Shankar Sankaran

Shankar Sankaran is the Professor of Organisational Project Management at the School of the Built Environment and a Member of the Centre for Informatics Research and Innovation at UTS and a core researcher of Megaproject Management in its Industry Transformation Cluster.

Shankar’s research covers organizational project management, megaprojects, systems thinking, project leadership, energy justice and action research. His recent research projects are: Investigating the impact on project governance and controls on Environmental Social Governance (ESG) reporting; A practice-based study of project portfolio management and strategic alignment in construction; Social media use in project management; Investigating employment opportunities for people with disability in the construction sector.

Shankar was a lead Chief Investigator in an ARC linkage grant on Project Governance and and a Chief Investigator in an ARC Linkage Grant on Leadership on Leadership of Not-for-Profit Organizations in Aged and Community Care. He was also a principal investigator in three PMI Sponsored Research Programs: Balancing Person-Centered and Team-Centered Leadership in Projects; Governance of Innovation in Portfolios, Programs and Projects; and Practice-based Study of Portfolio Management and Strategic Alignment in the Construction Sector.

He teaches advanced level subjects in the Master of Project Management Course at UTS including organizational project management, systems thinking for managers, leading projects in organizations and project management consultancy. He has supervised more than forty-five doctoral students conducting research in management since 2001.

Shankar is an editor and author of chapters in the forthcoming Research Handbook for the Governance of Projects Megaproject Leaders: Reflections on Personal Life Stories both published by Edward Elgar, An Evaluative Study of Action Research Rigorous Findings on Process and Impact from Around the World published by Routledge, Cambridge Handbook of Organizational Project Management published by Cambridge University Press and Novel Approaches to Organizational Project Management Research - Transformational and Translational published by Copenhagen Business School Press. He is one of the authors of the forthcoming book titled Managing People in Projects for High Performance being published by Springer; Balanced Leadership: Making the Best Use of Personal and Team Leadership published by Oxford University Press; and Organizational Project Management: Theory and Implementation published by Edward Elgar. He is the Section Editor of the Management and Organization Section of the Handbook of Systems Sciences published by Springer and an Associate Editor of the SAGE Encyclopedia of Action Research.

Shankar has won several research awards with Ralf Müller and Nathalie Drouin including the Project Management Institute’s Research Achievement award in 2022; International Project Management Association research award on Balanced Leadership in 2021; PMI’s David Cleland's Literati Award in 2021 for the book Organizational Project Management; and the Walter Lipke Award for the work on Organizational Project Management and its Validation at the Project Governance and Control Symposium in 2019.

He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Project Management, The International Journal of Managing Projects in Business and Systems and edits Project Management Research and Practice. He has guest edited special issues for prominent project management and systems research journals.

Shankar joined academia after several years of experience as a major project manager in projects across the world and served as a technical director of Yokogawa Electric Asia, Singapore.

Shankar is the Chair of the Global Accreditation Centre of the Project Management Institute's board (2021-2022) and Member of the College of Leadership and Management at Engineers Australia - Sydney Division since 2021 and the Past President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (2019-2020). He is one of the members of a team of project management professionals working on Engineers Australia's initiative on Project Governance by Engineers that started in 2022.