About us

We were founded as the John Grill Centre for Project Leadership with a generous $20 million gift from University of Sydney alumnus John Grill, announced October 2012. 

For over a decade, as the complexity of projects increased, we have been developing advice for project leaders based on our trajectory of research and followed the success of the alumni from our Executive Leadership in Major Projects program. 

Executive education has been at the heart of the activities from the very start, with the vision to be the world leader in project leadership education, thinking and research in order to inspire, inform and support the successful delivery of large-scale projects.

To enhance leadership capability and enable organisations to successfully deliver large-scale projects globally, we set out to partner with leading organisations across infrastructure, energy, mining, technology, banking and finance to provide support to their Senior Executives.

Focus has been given to leading self (leadership practice), leading others (high performing project teams, collaborative engagement and stakeholder alignment) and leading the project (design thinking and strategic mindset, value creating planning, execution agility).

We celebrate the achievements of the alumni and the friendships and connections they have made through the program.

Customised executive education programs are able to be designed to meet your specific business needs.

As we move forward as an Institute, we recognise the significant contributions of the Centre on which we build and the inputs of our previous CEOs Mark Voigts and Professor Suresh Cuganesan, the professional staff and a range of senior practitioners including Maurizio Floris and Garry Bowditch in the transformation of project-based industries.

Listen to our previous directors talk about their passion for this initiative:

• John Grill on Making Lives Better (2019)
• Overview of the John Grill Centre for Project Leadership (video, 2019) 
• Innovative approaches to learning (video, 2019)
• Executive Leadership in Major Projects program (video, 2017)
• The first cohort on the Executive Leaders in Major Projects program (video, 2014) 
• Inspiring Project Success (video, 2015)
• Inspiring project success (pdf, 1.4MB)
• John Grill’s Donation (video, 2012)

We welcome you to contact the current Director, Professor Jennifer Whyte and her team and to work with us to take the John Grill Institute for Project Leadership forward. 

This was an agreement between the University of Sydney and Transport for New South Wales, established in 2017 and led by Associate Professor Julien Pollack, and was completed in late 2021.

This research is developed new insights by working with practitioners to consolidate international best practices and making it relevant to their practice, experimentally testing the impact of knowledge management approaches on project performances, and hosting round-tables to bring together leading researchers and practitioners to discuss the findings and plan our next steps.

Please see our latest findings from the research, or review our archive of reports related to this initiative:

• Re-establishing global infrastructure leadership (2016) (pdf, 2.6MB)
• Shifting Australia’s infrastructure mindset to the long-game (2016) (pdf, 1.4MB)
• Why wait for government (2017) (pdf, 3MB)
• Why customer stewardship matters (2017) (pdf, 3.7MB)
• Infrastructure’s missing link (2018) (pdf, 1.7MB)