| Lavagnon Ika | |
| Birth Place: | Benin |
| Citizenship: | Canadian and Beninese |
| Occupation: | Project management scientist, academic and author |
| Alma Mater: | Institut National d'Économie Université du Québec à Hull Université du Québec à Montréal |
| Thesis Title: | The key success factors for international development projects |
| Thesis Year: | 2011 |
| Workplaces: | University of Ottawa University of Pretoria |
Lavagnon Ika is a Benin-born, Canadian project management scientist, academic, thought leader, and author. He is a full professor of Project Management, founding Director of the Major Projects Observatory as well as the program director of the MSc in Management at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria.[1]
Ika is most known for his contribution to the academic and policy debate on why large-scale projects experience cost overruns and benefit shortfalls worldwide, and what it will take to make them work and deliver more success in both the short and long terms. He has made contributions towards the research on managing global development projects, initiatives that seek to contribute to achieving the challenges of sustainable and equitable poverty reduction and/or improvement of living standards in the Global South. His work focuses on project management, primarily focusing on project management & strategy implementation, major infrastructure delivery, international development, grand challenges, and project behavior and misbehavior. He is twice the recipient of the Global Research Award from the International Project Management Association (IPMA).[2] [3] He is the author of a book titled Managing Fuzzy Projects in 3D: A Proven, Multi-Faceted Blueprint for Overseeing Complex Projects.[4]
Ika completed a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1997 from the Institut National d'Économie. In 1998, he went to Canada for his MSc in Project Management. He completed his Master of Science in Project Management from Université du Québec à Hull in 2001. He obtained his Ph.D. in Business Administration in 2011 from Université du Québec à Montréal, through a joint doctoral program with McGill, Concordia, and HEC Montréal.[1]
Ika began his academic career in 2001 as a part-time professor at Université du Québec, where he eventually became a replacement, assistant, and then associate professor. Concurrently, he joined the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa as an assistant professor, serving there until 2015. From 2015 to 2019, he continued as associate professor of Project Management at the University of Ottawa. Since 2023, he has been an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria as well as a full professor of Project Management at the University of Ottawa since 2019.[1]
In 2021, Ika was appointed as a World Bank Fellow, but the fellowship was later suspended due to COVID-19. Furthermore, he 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 US-based Project Management Institute (PMI) in 2024 as a lead scholar on how to measure project success.[5] Since 2020, he has been the founding Director of the Major Projects Observatory and, since 2022, the program director of both the MSc in Management and Health Systems Programs at the University of Ottawa.[1]
Ika's project management research is divided into two main streams. The first stream investigated the prevalence of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in the West (e.g., Canada and USA), assessing whether biases (e.g., over-optimism) or errors (e.g., poor management) played a more significant role. This research explored the practical implications of Daniel Kahneman's Planning Fallacy versus Albert Hirschman's Hiding Hand principle,[6] particularly during significant infrastructure investments for post-COVID-19 economic recovery. The Planning Fallacy, the tendency to over-promise and under-deliver, suggested that forecasts of costs and benefits are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios and that many projects should never have been started. The Hiding Hand proposed that if promoters had known the real costs and benefits of many projects, they would not have been done. He critiqued Bent Flyvbjerg's dismissal of Hirschman's Hiding Hand principle, arguing that Flyvbjerg's narrow focus on cost-benefit analysis overlooked broader project impacts and problem-solving aspects, and thus that ignorance may be good for projects. He presented evidence that the Hiding Hand was more prevalent in project successes than Flyvbjerg acknowledged.[7] Furthermore, he also demonstrated that 60% of projects are prone to optimism bias.[8]
Furthermore, Ika examined the causes of cost overruns in transport construction projects by analyzing contextual factors such as program management, quality, safety, design, and management practices, recommending alternative procurement strategies to address these issues.[9] He also explored the multidimensional nature of project success, addressing business case benefits delivery, diverse stakeholder perceptions, sustainability concerns, and proposed a four-dimensional model to assess and understand project outcomes over time.[10]
Ika's first stream of research culminated with a new theory of project behavior and performance, coined "The Fifth Hand", which asserted that biases and errors combined to exact a heavy toll on projects. Following the work of Gerd Gigerenzer, the longtime director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and critic of Daniel Kahneman,[11] he argued that the Planning Fallacy, along with its remedy "bias uplifts" such as Reference Class Forecasting (RCF), might work under risk, not uncertainty, where probability calculus falls short. He recommended instead, the use of heuristics and "best fit" practices. Such heuristics or rules of thumb included "Your biggest risk and asset is you" and "Plan your work and work your plan, but be ready for a few surprises down the road".[4] He also argued that the Cassandras or the over-pessimistic and the Pollyannas or the over-optimistic promoters of projects were both right and wrong and called on promoters to be Januses, who are much more pragmatic characters in the world of projects.[12]
In his second research stream, Ika explored the factors contributing to the success and failure of global development projects, with a particular focus on Africa. He suggested that projects in Africa often fall into four traps: the one-size-fits-all technical trap, the accountability-for-results trap, the lack-of-project-management-capacity trap, and the cultural trap.[13] He investigated the importance of contextual understanding, the pitfalls of results-based management, and the complexities of scaling up and replicating successful projects across different locations to enhance the positive impact on beneficiaries, especially the poor and marginalized.[14] Focusing on the theory of capacity building project delivery, his 2017 research examined structural, institutional, and managerial conditions for the success of international development projects in different contexts, proposing that high levels of multi-stakeholder commitment, collaboration, alignment, and adaptation were crucial.[15] In related research, his 2022 study analyzed the evolution of the concept of "capacity building" through a literature review, suggesting a "new pragmatism" framework that emphasized context sensitivity, methodological pluralism, and collaborative knowledge creation for more effective public administration practices.[16]
Looking into World-Bank funded projects, Ika also showed that 60% of them are prone to optimism bias, which affects up to 20% of their performance.[17] His investigation of how beneficiary engagement levels influenced short and long-term success in global development projects found that both beneficiary involvement and participation positively influenced project outcomes. It also emphasized the importance of tailored approaches and factors like beneficiary trust in project governance for maximizing impact, especially in low- and middle-income countries.[18] Additionally, this second stream led to a "project management school" in global development, which explored how project activities and processes are really carried out.[17]
Ika coined the term grand challenge projects, which represented projects that sought to tackle grand challenges or those complex problems the world faced (e.g., climate change, global pandemics, and unsustainable development). He suggested that grand challenges and project management were strange bedfellows, but a more adaptive, agile, collaborative, and best-fit project management approach, where strategic logic, heuristics, intuition, and agile experimentation prevailed, could work, considering the fuzziness that often characterized grand challenges. He further added that a portfolio, program, network, or national development plan approach was the best shot at tackling grand challenges sustainably.[19]