Building Resilience in Large High-Technology Projects: Front End Conditioning for Success

Success in mega-projects is frequently discussed among project theoreticians and practitioners. This research focuses on high-technology projects and draws on recent literature and fieldwork at ten contemporary megascience projects in Chile, Australia, and Europe. This study concludes that project success is not random, and early adoption of certain approaches, activities, and launch conditions will position a project for success and resilience. Nine resilience factors (beyond a priori programmatical artefacts) are grouped into three ‘attitudinal’ factors, and six ‘conditioning’ factors and then examined in detail against three case study projects. The study’s conclusion show that attitudinal factors remain a challenge, especially within institutional type hightech projects, and launch conditioning shows mixed levels of application. Through the nine factors, this paper offers newly consolidated insights for high-tech project start-ups and presents the case for co-application of contingency funding and ‘proto’ task forces in response to unknown risks, and advocates the establishment of more formal information ‘traffic’ management through an empowered centralised project information office. DOI: 10.4018/jitpm.2012100102 22 International Journal of Information Technology Project Management, 3(4), 21-40, October-December 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. aim of convincing project managers to focus harder in nine areas contributing to project robustness and resilience. In this paper, I aim to identify the early conditions required for high-tech mega-project success, beyond the basic ‘givens’ of project structure, funding, tools, and plans. Resilience is defined here as being akin to robustness in the sense of building strength and the ability to recover from, or adjust easily to, misfortune or change. The parameters of mega-projects are not tightly specified here, except to note that these endeavours typically have hundreds of millions or even billion dollar budgets, time-frames usually measured in at least years, and often a high level of public or political attention. In this paper, high-tech projects are defined as those involving research and development (R&D), a significant information technology (IT) component, application of leading edge science/engineering technologies, and with substantial infrastructure requirements.