OUR JOURNEY
Project X was conceived within the Portfolio Insight Team at the IPA as a vehicle to engage contemporary research in project and programme with the ‘real-world’ issues that are manifest across the Government’s Major Project Portfolio (GMPP).
Project X is ambitious, it seeks to promote and support methodologically rigorous research that is firmly grounded in clear pathways to impact – with an ultimate ambition of delivering savings for the project delivery and enhancing project management capability across government departments and industry.
Today Project X is funded by the ESRC through a grant awarded 2018. Our research is delivered through 6 themes, each led by academics and government leads. The Themes are:-
Theme A : Defining value, understanding and measuring success and the identification of critical success factors
Theme B : Front and back-end management practices and their influence on project performance
Theme C : Data quality and use and their connections to project performance
Theme D : Assurance, reviews, reporting and governance and their connections to effective decision making
Theme E : Capability & knowledge management
Theme F : Spotlight on transformation
The 6 Themes
Theme A: Defining value, understanding and measuring success and the identification of critical success factors
The key focus of theme A is deriving, through our research, a clear understanding of what represents “value” and “success” for different types of major projects. The monitoring and measurement of value and success and how delivery progress can be tracked through the project life-cycle using performance drivers is essential. The research will therefore seek to establish best practice in this area with recommendations for how success on major projects could be assessed against appropriate value propositions.
Understanding the value generated by infrastructure, ICT, defence and transformation programme investment requires a sophisticated appreciation of the complex interplay of social, political, economic and legislative forces on the project environment. This knowledge is essential to informing decisions on ‘short-term’ capital cost and ‘long-term’ whole-life benefits and savings; a difficult task given the challenging environment in which government operates.
In seeking to generate greater value from projects, we should improve the clarity of the value proposition at the outset; expectations of the benefits to be delivered should be realistic and considered in the context of optimism bias. We should also consider how decision-makers make sense of the decision situation using the multi-faceted concepts of value and success, who is doing the conceptualisation, what their roles are, and how these ideas are turned into performance measures. We can then look to see what drives achievement of the value proposition and what leads to changes that threaten that achievement. In particular, we need to address differences between decision-makers in the ways in which value definitions are used and to make recommendations as to how better understanding and agreement on appropriate definitions can be achieved. Finally, we need to understand who owns benefits, and how they are placed to ensure that they are realised.
Theme B: Front- and back-end management practices and their influence on project performance
In this theme we are exploring the challenges encountered during the (very) early and late phases of major projects. In short, why do so many projects start and land badly? Although key aspects of project and portfolio performance are determined during these critical ‘book-end’ periods that, by definition span organisational and temporal boundaries, they are frequently overlooked in practice and poorly understood in theory/education.
Following a series of preliminary interviews (workshops, etc.) the preliminary activities of the theme include:
1. Understanding the (very) front end of project (the policy/concept - project nexus). Following further exploratory fieldwork, a preliminary conceptualisation of the dimensions connecting front-end activity and project performance will be developed and then tested using IPA data set (Universities of Bath and Brighton)
2. How can we handover projects better? How do we improve the transition of a project from the project team delivering in a project life cycle to the end users’ business as usual activities, to ensure the realisation of the benefits the project set out to achieve?
3. An investigation into the back-end of delivery’ when projects morph into operational delivery. Research conducted so far has used cases of major organisations (infrastructure clients) dealing with projects with diverse and substantial deliverables. For example, Heathrow and the new Terminal 2 Queen’s Terminal (where the transition to operations was dominated by the need to avoid replication of the problematic opening of the previously completed terminal – Terminal 5). Similarly, Transport to London has looked at the development in electronic ticketing using contactless bank-cards, such as debit and credit cards. Here, the issue was to follow the success of the deployment of the dedicated electronic ticket system known as Oyster (UCL)
Theme C: Data quality and use and their connections to project performance
It is important to understand the role of data in the governance and management of projects. Does good data help to ensure successful delivery? If we can demonstrate the link this should lead to improvements in the data we collect which will in turn enable the design and deployment of more sophisticated analytical methods capable of unlocking the latent knowledge embedded within existing data-sets.
The IPA is committed to improving the quality of the data that it collects across the GMPP and more broadly, and is keen to link GMPP with other data sets from within and outside of government. It also seeks to understand how GMPP knowledge, both explicit and tacit, can be made accessible to project and programme communities in such a way that it fosters continuous improvement and improved critical reflection on performance.
We need to understand:
a) How projects behave and the data that represents that
b) Embedded within an analytical process within the organisation
c) How the data can be used predictively
d) But this all needs an understanding of how individuals, groups and organisations behave
e) And how we deal with this needs to be associated with the eventual performance of the project (which is the point of the exercise!).
We therefore have five different levels of study, which need to inform each other.
Theme D: Assurance, reviews, reporting and governance and their connections to effective decision making
Assurance is the process by which we assess the progress of a project against its defined objectives at specific points in time to understand whether it is on track to deliver its outcomes within defined parameters. Governance, on the other hand, should ensure that the strategic alignment of programmes and projects with policy and departmental strategic plans is achieved.
The aim of this theme is to examine the impact assurance reviews, reporting and effective governance have on the progress of delivery of major projects.
A central theme in Theme D concerns the analysis of how information is visualised, integrated and layered more effectively through governance and reporting systems and practices in order to improve the quality of decision-making in major programmes. We plan to investigate the connections existing between governance and intra-organisational communications, through a study of reporting and communication mechanisms. More specifically, the study aims to understand how uncertainty and ‘unknown unknowns’ are dealt with through the design of reports (e.g. through debates mobilised by programme allowances) and the impact that visual aids to decision-making (e.g. dashboards) have on the governance, reporting and communication processes of complex programmes
Theme E: Capability & knowledge management
Delivering public infrastructure and services is dependent on projects and programmes of various sorts, many of which have been bedevilled by poor performance, especially as size and complexity increase. Development of appropriate project capability - an umbrella term which encompasses project management, programme management and portfolio management - is key to improving project delivery performance. Project capabilities are distributed in many locations around the organisation and sometimes brought in from other organisations.
This theme examines the capabilities needed to deliver successful public sector projects and programmes, how they are built and distributed. Our definition of project capabilities is based on three dimensions identified in previous research (Davies and Hobday, 2005):
· strategic project capabilities - the high level management skills and experiences which enable organisations to design and deploy projects for strategic purposes
· project structures - which refers to the ways in which capabilities are located and distributed within an organisation including informal structures and resources (e.g. key individuals and networks within organisations
· project processes - including hard or tangible systems, procedures and tools such as published standard operating procedures, project management toolkits, IT systems, manuals and flowcharts and ‘soft’, or human dimensions of project activity, such as leadership, team motivation and communications.
These three sub-sets of capability are dynamic and changing and closely related to each other. The outputs of the other themes will provide an important input into theme E and vice versa.
Theme F: Spotlight on transformation
The GMPP contains an increasing number of complex programmes designed to transform the way individual departments operate and the way in which government services are delivered to citizens. IPA have created a ‘peer group’ of the largest transformation programmes for the exchange of ideas, mutual support and the development of specific tools to assist all such programmes across government.
Government transformation and service delivery projects continue to make up the largest single category of projects by number in the portfolio. The median cost of this type of project is low (£0.2bn) but they can be the most difficult to get right due to their complex and often challenging nature. Transformation projects are often unique and therefore do not benefit from lessons learnt to the same extent that, for example, infrastructure projects do. An example of a transformation project is the Department for Work & Pensions’ (DWP) New State Pension Project to implement the Pensions Act 2014 by introducing a simple flat-rated state pension.