Building major programmes for tomorrow
Professor Daniel Armanios presents a new agenda and new tools for major programme management.
Daniel Armanios delivers his inaugural lecture as BT Professor and Chair of Major Programme Management at Saïd Business School. He is introduced by Dean Soumitra Dutta, who emphasises his interdisciplinary background and Oxford MScs (gained as a Rhodes Scholar) in management research and water science policy and management.
Professor Armanios draws on his own research in China and in the US, as well as referring to a range of projects of projects across the world from Mexico to East Africa, with a particular focus on extreme environments such as Alaska.
He argues that what we traditionally think of as major programmes – multi-billion-dollar mega-projects that affect millions of people and can take decades to build – are inflexible and unresponsive to changing environments, new technologies, and individual communities, particularly those that have historically been ignored.
Instead, he calls for more distributed and localised programmes, that are not centralised and scaled but viewed as a portfolio of projects, each calibrated to the size of local demand. This new approach requires new tools, and he proposes a working framework that can be deployed to tackle challenges from climate change to health and well-being, food and energy security, and education. As part of this framework he introduces his Project S³ platform.
Scoping (the ‘where’): mapping major programmes to identify components most vulnerable to disruption and present opportunities to innovate
Scaffolding (the ‘how’): develop technologies and structures for coordinating across the programme to identify needed and existing expertise, roles, and specifications
Sensing (the ‘who’): enhance resilience and reliability through identifying and including those who have historically been marginalised in major programmes.
