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Modern life depends on the successful design, construction, assembly, delivery, maintenance, operation and decommissioning of large projects. Examples in the public eye are the Olympics, transport infrastructure, healthcare systems, telecommunications and the financial infrastructure. However, large projects especially those involving IT, are often perceived as being late, over budget and failing to live up to expectations. Recent examples include the Rural Payments Agency, student loans, and the NHS IT project. The reasons for failure have been investigated by the National Audit Office, amongst others, and the reasons seem to be depressingly similar, involving poor definition of goals, poor monitoring of progress etc. This project will take a look at a major project that is perceived as generally successful - CERN's ATLAS project to detect and measure the particles generated by collisions in the Large Hadron Collider. The ATLAS experiment suffers from many complexities that should make it unusually difficult to manage - 37 participant nations, with their own culture, linguistics, accounting and funding arrangements; a machine that consists of over 20 million components; software development that is distributed geographically to many of the over 100 institutions that are participating in this project; a democratic, learning culture, etc.The purpose of this project is to understand the differences and similarities between ATLAS and other large project-based organisations. It may be that the normative approach to project management has in-built flaws that mean that it does not scale up well to large, complex projects (such as ATLAS) and that the success of ATLAS indicates one possibility for managing large projects differently. It may be that the competitive, academic culture of ATLAS is the most significant factor in driving the success and innovation of the project, but even so it has to cope with crises, conflicts, and funding difficulties, as with commercial projects. Even if conventional, commercial projects cannot adopt the methods of the ATLAS project, they may be able to adapt some of the methods to use as interventions, i.e. methods that may help them avoid or escape from a project crisis.The findings from this project will be written up as case studies, that will be used as teaching material for Oxford's MSc in Major Programme Management, and will be available for teaching MBA and Executive Education programmes. An analysis of the similarities and differences between the ATLAS approach to project management will be submitted for publication in learned journals and in trade magazines, such as Project. A presentation will be made to the ATLAS/CERN community on the project findings, with a view to reviewing what lessons may be learned, on both sides. The findings will also be written up as a chapter for a proposed book on modern approaches to systems engineering. Short videos and audio clips will be published on the websites of the BT Centre and the Said Business School. Furthermore, the outcome of this preliminary investigation will form the basis of a larger, extended research project on systems engineering in large commercial organizations. A further multi-university, multi-practitioner project on the Management of Emergent Scope is also under development, and we plan to include ATLAS as one of the key case study organisations in that project.
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