With his project “The successful planning and delivery of megaprojects: a short and long term perspective”

Giorgio Locatelli, professor of the Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, has won an IPMA Global Research Award 2023.

The IPMA Awards recognise project managers who give their best to achieve the desired outcomes for stakeholders, organisations or society, dealing with ever-increasing complexity and volatility. The judges evaluated the applications based on the following criteria: research problem, research processes, research results, and research people.

The ten-year research work of Professor Locatelli finds a compendium in the project “The successful planning and delivery of Megaprojects: a short and long term perspective”.

Megaprojects are projects characterised by large investment commitment (often above 1 billion USD), vast complexity (especially in organisational terms), and long-lasting impact on the economy, the environment, and society.

Locatelli’s research was aimed at rigorously identifying the megaproject characteristics shaping project management success indicators (respecting time, budget, scope – phase 1) and long-term project success indicators (sustainability, value creation for stakeholders etc. – phase 2).

Phase 1 developed and applied an innovative benchmarking methodology combining qualitative and quantitative analysis to collect, select, and investigate good and bad practices and learn from a portfolio of megaprojects. The methodology has been applied to large transportation infrastructure, power plants, and nuclear reactor decommissioning.

Phase 2 leveraged a wider range of theories and approaches. For instance, a social identity perspective to investigate the impact of megaproject environmental responsibility on organisational citizenship behaviours for the environment, a micro foundation perspective to study people’s experience in megaproject; quantitative statistical methods as a structural modelling approach to study Firm and project innovation outcome measures in infrastructure megaprojects.