Lavagnon Ika is Associate Professor of Project Management (PM). He holds an M.Sc. in PM from UQO and a PhD in Business Administration with specialization in Project Management from the Université du Québec à Montréal, a Montreal-based joint doctoral program with McGill, Concordia, and HEC Universities. Over the past years, he has taught PM at the B.Com and MBA/EMBA levels in both French and English, mainly in Canada but also in Europe, Africa, and the Middle-East. He has led a number of PM workshops in organizational settings and advised a number of project managers and senior business leaders in his consulting work. His clients include different federal government departments. He has supervised a number of PhD students and a dozen M.Sc. students and sat on many MSc and PhD committees around the world.
His research topics include: what makes projects complex; what makes projects successful; why do projects fail and what can be done about it; and what is the role of project strategy, supervision and management in project success/failure. Besides his works on international development projects, Professor Ika has a genuine interest in project settings such as arts and culture, law, education, etc. as well as in strategy and in the foundations of PM Research.
Professor Ika is the author of 20 papers in peer reviewed journals as well as of more than twenty conference proceedings. Professor Ika’s work has been published in many journals including the International Journal of Project Management, the Project Management Journal, the International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, the Journal of African Business, and the International Journal of Project Organization and Management. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Project Management and of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of African Business. He is the Project Management editor for the Open Access journals, the Taylor & Francis’s Cogent Business & Management and Mega Journal of Business Research.
Professor Ika received the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence, Oustanding Paper Award Winner in 2017 and Highly Commended Paper Award Winner in 2011. He also received the Telfer’s Innovative Researcher Award in 2017 and the IPMA Research Contribution of a Young Researcher Award in 2012. Two of his papers are among the most cited papers in top Project Management journals since 2011. Many of his papers are praised by PM practitioners including citation in a recent World Bank’s Concept Note.