Managing Risk in Complexity Special Interest Group (MRC SIG)
2023 Reports

21 March 2024
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEDT
Online

Andrew Pyke
Managing Director, Keyholder Pty Ltd
ICCPM Fellow

About the webinar
Unpack the 3 latest MRC SIG report releases of 2023.
More information coming soon

About the presenters

Andrew Pyke is a Certified Practicing Project Director (CPPD) and a qualified Company Director.  He regularly acts as an independent analyst and review Board member for major national projects for the Australian Government, and a facilitator for developing program strategies. Andrew specialises in program strategy on large-scale complex programs often involving advanced technology and mission-critical systems, with significant commercial challenges and international relationships.

Andrew has his own small business, following a career of Executive and Board-level leadership in national and multi-national business, engineering and complex projects and negotiations. Andrew’s experience includes public and private sector projects and programs, ranging across the investment lifecycle, in Defence, Telecommunications, Air Traffic Management, and Intelligence industries. In recent years, Andrew acted as the Program Director for a major inter-agency national infrastructure program, with an international supply chain, and a negotiator on complex multi-party contracts.

Andrew regularly contributes to the body of knowledge in complex project management, through lectures, workshops and book reviews, and does pro bono work on community housing projects.

Capturing Value from Complexity

24 April 2024
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEST
Online

Dr Mustafa Hafizoglu
Managing Partner, Advisors Turkey

About the webinar
The application of social network theory in project management can provide valuable insights for scholars and practitioners in understanding the impact of changes in communication patterns among stakeholders on predictable outcomes, especially in complex projects. By investigating the development of networks within temporary complex project organizations and putting forth a framework for modeling network dynamics across time, this webinar seeks to capture value from complexity. Despite the inevitability of network evolution, the temporal dimension of networks is often overlooked in existing network theory literature. However, project organizations offer an ideal context for studying network evolution due to their temporary and dynamic nature. This webinar aims to present a transition from attribute-based project stakeholder analysis solely based on the characteristics of the stakeholders (such as power, interest, and impact), to a relation-based analysis utilizing network theory. Moreover, this webinar endeavors to unveil a relationship between enhanced project-related communication within an evolving project network and heightened stakeholder satisfaction.

Complexity comes from various identified and unidentified relationships between parts. Participants will learn a new framework for managing stakeholders which focuses on identifying relationships and their effects at the end of this webinar.

About the presenter
Mustafa is a project management professional, author, instructor, and strategy implementation professional with a 25-years of experience in aerospace, defense electronics, and manufacturing, managing complex projects and programs. He is the co-founder and past president of PMI Turkey Chapter and representative of KMI (Knowledge Management Institute) in MEA region. He’s been teaching Project Management Courses at various universities such as Middle East Technical University and TED University. Mustafa is a part of the core teams for PMI’s Practice Guides on Governance of Projects, Programs, and Portfolios as well as Benefits Realization Management. Mustafa has a Ph.D. in business administration with a focus on project stakeholder management. He is currently Managing Partner at Advisors Turkey, a subsidiary of global consulting and training company.

Scoping Safety Domains

22 May 2024
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEST
Online

Benjamin Luther
Senior Test and Evaluation Engineer, Nova Systems

About the webinar
All around the world, intra-organisational battles rage for political influence and resources. This is not necessarily a bad thing – it can be part of continuous renewal and optimisation within organisations. Included in this are deliberate management decisions to cut superseded activity and duplication. But two particularly tribal areas of organisations lay claim to what appears superficially, to be the same function. These are the Industrial Safety, and, System Safety communities, both laying claim to the term safety. As systems evolve to be clear and complicated, these two tribes go to war for organisational resources. While Industrial Safety carries the weight of the law, System Safety is regulated. All the while, managers want to rationalise them since, “aren’t they duplicating safety?” With safety being the special case of risk management when a consequence includes the potential for harm to human health, researching approaches to safety management has been instructive in the wider field of risk management.

Underlying the problem is the single English word safety. As part of a research project toward a HDR at University of Adelaide Business School, the team has been researching the conduct of risk management to support decision making in organisations employing complex systems. The research observed the practices of the experimental flight test community to find that they were employing parallel approaches, in duplicate. The test crews were aware of the differences and used different tools to manage risk in the different system intricacy domains. A Cyenfin lens is useful to distinguish the different system domains, to see that the two tribes in the original organisation are doing different things. Industrial Safety is most effective in Clear systems with short time durations to preclude third parties getting involved. “My hammer, my thumb, my feedback loop.” System Safety is most effective in Complicated systems when extended time durations admit third parties, like passengers on commercial air transport. A high-vis jacket isn’t going to help in the cockpit, but a reliable engine will. For both these domains, statistical approaches work because adverse incidents occur frequently enough to gather meaningful data.

The interesting part of the research has been the extension to systems in the contemporarily defined, Complex domain. These are systems that feature emergence and a dynamic system configuration. With the evolution of systems to be complex, the wider plane becomes apparent and statistical approaches are no longer appropriate with only a single data point. This is the realm of experimental flight test, where the research was conducted. But it is also the realm of AI and innovation. With safety being the special case of risk with a consequence that is adverse to human health, this research is for Risk Managers (and Safety Managers) of systems that span the Clear, Complicated and Complex domains. It provides a unifying framework, enabling efficient scoping of existing tools to where they are effective. It avoids holes in risk management when a domain would be falsely rationalised away in pursuit of management efficiency. Ideally, it will calm the tribes when it illustrates their complementary nature and aid managers by illustrating the limits of each.

