Dr Dicle Kortantamer

Profile

Dicle Kortantamer is a project management researcher, lecturer and advisor. Prior to academia, she spent over 15 years in the industry, leading complex information technology enabled strategic change projects, programmes and portfolios and providing consultancy services on leadership and project management. She has a PhD from the University of Brighton, MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science in Analysis, Design and Management of Information Systems and a BSc in Computer Engineering.

Dicle’s interdisciplinary research focuses on projects, programmes and portfolios, and seeks to link this to questions about leadership, time-related issues, boundary work and value creation. The settings for her research include public organizations, private organizations and grassroots community projects. Her PhD brought together studies of projects and leadership to  outline the complexities inherent in projects that make leadership particularly difficult, and offered an alternative model of project leadership. In 2018 she became a research fellow on the Project X: Better Government Projects - a three-year ESRC funded programme of research. In this role she researched the leadership challenges faced in projects that face radical uncertainty.

Dicle actively engages with the UK parliament, government, industry and higher education institutions. She was invited to participate in the 2020 Cabinet Office workshops that informed their research agenda for the National Leadership Centre, co-designed a pilot study on leading the delivery of public policy responses to societal grand challenges through projects with the Cabinet Office, participated in the UK parliament’s expert surveys on the Covid-19 outbreak and the UN Climate Summit, and published an Association for Project Management report that informed the written evidence provided by Project X for the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s (PACAC) inquiry into ‘The Government’s management of its major projects’. She is invited as a keynote speaker and panellist to various Association for Project Management conferences and events, and a guest lecturer by various higher education institutions (e.g., the UCL Bartlett and the Imperial College).

Research interests

Dicle Kortantamer’s research connects studies of leadership and projects. She is particularly interested in bringing in ideas about temporality and boundary work into the understandings of leadership, and ideas about plural leadership and meaning making into the understandings of leadership in projects.

Her previous and current research has been drawing on practice-based theories to look at various questions such as how leaders cope with high degrees of uncertainty and urgency, and how individuals or collectives from different organisations or functions effectively work together to accomplish the work of leadership in projects. The settings for her research include public organizations, private organizations and grassroots community projects.

Dicle received the following awards for her work on leadership in projects:

• Best conference paper by an early career researcher award, IRNOP (International Research Network on Organising by Projects) Conference 2018
• Awarded Association for Project Management (APM) research grant in 2017

Professional memberships

• Association for Project Management
• European Group for Organization Studies

Research groups and institutes

• Cities, Infrastructure and Energy

Current postgraduate researchers

• Qinghao Wang
• Dan Yang
• Yishi (David) Zhang
• Reem Alyagoub
• Yuchen Guo

Projects

<li><a href="//phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/1345-project-leadership:-time-related-issues-in-leading-a-temporary-organisation">Project leadership: Time-related issues in leading a temporary organisation</a></li> <li><a href="//phd.leeds.ac.uk/project/1346-value-creation-through-projects">Value creation through projects</a></li>