The Government set out its strategy to improve the delivery of public services through increased and better use of information technology (Cm. 6683, ISBN 0101668325) in November 2005, with the aim of ensuring services are designed around the needs of customers or citizens rather than the provider. Drawing on 24 case studies from the public and private sectors in the UK and overseas, this NAO report highlights examples of successful IT-enabled programmes and projects which have achieved tangible benefits for citizens and taxpayers and identifies good practice which can be transferred to new and existing government programmes and projects. It pinpoints three key issues in these success stories relating to: i) the degree of engagement by senior decision-makers; ii) the level of organisational understanding of what is needed to be an 'intelligent client' (in terms of having the necessary skills to negotiate effectively with suppliers and users); and iii) the importance of realising the benefits of change by determining at the outset what the desired benefits are and how the project will be managed to ensure these benefits are optimised.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an increasing use of projects and similar temporary modes of organising in the public sector of nations in Europe and around the world. While for some this is a welcome development which unlocks entrepreneurial zeal and renders public services more flexible and accountable, others argue that this seeks to depoliticise policy initiatives, rendering them increasingly technocratic, and that the project organisations formed in this process offer fragmented and unsustainable short-term solutions to long-term problems. This volume sets out to address public sector projectification by drawing together research from a range of academic fields to develop a critical and theoretically-informed understanding of the causes, nature, and consequences of the projectification of the public sector. This book includes 13 chapters and is organised into three parts. The first part centres on the politics of projectification, specifically the role of projects in de-politicisation, often accomplished by rendering the political “technical”. The chapters in the second part all relate to the reframing of the relationship between the centre and periphery, or between policy making and implementation, and the role of temporality in reshaping this relation. The third and final part brings a focus upon the tools, techniques, and agents through which public sector projectification is assembled, constructed, and performed.

The business of government is necessarily diverse, changing and of considerable scale. A focus on improving the implementation of government programs and initiatives is important because the community expects the Government to deliver on its policies, as does the Government. The papers included in this collection address numerous aspects of improving implementation. They were initially presented at the Project Management and Organisational Change conference held in Canberra in February 2006, the first annual research conference organised by ANZSOG in conjunction with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. This collection represents a comprehensive drawing together of experience and insight from both practitioners and academic researchers, with speakers including top public sector executives from the Australian jurisdictions as well as representatives from the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have committed to introducing agile change management for faster results with cheaper implementation at lower risk. The first hands-on guide is designed to help public sector leaders reap the rewards of agile methods, based on the latest national and international research.

"This book seeks to accelerate the collective understandings and implications on the management of business organizations; with an emphasis on theoretical explanations on the development of feral information systems"--Provided by publisher.

This hugely informative and wide-ranging analysis on the management of projects, past, present and future, is written both for practitioners and scholars. Beginning with a history of the discipline’s development, Reconstructing Project Management provides an extensive commentary on its practices and theoretical underpinnings, and concludes with proposals to improve its relevancy and value. Written not without a hint of attitude, this is by no means simply another project management textbook. The thesis of the book is that ‘it all depends on how you define the subject’; that much of our present thinking about project management as traditionally defined is sometimes boring, conceptually weak, and of limited application, whereas in reality it can be exciting, challenging and enormously important. The book draws on leading scholarship and case studies to explore this thesis. The book is divided into three major parts. Following an Introduction setting the scene, Part 1 covers the origins of modern project management – how the discipline has come to be what it is typically said to be; how it has been constructed – and the limitations of this traditional model. Part 2 presents an enlarged view of the discipline and then deconstructs this into its principal elements. Part 3 then reconstructs these elements to address the challenges facing society, and the implications for the discipline, in the years ahead. A final section reprises the sweep of the discipline’s development and summarises the principal insights from the book. This thoughtful commentary on project (and program, and portfolio) management as it has developed and has been practiced over the last 60-plus years, and as it may be over the next 20 to 40, draws on examples from many industry sectors around the world. It is a seminal work, required reading for everyone interested in projects and their management.

Digital State at the Leading Edge is the first attempt to take a comprehensive view of the impact of IT upon the whole of government, including politics and campaigning, public consultation, service delivery, knowledge management, and procurement.