News + Insights

Today, the Project Management Institute (PMI) will recognise the important work and contribution to the project management profession of one of our teaming partners, Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, by presenting him with the 2019 PMI Research Achievement Award. The PMI Research Achievement Award recognises and honours an individual whose work has significantly advanced the concepts, knowledge, and practices of project management through a published body of academic research.

Read the full article here.

Time and cost overruns are a well-known feature of major infrastructure and IT projects around the world.

Hitting the headlines regularly are reports of budgets spiralling out of control, and projects completing months or years past their proposed launch dates, negatively impacting companies, cities or even whole economies.

Two alumni of the MSc Major Programme Management (MMPM) at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford are changing that by bringing AI to the sector. David Porter, a successful businessman with no previous exposure to AI, and Cuong Quang, a project manager with industrial AI experience, met in 2015 on the MMPM and set up Endeavour Programme. Cuong has commercialised his AI innovations through Endeavour Programme to tackle the issues that surround the effective delivery of mega-projects and break the cycle of failure. Read more +

Octant Predict

Endeavour Programme’s Octant AI Predict Module forecasts final cost and project profitability, using powerful algorithms and extensive industry data from many sectors (water, road and civil projects). The artificial intelligence platform can be used to provide data driven predictions for any similar projects for any sector specific client. The most advanced sector in the stable focusses on roads and civil projects with a building project platform in the wings. Octant AI reduces costs and time overruns by providing project decision makers with more accurate, faster and earlier project outcome forecasts, which allows more informed decisions with less uncertainty. It is the vanguard of a new approach to project decision making which underpins measurable improvement to the current non-AI methods used globally.

Octant AI is cloud based and runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is secure, easy to use, integrates with most corporate data warehousing systems and operates across any device. It is accessed online in a SaaS format. Risks of data security have been addressed, with an easily adapted method available to integrate with client data security and privacy policies. Read more +