About the presenter
Ben was an RAAF maritime mission commander before being posted to flight test where he completed assignments on the F/A-18, P-3 Orion, and USAF RC-135, among others. As the customer’s FTE inside Airbus for the A330 AAR tanker development program, he was involved in the extensive modification of that aircraft, including the flight controls and 3D remote vision system for the boom. For Wedgetail, he was part of the team that achieved the first AAR refueling of the Boeing 737. Returning to ARDU, he served as the Flight Test Safety Officer before being recruited to Gulfstream in the wake of the G650 flight test accident. Ben was responsible for creating a Safety Management System within an experimental flight test context. He later led flight test teams in FAA Part 25 certification of the G500, G600 and G700. As the Secretary for SFTE International, Ben was an invited speaker to Boeing, Joby, Lincoln Labs, and Mitsubishi Aircraft. He is now the VP at the Flight Test Society of Australia. Ben works for Nova Systems, delivering test services toward assurance of complex socio-technical systems. He leads the Emerging Markets group in the Aerospace domain. Ben is a Distinguished Graduate of the National Test Pilot School, has Masters degrees in Flight Test and Aviation Safety, and as an American Australian Association scholar, completed an AMP at MIT Sloan. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide Business School.

Complex Project Delivery: A Case Study

June 2024
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM AEST
Online

Raphael Dua
Senior Master Scheduler, Leidos

About the webinar
Managing complexity in a project has always been challenging, but there are ways to make it more manageable. The presentation will cover how to:

1. Diagnose project complexity: Use a project complexity model to identify the complexity of your project. This helps understand the variables and interfaces, ambiguity, uncertainty, unpredictability, dynamics, social structure, and interrelationships that make any project complex .
2. Assign competent leaders: Choose project leaders who have experience managing complex projects.
3. Select the project approach: Choose an approach that is commensurate with the complexity profile of the project. ( Read the scope documents and the contract), Traditional, linear project management tools and techniques will not be insufficient to manage the complexities of 21st-century projects.
4. Manage complexity dimensions: Identify the complexity dimensions that are present in any project and manage them effectively. This will involve managing stakeholder expectations and involvement, identifying and combating project risks, and managing change in complex projects as well as other exogenous factors.

Remember, complexity is a subjective factor that usually refers to the difficulty of a design or build of a system. It is important to understand the complexity of a project and manage it effectively to ensure its success.

About the presenter
Raphael is an accomplished master scheduler and project controls leader with many years of experience across Defence, other government agencies and the private sector.

He is currently working as the Master Scheduler for a major defence high value complex IT project, managing five delivery partners weekly “plans on a page”.

Prior to the CIOG projects he was the senior master scheduler for the Bio-Security Department within DAWE, where he ran over 20 projects on a weekly cadence with production of reports for various levels of APS.

Previously he has worked for Metadata Pty Ltd providing planning, schedule, and resource controls for several Metadata’s clients, such as Alcoa, FMG, ERTECH, SNOWY 2and BHP. Just prior to this he was engaged as the Senior Planner and Scheduler for the Ausgrid Tender for AusNet Western Victoria Transmission project; and the Melbourne Airport new runway construction program valued at $1.3B.

Raphael has recently completed a Schedule Assurance programs for SNOWY 2, and BHP.

He has successfully achieved the planning and scheduling for many iconic Defence projects including:

• Planning and scheduling services and training for the F-111 Strike Maintenance
• Prepared and developed all project plans and schedules ASC Collins Class Submarine for 9 years
• Planning and scheduling for the major road’s reconstruction as part of the National Disaster Recovery Relief Agreement project for Transport Main Roads Department in Queensland

Additionally, Raphael brings with him a range of other directly relevant skills and experience in:

• Developing and delivering Critical Path Logic and Gantt Methodologies
• Expert Earned Value Management
• Project Cost Controls and Governance
• Forward Forensic analysis
• Establishing and implementing robust program and project governance and reporting frameworks
• Safety Analysis via OH&S

In his spare time, Raphael also is a visiting Senior Lecturer at Victoria University as a lecturer for a master’s degree subject unit in project management and information technology. He has in the past thirty years been a senior lecturer for various universities both in Australia and Overseas for Construction Project Management and scheduling. He also works for Standards Australia as a Senior Cost Planner / Contract Manager / Project Controller and represented of Standards Australia to the ISO Project Management committee, for ISO 21500 – TC258 WG3, WG6, WG7 and WG12 committees.

He is also highly skilled at using a broad range of scheduling tools including Open Plan Professional, MS Project, Primavera, Compass, Micro Planner X-Pert, ACONEX, Navisworks and Acumen Fuse. When asked why he was interested in a Defence scheduling role given his experience, he replied because he is passionate about programs, projects and scheduling and is full of energy and enthusiasm!

He has been a significant contributing author to PMI Best Practices Guides, the CIOB Time Management manual and many other books on Project Management, Planning and Scheduling

He was awarded the “Inaugural Wayne Wilson Award for Lifetime Achievement in Project Controls” in November 2022.