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28 AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 www.vanguardcanada.com
NAVIGATING
COMPLEXITY
Major-General (Ret'd) Doug Dempster is the executive
director of the Telfer Centre for Executive Leadership and champion for
their complex project leadership initiative. He has served previously as
NATO Assistant Secretary General for Executive Management in
Brussels and chief strategy ocer for National Defence.
A tale of three projects
M
uch of the recent debate on Canadian
defence acquisition has tended to gravi-
tate towards projects in difficulty. This
tends to obscure the positive outcomes
achieved by successful projects. As the
Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa
prepares to start its Masters of Business in Complex Proj-
ect Leadership in the fall of 2016, we have been examining
potential complex project case studies as learning tools.
While we will certainly seek examples from non-defence
domains and other countries, we believe that we need to
select some particularly relevant Canadian acquisition ex-
periences that can serve as models.
We are seeking a set of projects that meet the criteria of
strategic impact, domain complexity, resilience to change
and government-industry collaboration. In some situa-
tions, we may be able to compare Canadian projects with
similar ones in foreign jurisdictions.
This article will explore an initial small sample of three
successful Major Crown Projects: the Aurora Incremental
While much of the public remains transfixed
on defence projects that have gone wrong,
successful navigation through future
programs requires attention to what has
gone right. Photo: LS Dan Bard, Formation
Imaging Services, Halifax, Nova Scotia
