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R. Britt Freund

Director of Project Management Consortium

Department:     Information, Risk & Operations Management

R Britt Freund Headshot
R Britt Freund Headshot

Dr. R. Britt Freund is Director of the Project Management Consortium at the McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He is also the former Graduate Business Dean and Director of the Full-Time, Evening and Professional MBA programs at the school. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on a wide range of topics such as project management, operations strategy, distribution, supply chain management, inventory control, optimization, process analysis, practical statistics and risk management. He has also taught extensively in executive and professional MBA programs in Europe, Asia and the USA.

Dr. Freund is a very active speaker and consultant who worked with a wide variety of public and private corporations. These companies include Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Petrobras, Sinopec, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, Texas Instruments, HEB Groceries and Frito-Lay. Dr. Freund is involved with several small startup companies in the Austin metropolitan area and is currently a member of the curriculum committee for the Texas Entrepreneurship Foundation. His primary research, teaching, and consulting interests for the past decade have been in the realm of Project Management, particularly the management of risk within large capital projects. His most recent work has been in the interface between commercial agreements and the requisite project management activities. Since 2005, he has been the Faculty Director for the Shell Project Academy (SPA) which is a consortium of four partner universities working with Royal Dutch Shell to develop and deliver project management tools for use in large capital projects. This has subsequently led to the formation of the Project Management Consortium within the university, of which Dr. Freund is the Director and founding faculty member. He has played a similar key role in setting up programs with ExxonMobil, Petrobras, and Sinopec. Dr. Freund has traveled extensively around the world, presenting workshops on project and risk management to a wide variety of project managers and senior executives. He has also consulted with the Project Director for a massive, multi-billion dollar capital project for Shell in Northern Alberta.

Dr. Freund has received a number of teaching awards from his students while at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also routinely involved in student case competitions at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.