Latest news

20th February 2012

Association Manager, Manon Bradley, took part in the British Drug Free Powerlifting Association British Championships in Dudley in the West Midlands yesterday (19th February) in which she: won the under 70kg squat competition; won the under 70kg benchpress competition; won the award for being the best female squatter overall; won the award for being the best female benchpresser overall and broke 4 world records in the squat competition! Her final squat was an amazing 115 kg a personal best and 15% more than the previous world record. Not a bad day!

14th February 2012

Major Projects Association members are invited to attend the inaugural lecture by Professor Naomi Brookes and launch of the Engineering Project Academy by Professor Denise Bowker

'Megaprojects: Why do they fail, why does this matter and what we can do about it'

When : 18:00, Thursday 8 March 2012
Where: Rhodes Lecture Theatre, School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds.

visit http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/engineering-project-academy/events/ to register.

23rd November 2011

The Association has awarded its PhD grant to Alex Murray of UCL whose PhD investigation aims to develop methods for comparing the operations of both privately and publicly financed infrastructure. Alex hopes such empirical testing will shed an objective light on the assertion that procurement method is a significant determinant of a project's operational performance. To date he has already undertaken two considerable analyses of social infrastructure concerning hospitals and schools, which suggest there are differences in aspects of the operational cost and performance between facilities procured via the PFI procurement route and that of more conventionally procured facilities. The MPA Long term PhD grant funding will be used by Alex to undertake industry consultations to verify the accuracy of the central government datasets used to benchmark operational performance. The consultations will also serve to inform and guide the ongoing PhD investigation to provide practitioner relevant findings and implications. It is hoped that a panel of relevant MPA members will volunteer to provide close consultation on the research - if you are interested in this work and would like to volunteer please email Manon Bradley on mpa@majorprojects.org.

30th September 2011

The Major Projects Association is proud to announce that Neil Turner has completed his PhD on the subject of organisational learning in complex projects and is now Dr Neil Turner. Dr Turner was one of the first recipients of the MPA Grant for PhD Students and we hope that our support went some way to assisting him towards this success.

The topic of Dr Turner’s research was that of organisational learning in complex projects, a key area within the industry and the necessity to balance ‘exploitation’ (refinement and incremental improvement of existing knowledge and processes) together with ‘exploration’ (innovation, knowledge creation and problem-solving). Dr Turner tells us that organisations are generally better at one than the other, but project management inherently requires that both be present. This is known as ‘ambidexterity’, an emerging field within academic research that is shown to enhance organisational performance. Dr Turner’s PhD is entitled: ‘The Management of Ambidexterity – An Intellectual Capital Perspective’. Neil has promised to share this work with the Association – for those interested; a copy will soon be available on the MPA website.

12th July 2011

Following the success of last year's trial grant to PhD students, the Association has decided to offer two types of awards in 2011/2012. The first award will be one off support for students who have a specific need to enhance their work - this might be attending a conference or carrying out additional research interviews. There will be three of these awards made up to the value of £1,000. The second award will be to encourage long term engagement between the PhD student and the Association and the successful candidate will receive up to £2,000 a year for three years. Both of these awards are open to any person studying for a PhD with one of our Academic member institutions or working for a member organisation.

For more information contact Manon Bradley on 01865 422581
or email mpa@majorprojects.org.
or Click here to view web pages>>>