MSc Operations, Project and Supply Chain Management / Course details

With complex forms of interorganizing to tackle grand societal challenges as a background, this course aims to equip students to make informed judgement calls that are necessary to exercise leadership and governance in these settings. We will focus on how managers can design structures and processes that encourage norms of interorganizational collaboration to flourish (mutual trust, compromise, reciprocation), and enable value co-creation processes with suppliers and nonmarket stakeholders, while allowing for a distribution of value that most all parties will see as fair enough.  

The teaching approach follows a Socratic model and hinges on discussions of case studies to sharpen students’ ability to make arguable claims and impart managerial insights.  

Our sample of cases is diverse and varies by economic sector and context. For example,

•    ~£100bn (final prices) UK’s High-speed 2;  

•    Lagos (Nigeria)’s public transport network (Nigeria)

•    UK and Brazil’s Cairo housing crisis

•    Intel’s multi-billion capital expansion program

•    China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Chinese: 一带一路)

 

Our focus will be on understanding how managers can tackle managerial challenges that are endemic to tackling grand societal challenges by designing governance structures, development processes, contracting and procurement strategies, and communication strategies. Our aim is to equip students with a diversified ‘toolbox’ of conceptual frameworks and methods, as well as awareness of contingencies that impact causal relationships.  

We conceptualise leadership as a process of designing . Hence, we will frame leaders as ‘designers’ of the structures and processes supporting decision-making on resource acquisition and allocation, dispute-resolution, and resource exchanges with supplier and non-market stakeholders in the surrounding context. 

BMAN72262 Programme Req: BMAN72262 is only available as an elective to students on MSc Operations, Project and Supply Chain Management, MSc Management and Implementation of Development Projects, MSc Data Science (Bus&Man)

This aim of this course is to introduce students to conceptual frameworks and methods that are relevant to any graduate-standing student (in planning, management, economics, or engineering) with ambition to take on leadership roles in complex forms of organizing to tackle ‘wicked problems’ characterised by conflicting goals, entrenched interests, feedback loops, differing planning horizons, and differing value functions that cannot be solved without intersectoral cooperation across public, private, and nonprofit sectors. These so-called ‘grand societal challenges' require establishing multi-party, often project-based, forms of interorganizing to pursue develop public goods (eg new policy and regulation, international treaties), and develop large-scale technology, e.g. transport, energy systems, IT infrastructure; social assets (e.g. prisons, schools and hospitals); defence systems (e.g. submarines, missiles and aircraft carriers); and science infrastructure, e.g. telescopes, particle accelerators.  

Whether promoted by public-sector bodies, private firms, or public-private partnerships, establishing interorganizational contexts unified by higher-order goals is instrumental to tackle today’s deepest challenges from climate change, antibiotic resistance, and inequality to Africa’s population growth and quick urbanization. Only in basic infrastructure, e.g., transportation, power, water, and telecommunication, before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was investing around $2.5 trillion a year. And at the time, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated a need to invest an average of $3.3 trillion annually to support current rates of growth—with emerging economies accounting for around 60 percent of this need.    

 

Multi-party forms of organizing set up to tackle grand challenges – or even to simply chip away at grand challenges - bring together multiple autonomous actors that are unified by an identifiable system-level goal. This is because the key sponsors - the organizational actor (or coalition of actors) leading the effort tackle the challenge sometimes through, a special purpose vehicle (SPV), is unlikely to control all the resources that are necessary to achieve the targeted goal. Some complementary resources that are essential to value creation can be acquired through market transactions because those resources are quantifiable and measurable, e.g., property, supplier capabilities. Other valuable resources are controlled by stakeholders that exist in regimes of ill-defined property rights and inefficient  or political markets. These sometimes called “nonmarket” stakeholders lay outside the buyer-suppliersupply chain as traditionally defined and cannot be internalized in the governance structure, e.g. local communities, interest groups, activists, regulators, local and national agencies. Crucially, nonmarket resources can be difficult to define, measure, and monetize, and thus costly to acquire through transactions, for example, permits and consents. Hence, tackling wicked problems requires combining different governance structures: 1) strategic alliances between resourceful autonomous actors that collectively take the helm of the enterprise; 2) a hub-and-spoke governance (bilateral agreements) with a vast universe of non-market stakeholders; 3) consensus-oriented collective action (non-hierarchical) structures; and 4) a vast managed supply chain.  

