Harvey Maylor

Harvey Maylor has worked with Saïd Business School since 2013.

He has served as a programme director in the Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA), our programme for the leaders of the UK government’s 150 most significant projects. In April 2017, he joined the faculty as Senior Fellow in Management Practice, and in June 2018 was awarded the title of Associate Professor. Prior to working with MPLA, Harvey was the Founding Director of the International Centre for Programme Management at Cranfield University, delivering a US$4M portfolio of research and development activities over five years, and founding Cranfield’s MSc in Programme and Project Management. From 1993 to 1998 he was a lecturer at Cardiff Business School, and from 1999 to 2006 at University of Bath.

In addition, Harvey has taught and consulted for global firms (full-time 2013-2017) and still spends part of his time in this arena. His approach combines teaching, research and practice, and continuously seeking innovations that might solve some of the big problems he has encountered in his work. In doing so, Harvey is minded that our research can have the effect of normalising practices that are not necessarily effective, as the bulk of projects under-perform. For this reason, it is imperative that the opportunity is taken to highlight both current great practice, as well as provide thought leadership, drawing ideas from multiple domains to generate new or reconfigured alternatives for the future.

The focus of Harvey’s attention is major projects: those projects of sufficient scale or importance that their achievement represents a significant endeavour for the organisations that are undertaking them. This significance could be in terms of either budgetary scale, the level of risk encountered or the complexity of the interaction of stakeholder groups. This includes both transformation and infrastructure projects.

Harvey’s subject home is Operations Management; he is concerned with systems of work, and in particular the interface between formal systems and behaviours. Major projects are an especially rich context for the study of such systems. His interests are not limited to what has conventionally been called ‘project management’, and span an eclectic mixture of contexts and perspectives. Further details are under the ‘research’ tab.

Professional organisation memberships:

Academy of Management, British Academy of Management, European Operations Management Association (board member 2000-2003), Project Management Institute, and the Association for Project Management.

Research All of Harvey's research begins with a practitioner or an organisational problem.

His current research projects exist either to understand better an organisational problem, (e.g. complexity, lean, capabilities, delivery by design) or to develop the foundations for this in the future (ambidexterity, What do major project leaders do?).

Publications

The concept of organisational projectification: past, present and beyond?(opens in new window) Journal article | International Journal of Managing Projects in Business | 2-9-2019 H Maylor, V Turkulainen

Understand, reduce, respond: project complexity management theory and practice(opens in new window) Journal article | INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS & PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT | 7-8-2019 H Maylor, N Turner

Lean leadership in major projects: from "predict and provide" to "predict and prevent"(opens in new window) Journal article | INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF OPERATIONS & PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT | 2018 Matthias Holweg, Harvey Maylor

Researching Business & Management Book | Palgrave Macmillan | 10-1-2017 H Maylor, K Blackmon, M Huemann

Making it happen: How managerial actions enable project-based ambidexterity(opens in new window) Journal article | MANAGEMENT LEARNING | 4-2016 N Turner, J Swart, H Maylor, E Antonacopoulou