Project Abstract
The purpose of organisational governance is first to ensure that the organisation is creating value (as the owners' define 'value'), second to provide principles of operational decision-making (hence the roots of organisational culture), and third to provide direction to reposition the organisation in a dynamic external environment (hence strategy). This focus of this research programme is governance in the context of engineering activities: What makes for effective governance? Can we integrate governance into existing models for quality, new-product-development, project management, risk management, innovation, high-reliability-organisations? How does governance affect organisational culture and human error behaviours in high-reliability-organisations and safety-critical situations?
Our work to date has created a system model of the governance function, one that integrates into multiple areas of the engineering venture. A second stream of work is the use of the statistical method of association rules analysis to determine the factors associated with successful governance. Industry and Postgraduate students who are interested in joining the programme or proposing specific research strands are encouraged to contact Dr Pons.
