Darren Dalcher

Biography

Darren Dalcher has been collecting stories of accidents, failures, disasters and catastrophes in projects, organisations and nations over the last thirty years. As there was no shortage of suitable failure candidates, his family has been forced to move home to accommodate the constantly growing repository. The purpose in accumulating what amounts to a shrine to human folly was to utilise forensic methods to develop a systemic basis for understanding and analysing emerging patterns of failure. In recent years he has turned his attention to rethinking and reconceptualising success in light of his earlier work.

He is Professor in Strategic Project Management at Lancaster University Management School and the founder and Director of the National Centre for Project Management, an interdisciplinary centre of excellence operating in collaboration with industry, government, third sector organisations, and the learned societies. He is an International Visiting Scholar at InnoLab, University of Vaasa and holds visiting appointments at a number of leading international institutions.

He is active in numerous international committees, standards bodies, steering groups, and editorial boards. He is heavily involved in organising international conferences, and has delivered many international keynote addresses and tutorials. He has written over 300 refereed papers and book chapters and published over 30 books. His work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Portuguese. He is Editor-in-Chief of Wiley’s Journal of Software: Evolution and Process and Editor of two established book series focused on managing projects and change initiatives, published by Routledge.

He has built a reputation as leader and innovator in the area of practice-based education and reflection in project management and has designed, developed and launched the UK’s first professional doctorate in project management, alongside an extensive suite of executive and professional masters programmes and diplomas. He was named by the Association for Project Management as one of the top 10 influential experts in project management and has also been voted Project Magazine’s Academic of the Year for his contribution in “integrating and weaving academic work with practice”. He has been chairman of the influential APM Project Management Conference for an unprecedented five years, expanding the scope of the event, setting consecutive attendance records, bringing together the most influential speakers and forging cross-disciplinary dialogue.

He is a very popular speaker who has delivered lectures and courses at many international institutions, and has won multiple awards and prizes, including most recently, the 2015 Best Paper Award from the British Academy of Management, the 2016 CMI’s Management Articles of the Year competition, the 2017 Outstanding Paper Award in the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence and the PMWJ Editor's Choice Awards in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. His research interests focus on rethinking project success and the concept of agility, as well as maturity and capability, process improvement, systems engineering, decision making, change management, ethics, complexity, project leadership, knowledge management, and reflective practice.

Professor Dalcher is an Honorary Fellow of the Association for Project Management, a Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, and the Royal Society of Arts, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Member of the Project Management Institute, the International Council on Systems Engineering and the Agile Business Consortium and the British Academy of Management. He sits on numerous senior research and professional boards, including the PMI Academic Insight Team, the International Advisory Council of PM World Today, the CMI Academic Council, the British Computer Society Fellows Advisory Group and the APM Group Ethics and Standards Governance Board.

He is the Editor and Academic Advisor of the APM Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition, released to mark the formal award of the Royal Charter to the project profession. The new edition positions project management in an organisational perspective and focuses on the delivery of beneficial change and strategic transformation through projects, programmes and portfolios.

Education

PhD, King's College London

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Project success and failure
Project agility and adaptability
Life cycles
Decision making
Ethics
Reflective practice

Personal Interests

Learning from failure...

Books