view. Fourth, the results refute the notion of a schismogenic paradox of accountability and provide empirical support for meanings of accountability that transcend this paradox.
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    Project sponsor competence in the UK public sector: A systematic review
    (Cranfield University, 2003-08) Lupson, Jonathan; Partington, David
    This thesis reviews the literature on project sponsorship, competence and accountability in the public sector. It adopts a systematic review methodology, which aims to find, evaluate, analyse and synthesize literature on a transparent, replicable basis. Based on a set of keywords derived from a scoping study and practitioner inputs, a series of keyword searches were conducted on a number of databases. The literature found was evaluated for relevance and rigour against a set of specified source, content and quality criteria. I developed new content criteria in response to new uses of keywords in the literature. I also used the reference lists in the material that passed all the criteria to find further literature, which I also reviewed for rigour and relevance against the source, content and quality criteria. Systematic review is therefore a deductive process, which changed my understanding of the research subject form a general one to a more specific one. I found project sponsorship to be a common role in many areas where project management is used. My synthesis of the literature suggested that the role is a powerful, risk-taking one, requiring leadership and ownership. Competence is a divided , ambiguous concept, with current approaches limited by virtue of their rational, dualistic ontology. Accountability is fundamental to any understanding the role of the project sponsor in the public sector, but is a difficult, changing concept, capable of being viewed from either a process or an organizational perspective. I found significant research gaps in the project sponsorship literature. It has been the subject of little direct research. Whilst there is some understanding of the role in relation to the project, the wider aspects of the role and what may constitute competence in the the role are fertile areas for further research.