آیا استراتژی ها از طریق پروژه ها اجرایی شده است؟ شواهد خلاف انتظار از یک مدیر در مدیریت دولتی جدید

This paper reports on the effectiveness of the project management and investment frameworks in the State of Victoria. It finds project management and investment practices comparable to best practice but also finds 100 billion dollars invested in projects over the past decade without any evidence of improvement in strategic goals. It concludes that there may be systemic deficiencies in our project management and investment frameworks. It suggests that deficiencies in the way projects are currently selected and managed limit the capability to realise strategic goals. Future research to develop programme management, portfolio management and project governance is recommended to increase the likelihood that strategy will be implemented.► Projects in an exemplary case appear not to be contributing to strategy. ► There appear to be deficiencies in the way projects are selected. ► Research is recommended in project governance, programme and portfolio management.

This paper reports on the effectiveness of the project management and investment frameworks in the State of Victoria. This is of general interest because the State of Victoria is considered to be one of the international leaders in New Public (Greve and Hodge, 2007). New Public Management is relevant to both the private and public sectors because it is an approach that applies private sector management techniques to the public sector to improve efficiency and outcomes (Barzelay, 2001). The Victorian Auditor-General's Office (VAGO) believed that the Victorian project management and investment frameworks were at the forefront of industry practice but were concerned that the same problems were being found in project performance audits. They commissioned the research in this paper after new developments were pioneered in Australia in the area of IT project governance (AS8016, 2010, HB280, 2006 and ISO 38500, 2008). Their objective was to evaluate the Victorian project management and investment practices against the academic literature and new Standards to assess the likelihood of systemic weaknesses. The research questions reported in this paper are: • Project success—are projects undertaken within the Victorian Public Sector to realise strategic goals (as suggested by the new project governance standards)? • Are the Victorian Public Sector project management and investment frameworks comparable to best practice? Are there any systemic weaknesses? These research questions are of interest to the project management community because the research is being conducted in what is expected to be an exemplary case. If any deficiencies are found in the State of Victoria it is likely that these deficiencies will be more widespread. The first question is also of general interest because it provides a context to explore whether projects are undertaken to implement strategy in practice and whether strategies are actually being implemented. This paper will proceed by summarising the literature that will be used to evaluate the project management and investment frameworks in the State of Victoria. The methodology to gather data will then be discussed. The results will then be presented. The results will be discussed and finally conclusions will be made to summarise the key findings.

Victorian project management and investment frameworks were found to be comparable with and sometimes better than ‘best practice’. Despite this, there was no evidence that strategic goals had improved in any Agency despite very aggressive project investment in the period being studied. These findings contradict the expectations in the literature and from high level Victorian Government policy statements suggesting projects are undertaken to implement strategy. This suggests that there are systemic deficiencies not only within the State of Victoria, but with project/programme/portfolio/governance/strategy practice in general. The implication, because the State of Victoria is an exemplary case, is that projects may not be contributing to the realisation of strategic goals more generally. If so, this is an issue of major concern because projects are the key enabler of strategies to respond to the new economic environment. The research may be the first empirical evidence to suggest that projects generally may be failing to contribute to strategic outcomes. The research was undertaken in the context of high project failure rates. However the research did not directly study the relationship between project failure and strategy, the research compared total project expenditure, the realisation of strategic goals and adequacy of investment frameworks. The findings suggested that independent of project success or failure, projects had negligible contribution to organisational strategy in two of the largest Agencies. This implies a much broader relationship than with just project failure. What it suggests is that there is a systemic weakness in the way projects are selected and governed. The most significant deficiency appears to be in the area of programme management—a failure to clarify how individual projects contribute towards strategic goals. Expressed another way, it suggests that even if projects were to consistently succeed, deficiencies in the way that projects are currently selected provide no assurance that they will support strategy. This conclusion is particularly significant because projects are essential to deliver performance improvements that respond to structural changes in the economy. Demographic realities suggest that business-as-usual efforts will not maintain even the current levels of performance.