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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current practices of large UK organisations with respect to post-audits of capital projects with the aim of improving management decision making in the future. The investment process has been clearly mapped out in the literature, with the initial project proposal, appraisal, selection (investment decision), implementation, completion, and finally the post-audit. It is this latter stage which is ignored by so many organisations and has received less attention in the academic literature, a gap the author hopes to fill.

The empirical data are collated from a postal questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, followed by a short e-mail questionnaire. A methodological triangulation of empirical data obtained from the questionnaires and interviews, were undertaken to overcome some of the deficiencies from just using one method of data collection. The research is empirical and uses exploratory descriptive analysis to interpret the findings. The author focuses on the aspect of organisational learning theory as a process of continuous improvement, learning from past experience, especially in the management decision-making paradigm.

The author discovered nine important reasons for undertaking post-audits and ten for not. An important observation is that while those organisations which do not undertake post-audits attach a greater level of importance to “the reasons for not carrying out post-audits” and “the problems faced in the implementation of post-audits”, these difficulties have been overcome by those organisations that undertake post-audits. Evidence suggests that the current change in business culture, as a result of the recent financial crisis, may be refocusing the aims of post-audits from a learning exercise to one of managerial responsibility.

The research may be limited (in forming general conclusions) as it is based on a relatively small sample size. The author does not, however, believe that this distracts from its importance.

The author argues that training the non-users to overcome the perceived difficulties would enhance the investment decision-making process by encouraging them to learn from the experience of those that undertake post-audits.

The research is original as it reports on a current survey and will fill, what the author perceives to be, a gap in the literature. The respondents to the research consists of some of the most senior executives from the largest UK organisations and their views on academic issues are, in many cases, difficult to obtain; this research therefore has value in this respect. The findings point the way to new lines of enquiry in this field.

A study of the current practices for evaluating the ex-post performance of public-private partnership (PPP) school projects in Australia via literature review and qualitative case studies has found that no consistent approach exists for evaluating operational performance. A detailed critique of international PPP audits and practices has identified existing gaps in ex-post performance evaluation. Through a process of comparative analysis and industry confirmation, a performance analysis technique aligned with international practice has been developed that can be utilised by the educational departments across Australia to evaluate the ex-post performance of PPP projects (PPPs). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper opted for qualitative archival analysis of case studies using pattern matching, explanation building, time series, and comparative analysis. The data used for document analysis included value reports, project summaries, and contract documents, as well as local and international audit guidelines.

This paper reviewed current practices, identified a range of processes, and reported the best practices. However, consideration of the approaches taken in the UK and Australia for evaluating operational performance indicates that current techniques lack consistency.

The developed ex-post performance measurement framework is limited to Australian PPP school projects and, at this stage, cannot be generalised to other social PPP projects.

The paper includes implications for the development of better performance evaluation practices and audits.

An enhanced framework for measuring operational performance will increase the accountability of taxpayers in the content of their utilisation by the government.

This paper presents an enhanced ex-post performance measurement framework for education departments across Australia.

Life Cycle Costing (LCC) offers many advantages over other techniques but the time‐span over which the study must be undertaken and the uncertainty involved probably detract from its usefulness. However, this is one area where Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) techniques have great scope for application. The most important influences on decision making, in practice, are consistency and feedback; the challenge remains to prevent organisational decision making being resistant to new ideas and techniques.

Investment project post‐completion auditing (PCA) is capable of yielding significant benefits to firms wishing to tighten the control of existing projects and also to improve their decision‐making and planning procedures. An increasing proportion of large companies now operates post‐audits in pursuit of these benefits. However, adoption and implementation of PCAs is not problem‐free. Among the likely drawbacks is the possibility of deterring staff from advancing proposals for new investment. However, evidence from an empirical study shows that there appears to be no significant relationship between adoption of PCA and level of investment expenditure, in either absolute terms or when adjusted for disposals or size of firm. This suggests that some of the difficulties typically associated with PCAs may be overstated. Concludes with a survey of the issues which would‐be adopters of PCAs should address and offers a checklist of action points designed to lubricate the introduction of PCAs.

The purpose of the paper is to report the investigation results of current practices of strategic asset allocation process, which consists of capital budget planning, monitoring, and control of Hong Kong building contractors. The changes of the said practices are compared with the results of the two similar surveys undertaken in the past longitudinally.

