Speakers

Lavagnon Ika, MSc, PhD is Professor of Project Management and Founding Director of the Major Projects Observatory at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. He is also an Extraordinary Professor at both the Graduate School of Technology Management and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GBIS) of the University of Pretoria. He is a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow, an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Project Management and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, and a (former) member of the Academic Boards of the international project management associations PMI and IPMA.

Professor Ika is a key contributor to the most recent debates on major infrastructure delivery (e.g., project behavior or why projects experience cost overruns and benefit shortfalls), and he is considered the world leader of the research on managing global development projects (e.g., World Bank or Global Affairs Canada-funded projects delivered in Africa).

Professor Ika's work has earned him three Emerald Publishing House Awards of Excellence (Best Reviewer Award in 2018, Outstanding Paper in 2017 and Highly Commended Paper Award in 2011), as well as three IPMA Global Awards of Excellence (Research Award in 2017 and 2022 and Contribution of a Young Researcher Award in 2012). He won the PM World Journal Editor’s Choice Award in 2021.

He was a finalist of the 2023 UK Association for Project Management (APM) Award for the Research Paper of the Year. He was awarded the Telfer Innovative Researcher Award in 2017 and the Telfer Established Researcher Award in 2021. He is the co-author of the 2024 PMI Book of the Year Managing Fuzzy Projects in 3D and he is leading a handbook on project behavior to be published with Cambridge University Press in 2024. Professor Ika has provided guidance for the World Bank as external advisory panel member on their Results and Performance of the World Bank Group 2023 and for the PMI in 2024 as a lead scholar on how to measure project success.