Dan Credazzi

Postnomial degree info here

Postgraduate Research Student
Project Management



School of Civil Engineering
Phone: na
Fax: na
Email: dcre3687@usyd.edu.au

Research project - Public sector strategy realisation – Fostering a project's commercial aspects to increase the probability of success

Supervisor: A/Prof Chris Stevens
Associate Supervisor:

Advancing important national strategies such as the US space program and other public-sector benefit initiatives requires healthy long-term collaboration between the public and private sectors. While the public sector is best suited to define national strategies and provide financial resources for early execution, many industry-scale programs that live on, and deliver the intended benefits, do so with a degree of private sector participation in commercial environments. The nature and timing of the transition of public sector initiatives into private sector commercial delivery can affect the intended outcomes. Over the long term, market conditions and business considerations (seldom a part of government strategic project planning) become necessary components of a successful transfer of a public program of works into the commercial sector and increase the probability of successes.

High-risk ventures such as manned missions to Mars do have risk profiles that are beyond the private sector's risk tolerance. This was also the case with the aeronautical and communication satellite industries not so long ago. However, having matured through decades of public-private collaboration, the commercial aviation and communications industries have almost completely transitioned to private sector stewardship. In these instances, the government no longer shoulders the entire burden as the primary custodian or investor in the enterprise. Resources can then be aligned against other high-risk ventures that need further maturation before risk is reduced to the point where private sector investments become feasible. To a lesser extent, space launch falls into this category for small payloads, but due to the uniqueness and high risk, manned space flight must remain in the public sector for the near term. Over the long term, it is important to consider the eventual privatisation and commercialisation of some aspects of space exploration in the overall strategy and execution of the program. If there is a failure to transition some of the effort to the private sector, then NASA will be the sole supporter of the effort, which will consume much of its resources and limit its ability to expand into other frontiers.

Using the premise that strategic intent is materialised in the form of project delivery as the basis of a research study, the transition of public policy strategic programs to commercial sector project delivery will be analysed. Examples of this interplay along the public - private sector continuum such as public-private-partnership (PPP-Australia) enterprises & private-finance initiatives (PFI-UK) will be analysed. Based on this research, we will develop investment-planning models to improve control of public-sector program outcomes and increase the probability of a program"s sustained financial viability. Also, a stream of research will focus on infrastructure banks and their use of novel investment criteria as a basis for investment decisions. In this regard, these techniques employed by infrastructure/investment banks prior to investing in near-monopoly enterprises is also worthy of investigation. Once modelled, these criteria can be combined with the PPP modelling research to create a platform for improving publicly funded strategic project outcomes by using similar criteria. Parallel research is focused on US government strategy, its translation into NASA"s Manned Space Exploration Program and the subsequent cascade of partnerships between NASA and its contractors in support of that strategy. Reflecting on both scenarios may provide a better understanding of how to better manage the delivery of public policy strategy and specifically may help advance the central focus of NASA's Manned Space Missions