The long way to professional recognition: : project management in Italy

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Luca Sabini, and Danie Muzio, ‘The long way to professional recognition: project management in Italy’, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 10 (4):822-840, September 2017. The final, published version is available online at DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-02-2017-0011.Purpose: The professionalization of project management (PM) profession has developed differently according to the different environments in which it has been introduced. The purpose of this paper is to examine an example of this professional project (Italy) with this research question: “what have been the professionalization strategies of PM professional associations within Italian field?” Design/methodology/approach: The authors develop a qualitative case study made up of semi-structured interviews and archival data. Findings: The analysis demonstrates how PM in Italy has embarked on a clear upward trajectory in terms of its occupational size, economic significance and institutional development. However, the development of PM in Italy considerably lags behind Anglo-Saxon countries. The authors also identify three main strategies through which this professionalization project is being accomplished (see Section 5). These are corporate engagement, expanding membership and institutional recognition. Research limitations/implications: The study reviews the professionalization of PM in Italy. This is not a comparative study, but rather highlights Italian PM professionalization. Moreover, the authors expect significant findings could be reached with a comparable research across different national contexts. Originality/value: This work constitutes the first detailed and comprehensive study in the field of PM within the Italian context.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

How benchmarking can support the selection, planning and delivery of nuclear decommissioning projects

Nuclear Decommissioning Projects and Programmes (NDPs) are jeopardized by several risks, long schedule and cost estimates that lay in the range of hundreds of billions of pounds. Moreover, in some countries, these estimates keep increasing and key stakeholders have a limited understanding of the determinants that engender this phenomena. Benchmarking refers to the process of comparing projects in order to identify best practices and generate ideas for improvement. However, even if it is the envisaged approach to tackle the decommissioning challenges (and due to the NDPs’ uniqueness), until now, benchmarking has been only partially used. This paper proposes an innovative methodology to benchmark decommissioning projects, both from the nuclear and non-nuclear industry, within the UK and worldwide. From this cross-sectorial and cross-country analysis, it is possible to gather a list of key NDPs’ characteristic and statistically test their correlation with the project performance. The ultimate aim of the research underpinning this paper is to investigate the possible causation between the NDPs’ characteristics and the NDPs’ performance and to develop guidelines to improve the selection, planning and delivery of future NDPs

Managing change in complex projects: configuration management, asset information and big data

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An exploration of the relationship between nuclear decommissioning projects characteristics and cost performance

Nuclear Decommissioning Projects and Programmes (NDPs) are characterized by high complexity and variety, and a schedule that can take decades. Moreover, NDPs estimates at completion can reach billions of Euro and (for many of these projects) keep increasing, while there is a limited understanding of why this happens. To address this knowledge gap, this paper describes how to statistically test the association between the NDP characteristics and the NDP cost performance. The implementation of statistics on a pool of European NDPs highlights the significance of several country-specific and site-specific characteristics (e.g. respectively, the governance system and the availability of facilities to deal with radioactive material on site). Hence, the original contribution of this paper consists in (i) the selection of statistical tests suitable for analysing small sample sizes (i.e. NDPs) and (ii) the presentation of the results from the implementation of these tests on a pool of 24 European NDPs with an illustrative purpose