Bent Flyvbjerg's new book The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management arrived over Christmas. If you don't know of Bent's work, it's a source of must-read materials on managing projects.
This text (from the back cover) is an important and certainly timely book ... Professor Flyvbjerg is one of the central players in this emerging field of research and he has teamed up with world-leading contributors from a diverse set of scholarly disciplines and backgrounds to offer a contemporary view of megaproject management ...
Practitioners, planners, policymakers, and scholars in the areas of infrastructure and economic development will find the volume of considerable value.
From the Introduction Megaprojects are large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost $1 billion or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multip public and private stakeholders are transformational, impact millions of people.
Megaprojects are increasingly used as the preferred delivery model for goods and services across a range of businesses and sectors, such as:
- infrastructure,
- water and energy,
- information technology,
- industrial processing plants,
- mining,
- supply chains,
- enterprise systems,
- strategic corporate initiatives and change programs,
- mergers and acquisitions,
- government administrative systems,
- banking, defense,
- intelligence,
- air and space exploration,
- big science,
- urban regeneration, and
- major events.
Those areas cover pretty much everything in the project management domain.
The book is a collection of contributions in 24 Chapters on
- Challenges
- Has Megaproject Management Lost Its Way?
- Cycles of Megaproject Management
- Big is Fragile
- Institutional Challenges and Solutions for Global Megaprojects
- Biggest Infrastructure Bubble Ever?
- Causes
- Did Megaproject Research Power Behavioural Economics?
- Megaproject Escalation of Commitment
- Megaprojects as Games of Innovation
- Power and Sensemaking in Megaprojects
- A Collect-Action Perspective on the Planning of Megaprojects
- Understanding Drivers of Megaevents in Emerging Economies
- Cures
- Innovation and Flexibility in Megaprojects
- Megaproject Stakeholder Management
- Private Finance
- Wider Impacts of Megaprojects: Curse or Cure?
- Quality Assurance in Megaproject Management
- The Good Megadam
- Cases
- Cracking the Code of Megaproject Innovation: The Case of Boeing 787
- The Power of Systems Integration: Lesson of London 2012
- Iconic Urban Megaprojects in a Global Context: Revisiting Bilbao
- Private Provision of Public Services: Case of Australia Motorways
- Megaprojects as Political Symbols: South Africa's Gautrain
- Large Dam Development: From Trojan Horse to Pandora's Box
Anyone working in any of these domains needs to own and read this book. There are many references for Chapter as well as Professor Flyvbjerg's work