A total of 157 questionnaires were sent to about 1,000 approved Hong Kong building contractors (classified as group A, B, C in accordance with their maximum capacities). The total response rate was 30.7 per cent. Statistical techniques, a two‐dimensional contingency table, and discriminant function analysis (DA) were deployed to analyze the survey data via SPSS.

Only the practice of a regular review of the minimum rate of return of major projects was popular. For monitoring aspect, 100 per cent of surveyed contractors monitor project performance once operational. The result of post‐completion audits on major projects was 63 per cent. For the results of the longitudinal study, 66.7 per cent of group C firms employed the practices of intermediate and long‐term capital budgets and 71.4 per cent of large firms had a formal body for screening investment proposals compared with 54.8 per cent and 63.3 per cent of the same group's practices in 1994 respectively. DA results showed that the patterns within the three different groups (A, B, and C) were very similar, and group A and group B were active in capital budgeting monitoring and control.

Planning was the weakest and data showed that Hong Kong building contractors had tight control of the projects.

This paper reports the investigation results of current practices of strategic asset allocation process, which consists of capital budget planning, monitoring, and control of Hong Kong building contractors.

The literature on post-completion reviews (PCRs) either does not deal with the tying of PCRs to extrinsic rewards or provides scant theoretical reasoning or empirical analysis to back up its recommendations.

Based on research from psychology and empirical studies, the present chapter proposes that several effects of a PCR, which must be deemed rather dysfunctional, will increase when extrinsic rewards are linked to such a review. At the same time some possibly functional effects, however, are likely to remain constant. The propositions, therefore, call the usefulness of tying PCRs to rewards into question and call for further investigation.

According to Revans, for an organization to be successful in today’s rapidly changing environment, its capacity to learn must exceed the rate of change imposed on it. Through an examination of the processes by which individuals in organizations learn, develops a learning process model to facilitate continuous improvement and innovation in business processes. Draws on relevant theories which provide an understanding of how and why people learn, barriers which prevent learning, and the role managers need to play in the learning process. Provides a vision of what may be achieved by the systematic implementation of the learning process model. Deming’s system of profound knowledge provides a focus for learning activity. The model has been developed in a way which will be of practical use to managers working in organizations.

In the conduct of an organisation’s myriad activities, obtaining value for money is a crucial consideration, and over the years this has increasingly encouraged businesses to examine both the effectiveness and efficiency of outsourcing specific business functions. Historically, concern was with more‐or‐less peripheral activities where the cost advantage of outsourcing was readily ascertainable. But more recently attention has increasingly been directed towards more fundamental business activities where consideration of mere cost is supplanted by aspects of quality, and the recognition that greater external quality of provision might well override mere considerations of economy.

The audit of development funds that flow between development not-for-profit organisations (DNPOs) is virtually free from effective external regulation. When programme DNPOs subcontract development work to field DNPOs, they are under current international audit rules free to specify audit frameworks that are limited to the accuracy of the books. Questions of the efficacy of the development work can thus be bracketed off. This paper aims to develop an argument for improving the regulation of cross-national audits of DNPOs.

Based on a review of the applicable audit regulation and ongoing debates of legitimacy and accountability, this paper articulates a series of problems that should be considered in the regulation of cross-national DNPO audits with reference to their specific legitimacy communities.

The special consideration that is due to the beneficiaries of development activities suggests that cross-national DNPO audits should be regulated not just with reference to general audit and accounting rules. Consideration should be given as well to some of the key context variables that potentially have a bearing on the likelihood that the audited development programmes meet the claims of the legitimacy community of development. These can include the level and depth of accountability afforded to the beneficiaries, potentially conflicting legitimacy relationships, the nature of admissible records for the audit and the provisions for programme funds to cover the overheads of field DNPOs.

The managerial implications of this paper concern the regulation, commissioning and conduct of cross-national DNPO audits. The authors propose a series of remedies to the scoping of field DNPO audits in a cross-national context.

Focusing on the functioning of cross-border NPO audits, this paper adds an important facet to ongoing discussions about the accountability of current regulation to represent the new interdependencies brought about by the forces of globalisation.