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Most large projects fail. The Olympics have averaged 159% over budget across every Games since 1960. Major IT projects follow a power-law distribution of cost overruns, meaning the worst case is essentially unbounded. The question I work on is the inverse one: how does anyone deliver a large project well, and what do the rare ones that succeed actually do differently? I started in IT project rescue at McKinsey, pulling failing programmes out of the fire. The same patterns kept coming back. I wanted to know whether other domains (infrastructure, energy, megaevents) were doing better, and what IT could learn from them. That question became my doctorate at Oxford, and then a research programme built around what is now a 22,000-project dataset across 126 countries. What I study: • Why large projects fail, with empirical depth across IT, infrastructure, energy, and megaevents. • What the rare successes share. The first nuclear plant in the developed world delivered on time and on budget in forty years (Darlington, Ontario) is the case I keep coming back to. • How leaders, governance, and organisational design produce delivery against the odds — the subject of the book Harvey Maylor and I are finishing now. What I have written: • Intelligent Change: The Science Behind Digital Transformations (Wiley, 2025). Lead author. • How to Measure Anything in Project Management (Wiley, 2025), with Doug Hubbard. #1 Amazon bestseller in software/IT project management. • "The Uniqueness Trap" (HBR, 2025), selected for HBR's 10 Must Reads 2026. • Peer-reviewed work in HBR, Public Management Review, Project Management Journal, JMIS, Energy Research & Social Science, Energy Policy, and others. Roughly 4,500 Google Scholar citations. Where this work shows up in the world: • Teaching at Oxford on the MSc in Major Programme Management, the MBA, and executive programmes. • Policy work for the UK Office of Value for Money, the Department for Transport, the Irish Department of Public Expenditure, and the White House Working Group on New Business Models for Nuclear Energy. • Expert witness for the Edinburgh Tram Inquiry and the Muskrat Falls Commission of Inquiry. • CEO of Oxford Global Projects, where the research becomes advice for clients delivering large capital programmes. If you are working on a large project and the question keeping you up is whether yours will be one of the rare successes, this is the work I do. Get in touch: [email protected]
Research, teaching, and policy work on large-scale capital projects. My work is anchored by a 22,000-project dataset across 126 countries that began in my doctoral research and has since informed primary legislation, national spending codes, and government appraisal frameworks across five countries. I lead the Risk module on the MSc in Major Programme Management, co-lead the Leading Projects and Leading Digital Transformation MBA electives. Academic Director of the Oxford-UQ Executive Leadership Programme. Programme Director of the National Grid Major Projects Leadership Programme. Regular teaching in Executive Education. Recent peer-reviewed work appears in HBR, Public Management Review, Project Management Journal, the Journal of Management Information Systems, and Energy Research & Social Science. "The Uniqueness Trap" was selected for HBR's 10 Must Reads 2026.
Researching the importance, impact of outliers on project management and how to avoid them.