Equipping students to lead and govern in wicked organizational setting is the aim of this course – drawing on organizational economics (property rights theory, agency theory, transaction cost economics theory) and scholarship in organizational design and project management. To sharpen intuition for actionable insights derived from existing theoretical frameworks, we will vary focal phenomena from mega infrastruct

• Understanding of the megaproject lifecycle from the inception of an idea, through planning and implementation and finally hand over to operations
• Awareness of a megaproject as a capital-intensive technology development which encapsulates multiple subprojects, delivered concurrently and/or sequentially.
• Understanding of megaprojects as complex interorganizational contexts that combine different governance structures (collective action, hierarchy, managed supply chains)
• Understanding of key challenges facing megaproject leadership teams including coping with uncertainty, reconciling heterogeneous and conflicting interests between resourceful participants and key stakeholders, combining different governance structures, and meeting performance targets set at the onset of development
• Understanding of alternative ways to speed up megaproject development albeit high uncertainty in requirements
• Understanding of key strategic choices for megaproject leadership
• teams including enfranchising key stakeholders, renegotiating the value distribution,  designing a supplier procurement & contracting strategy, setting performance targets, and building financial slack ,
• Understanding of the value and challenge of building design flexibility - and options logic - more broadly to cope with uncertainty
• Understanding of how to factor in sustainability concerns into megaprojects
• Understanding of how to adapt megaproject governance to navigate institutional voids

 

Formal Contact Methods

Minimum Contact hours: 20 

Delivery format: Lecture and Workshops 

Wicked problems; goal displacement; centralised and distributed governance structures; participation architectures; megaproject; centralised and distributed governance; value co-creation.
Principles of Transaction Cost Economics relevant to make sense of when and how to assemble a supply chain and ‘buy’ collaboration under conditions of uncertainty, specificity, and low frequency; relational contracts.
Intermediaries, and the usefulness of intermediaries to navigate institutional voids in emergent markets and mitigate geopolitical risks   

Basic Principles of Organizational Economics: Agency Theory; Property Rights Theory; Transaction Cost Economics .
Understand the theory behind governance adaptation choices to enable value co-creation that lead to a value distribution that all participants see as fair without frustrating legitimacy of agentic action.
Understand the theory behind processes to relax commitments that were made to gain legitimacy to acquire essential resources without losing legitimacy to continue to allocate those same resources. 
New stakeholder theory and theory of stakeholder governance.

Project management norms and methods

Rhetoric practices to create a space where interorganizational conflict can be resolved 

Use of slack resources to help resolve disputes over conflicting subgoals in value co-coproduction processes.

Norms of collaboration towards the co-production of value and purpose building  
 

Group project (30%)

Case study reports (30%)

Individual assignment (40%)

Gil N 2023 Cracking the megaproject puzzle: A stakeholder perspective? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263786323000194

 

Project-based capital investment: Value Creation and Distribution

https://cmr.berkeley.edu/assets/documents/paper-calls/cmr_special_issue_project_based_capital_investment.pdf

 

Hartford, T. 2013. Do you believe in sharing? Financial Times. Aug 30

https://www.ft.com/content/afc5377e-1026-11e3-a258-00144feabdc0

 

He V F, Puranam, P 2021. Collaborative Conflict Management. INSEAD working paper 2021/69/STR

McGahan, AM 2023. The New Stakeholder Theory on Organizational Purpose. Strategy Science

 

Gil and Yongcheng 2021. Megaproject Performance, Value Creation and Value Distribution

 

Fu and Gil. 2023 Financial Buffers in Megaprojects: A Contingent Model of Joint Value Production and Policy Implications

 

Williamson, O.E. (1979). Transaction-Cost Economics: The Governance of Contractual Relations. Journal of Law and Economics, 22 (2) 233-261

 

Gil, Stafford, Musonda. 2019. Introduction in Duality by Design: The Global Race to Build Africa´s Infrastructure

 

Colfer LJ Baldwin CY, 2016 The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence and exceptions