Research Fellow – Performance Analytics in Government Projects

Required to work in both London and Cranfield – you will work with the Cabinet Office, software suppliers, the Centre for Business Performance and the International Centre for Programme Management at Cranfield to analyse the Government’s major projects data and to create insight into practices and performance.

The Cabinet Office receives quarterly returns on all major projects from across the whole of government. They also have access to business cases and project review data. The objective of this project is to develop ways of making sense of this data from both an academic and practice perspective. We are interested in connections between project characteristics, people and practices and how these contribute to successful project outcomes. In the past, this data has not been systematically collected and the analysis of this data has been undertaken only at the most basic level. With changes of personnel in the Cabinet Office, there is now the opportunity to get better quality data and the access required to conduct rigorous analysis.

We have an offer of software support from Lightfoot Solutions who run software called “signals from noise”. This is a statistical package developed to run on time series data using standard and bespoke statistical process control algorithms. We expect that the use of this software and its interfacing with the Cabinet Office databases will be part of this project.

You will be expected to interface with and contribute to other work across the University, including the initiative on big data and researchers at other universities. You will need to contribute both academically and practically to the fields.

You must have an educational background in Business & Management, Economics, Industrial/Systems Engineering or any field that relies on the analysis of organisational systems and processes and must hold a PhD. You will have both a personal interest and experience in a wide range of data analysis methods and ideally in data analytics. In particular, you must be highly numerate. Work experience in business and management is desirable, but not essential, as is some knowledge of project and programme management.

You should have a real interest in data analysis both from the perspective of making use of data to create insights and improve performance, as well as from the perspective of making an academic contribution to the field. We are looking for a competent researcher with an interest in education and developing learning material for this project.

Because of the sensitive nature of the material being accessed and analysed you will need to be security screened and be prepared to work within confidentiality constraints when presenting and publishing your research.

For an informal discussion about the position please contact Prof Mike Bourne on T: +44 (0)1234 751122 or E: m.bourne@cranfield.ac.uk