Director of Zenergy
Dr Stephen Thorpe is a Director of Zenergy with a focus on teamwork and technology. He specialises in enhancing team performance in IT and agile project management, data science, and collective intelligence.
Stephen holds a Diploma of Facilitation from Zenergy, and also a Bachelor of Business with First Class Honours and PhD from the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) where he has a background researching online team effectiveness, group facilitation, virtual worlds, second order project management, agile practices, digital government, and IT governance. Recent work includes a co-authored paper with Bikash Pokhrel (2024) on A Review of Digital Government Challenges in Developing Nations, to be published in the proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences.
Academic
Stephen is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering, Computer and Mathematical Sciences, and a lead researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the Auckland University of Technology. He is the Director of the Project Management Research Office and Editor-in-Chief of Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal, an international peer-reviewed journal for group facilitation practitioners.
Above all, growth and agility are the underlying passions that drive his academic expertise and innovative spirit. Over recent years he has led the creation of AUT’s Master of IT Project Management. He teaches the Team Facilitation for IT Projects class and co-leads the IT Project Management classes for undergraduate students. He supervises a range of students undertaking project management, facilitation and agile-related research projects.
With an agile mindset, he likes to take a team approach, focuses on alignment, and is constantly building a culture of success. With a background in group facilitation, user-centered design and software development, he integrates the domains of technology and collaboration.
Research
Research interests include teamwork in technology, online team effectiveness, group facilitation, virtual worlds, second order project management, agile practices, collective intelligence in agile teams, digital government, and IT governance. Facilitation work includes a co-authored paper with Dr Glyn Thomas on Enhancing the Facilitation of Online Groups in Higher Education (2019), published in the prestigious Q1 Interactive Learning Environments, and a chapter on The Gift of Presence in Groups, co-authored with Dr Dale Hunter and published by Routledge in Transforming worldviews and practices: Social Ecology and education (2020) edited by David Wright and Stuart Hill.