Abstract
Recent decades have seen repeatedly the high-profile abandonment of ambitious and expensive projects. Sauer (Why Information Systems Fail. Alfred Waller, Henley-on-Thames, 1993) and Flyvbjerg et al. (Megaprojects and Risk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) argue that the management of large-scale and long-term projects involves the definition and redefinition of success and failure, and the maintenance of financial and political support. To be successful, projects and policies must address both task and institutional orientations. Even if clear criteria are available for identifiable sub-systems, the issue of the effectiveness of any significantly complex system will impinge on a range of potentially conflicting values and interests. To manage these requires the development of narratives convincing to a range of stakeholders. The high energy physics experiments developed at CERN over decades offer insight into the successful long-term management of complex projects.
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Notes
- 1.
Tim Berners-Lee celebrating 20 years of WWW at http://info.cern.ch/www20/.
- 2.
The LHC is a collider in which two opposing beams of electrons (hadrons) are brought together within detectors in order to produce collisions which create short lived sub-atomic particles. Four major experimental detectors are located around the 27 km circumference of the LHC.
- 3.
- 4.
Austria to quit CERN particle physics laboratory
Fri, May 8 2009, 7:11 AM EDTVIENNA (Reuters) – Austria plans to pull out of the international particle physics laboratory CERN because its share of the high cost is eating up too much of the country’s budget for international research.
See the response to this statement at
http://user.web.cern.ch/user/news/2009/090508.html.
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1978.
http://www.teilchen.at:8080/teilchen/laufend/OneArticle?updatelogo=1;id=208;e=0.
Austria to stay in particle physics lab after all.
Mon, May 18 2009, 11:30 AM EDTVIENNA (Reuters) – Austria has changed its mind and will now not pull out of the international particle physics laboratory CERN over the cost, Chancellor Werner Faymann said in a statement on Monday, overruling his science minister.
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Little, S. (2019). Managing Context: Lessons from a Large-Scale Science Project. In: Bell, G., Pagano, R., Warwick, J., Sato, C. (eds) Problem Structuring Approaches for the Management of Projects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93263-7_7
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