Some late-career and post-retirement activities
PERSONAL STORY
By Alan Stretton, PhD (Hon)
New Zealand
INTRODUCTION
Background to this series of three articles
As noted in the first two articles of this series (Stretton 2026d, 2026c), I had earlier discussed some experiential influences on my perspectives and writings on project management in Stretton 2025c. The focus in the latter article had been strongly on direct career-related experiential influences.
However, there have also been other types of influences which have helped shape my perspectives on project management. This is the last of a series of three articles which discuss some of these. I have used the descriptor “extra-curricular” to distinguish these influences from the more directly career-related experiential influences in Stretton 2025c
The first article discussed some early-career education-related influences on some of my later project management perspectives. The second article looked at some of my mid-career external help-related activities and influences. This third article looks at some late-career and post-retirement activities, and their influences on my project management writings.
Figure 1 broadly relates my career stages with my primary activities at those times.
Some background to this third article
Late-career regular vocation, and two groups of external activities
As indicated in Figure 1, my late-career regular vocation was with the newly created University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), which engaged me at the beginning of 1988 to lead the development and delivery of a new Master of Project Management course. I described this in some detail in Stretton 2025c.
I engaged in two groups of external activities in this late-career stage. The was with two project management representative bodies – PMI in North America, and AIPM in Australia. Both were substantial involvements, and expanded my knowledge of, and perspecyives on, project management a great deal. The second group comprised education-related activities which, although rather minor compared with my mid-career initiatives, still added to my store of perspectives on project management.
Post-retirement occupation, and external activities
After I retired from UTS in 2006, I became involved in a venture to improve the English translation of Japan’s P2M – A Guidebook of Project and Program Management for Enterprise Innovation (PMCC 2004). This led to making comparisons with Western approaches to project and program management, which in turn led me to writing more and more on the latter subjects – an occupation I have continued to this day, and thoroughly enjoyed. Indeed, in this post-retirement stage I have now published well over 200 articles.
I have had two main extra-curricular activities in this post-retirement stage, the more influential of which was a senior level assignment with Rio Tinto, which gave me a much better understanding of the complexities of the mega-project world than I had previously had. This also raised some questions about an apparently unresolved incompatibility between the management of mega projects and that of smaller projects, and about how these are handled by our project management representative bodies.
We now look at the above extra-curricular activities in a little more detail.
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How to cite this work: Stretton, A. (2026). Some “extra-curricular” influences on my project management perspectives. 3. Some late-career and post-retirement activities, PM World Journal, Vol. XV, Issue VI, June. Available online at https://pmworldjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/pmwj165-Jun2026-Stretton-Extra-curricular-PM-influences-3-Late-career-post-retirement.pdf
About the Author
Alan Stretton, PhD
Life Fellow, AIPM (Australia)
Auckland, New Zealand
Alan Stretton is one of the pioneers of modern project management. In 2006 he retired from a position as Adjunct Professor of Project Management in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia, which he joined in 1988 to develop and deliver a Master of Project Management program. Prior to joining UTS, Mr. Stretton worked in the building and construction industries in Australia, New Zealand and the USA for some 38 years, which included the project management of construction, R&D, introduction of information and control systems, internal management education programs and organizational change projects. Alan has degrees in Civil Engineering (BE, Tasmania) and Mathematics (MA, Oxford), and an honorary PhD in strategy, programme and project management (ESC, Lille, France). Alan was Chairman of the Standards (PMBOK) Committee of the Project Management Institute (PMI®) from late 1989 to early 1992. He held a similar position with the Australian Institute of Project Management (AIPM) and was elected a Life Fellow of AIPM in 1996. He was a member of the Core Working Group in the development of the Australian National Competency Standards for Project Management. He has published 280+ professional articles and papers. Alan can be contacted at alanailene@bigpond.com .
To see more works by Alan Stretton, visit his author showcase in the PM World Library at http://pmworldlibrary.net/authors/alan-stretton/.
