ProfShankar Sankaran

My areas of impact from my research and teaching are in three areas : Project Governance, Project Leadership and Sociotechnical Systems. 

Professor Ralf Müller of Norwegian Business School and Professor Nathalie Drouin from the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) and I developed a theory-based concept of organisational project management (OPM) that is being used a governance model of portfolios, programs and projects to govern all project related activities to deliver benefits to an organisation and its stakeholders. Our work in developing the OPM model was honoured with the Project Management Institute’s highly esteemed David Cleland Literati Award for our book on OPM in 2021, a recognition that underscores the significance and impact of our research. I also led an ARC Linkage Grant titled ‘Governance Matters: identifying and making sense of the antecedents to project-blowouts’ from 2009 to 2012 from UTS. I am now a member of a team from the College of Leadership and Management at Engineers Australia to improve the capability of engineers to take up project governance roles in major projects to deliver better outcomes. I am now a Chief Investigator in an ARC Discovery grant on project governance.

Along with Ralf Müller of Norwegian Business School and Professor Nathalie Drouin from the University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) I was one of the Chief Investigators of a Project Management Institute’s Sponsored Research Program titled ‘Balancing Person-Centric and Team-Centric Leadership in Projects' from 2016 to 2017. The research was conducted across nine different countries with 26 researchers through which we developed a theory of balanced leadership which won us the prestigious International Project Management Association’s Research Award in 2019. The Oxford University Press has published a book on balanced leadership. Balanced leadership is now taught as a leadership theory and practice in projects in several universities around the world

As a lead Chief Investigator in an ARC funded research hub on human robot teaming of sustainable and resilient construction at UTS we developed new sociotechnical systems principles for human-robot teaming that has been published in Applied Ergonomics and is being used in projects being carried out at the HaRTCon (www.hartcon.org) hub. I have disseminated the findings from this work at a public seminar organized by Engineers Australia and was invited to discuss these principles at a webinar organized by the Tavistock Institute (UK). I am collaborating with the sociotechnical research cluster at Leeds University in the UK to further develop this area of this research together