A systems view of project management risk

Diana White's PhD thesis, "A systems view of project management risk" is very useful. Her research started with an interest in systems thinking at a time when some major projects had failed at great cost. She thought that management of risks associated with projects might be prevented by the use of systems thinking. And I like her diagram on page 8 which seems to be a cause-effect of the research overview. I tried my own:

But it doesn't reproduce well here, and this has got to be a working document because I want to add and change some of the bubbles and links already. So I'll do it again later.

Diana has a chapter that examines the literature on project management as well as three interesting case studies, one in ICT. So I'll note some of her references. However, she concentrates on projects and project management tools whereas I want to look more at people and management aspects of projects. My primary interest is in consultants and the management of them, but because consultants inevitably come with projects, then I must consider how they are managed in projects.

My review might begin:

"This review of the literature attempts to identify notions of successful use of consultancy contributions where public sector top management behaviour has reaped value."

except I'm not going to use the term 'value'. I like the metaphor of the harvest though in the word 'reap'. That is to harvest, or sow, glean, take the fruits of.

I want access to people at the top of the project; these could be contact or primary clients. I might want to interview the chair of a project board, and the relevant politician.

How much does a public but non-central government organisation use the advice and frameworks that NAO and OGC provide?

Risk again

I had a meeting with Geoff Peters last week, who pointed out a couple of relevant PhD theses by OU people. One of them is on risk: Diana White, "A systems view of project management risk", 2003. How am I ever going to put together as coherent a thesis at this? It’s about 400 pages so physically not easy to read.

At last supervision, a suggestion was to look up risk analysis tools as well as to follow up systems failure methods, so I'll have a good look at Diana's thesis. However, I have to make sense of the difference between risk analysis tools and project management risk.