Janet Smart

Janet Smart is Reader in Operations Management at Saïd Business School. Her areas of expertise include systems engineering, complex systems, big science projects, and programme management.

Janet joined Saïd Business School in 2007 to work within the BT Centre for Major Programme Management, which she helped establish along with the MSc in Major Programme Management. This course admitted its first students in 2009, and has since grown to be one of the most successful programmes of its kind in the world.

Janet’s research and teaching are in the area of systems engineering and in the design, delivery and management of large, complex projects. Her key interest is in the adaptation of project management methods to suit the circumstances of particular projects and organizations. She is currently working with two contrasting sectors - big science projects and museums.

Before joining the School, Janet spent almost twenty years in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. Her research there was in measuring and modelling the complexity of manufacturing systems, and in developing and applying an information-theoretic approach to the structural and dynamic complexity of manufacturing systems and supply chains. She supervised several DPhil and Masters theses, and she and her co-workers continue to publish on this topic.

With Dr. Felix Reed-Tsochas (Saïd Business School) and Professor Neil Johnson (then Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford), Janet set up the CABDyN research cluster in 2003, to investigate complex agent-based dynamic networks. CABDyN has become a world-leading centre for research on complex systems, gaining many substantial national and international grants, under the leadership of Reed-Tsochas.

Janet took her undergraduate degree in Physics at the University of Oxford, and her PhD in computing at the University of Durham.

Expertise

• Project and programme management 
• Big science projects
•  Manufacturing systems
• Systems engineering
• Complex systems