Alexander Budzier is a DPhil student at the BT Centre for Major Programme Management and Green-Templeton College.  He is conducting research on how to improve ICT Megaproject performance by improving decision-making of project sponsors under the supervision of Bent Flyvbjerg, the centre director. 

Prior to joining the BT Centre he has worked as a Market Research Executive at T-Mobile International in London and most recently as Senior Associate with McKinsey's Business Technology Office in Düsseldorf and Chicago, where he consulted banking and insurance clients on IT and operations projects. 

Alexander Budzier is a PMI certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and holds a degree by Dresden Technical University (Diplom-Wirtschaftsinformatiker) where he graduated with a research thesis on 'Brand Equity and Consumer Behaviour'.

ICT project performance

This research seeks to measure the performance of ICT projects from a stakeholder and project sponsor perspective. This project builds on research by Eveleens & Verhoef (2010); Sauer, Gemino & Reich (2007); and Glass (2006) into cost and schedule overruns of IT development projects. This project collects a large scale database to measure the cost, schedule and benefit performance of ICT megaprojects, one key feature of the data collection is to open up the scope of previous research. Thus it focuses on one hand on ICT megaprojects and includes, on the other hand, non-custom development projects such as standard software implementation, IT architecture, and IT infrastructure projects. Furthermore this data collection aims to better reflect the world of IT project management by investigating the delivery of change to the business side of organisations.

So far the database holds about 300 projects, accompanied by a large scale collection of publicly available US Federal Spending data, which contributes a further 1,100 large scale ICT projects.

The findings of this research will contribute to the academic understanding of risk and risk management; and particularly decision-making and uncertainty reducing work done by and in project organisations. In addtional the findings will also enable practitioners to predict & prevent ICT project risks in three ways - (1) by applying outside-in anchoring of cost, schedule, and benefit estimates in the front-end decision making of projects; (2) identifying root causes of cost escalation on ICT projects in project turn-around situations; and (3) uncover hidden risks in ICT project portfolios and optimising the utilisation of the employess.

Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander (in progress) Of Birds and Bees - ICT projects as high impact rare events and the implications for managerial decision-making in the wild.

Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander (in progress) Of Witches and Managers - Managing Variability in ICT Portfolios and Building Organisational Resilience.

Budzier, Alexander (submitted, 2010) The Risk of Risk Registers - A challenge to Helga Drummond's forthcoming article "MIS and Illusion of Control - an Analysis of the Risks of Risk Management", in: Journal of Information Technology.

Budzier, Alexander (2010) Statistical Analysis - A Manual on Dissertation Statistics in SPSS (PASW), published by Statistic Solutions Inc.

Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander (September 2010) "ICT projects as rare high impact events" , presented at CRASHH conference: Modelling Futures: Understanding Risk and Uncertainty, Cambridge University.

Flyvbjerg, Bent and Budzier, Alexander (March 2009) "ICT performance - Preliminary findings from a large-scale ICT project survey", presented at McKinsey's CIO/COO/CTO Conference Kitzbuhel, Austria.