A few years ago someone asked me the difference between a good project and a great one. I said that a good project delivers on time and in budget; a great project improves, or even saves, peoples lives. But in the time of COVID we’ve seen very few good projects in the UK, and even fewer great ones.
Rolling out a fully functioning furlough scheme in less than five weeks was a great achievement, as was the construction of the Nightingale hospitals. But the procurement of PPE when it was needed, track and trace, testing and school exams are all examples of public sector projects that have simply failed to deliver. When a government spokesperson tells us that there are “operational difficulties” that’s what they mean. A project is failing to deliver.
It’s not as though we’re not capable of delivering great projects in this country. When we get it right the results can be glorious. The BBC recently brought together the team responsible for the 2012 Olympics for The Reunion on Radio 4. Lord Coe reminded us that the whole thing was dependent on project management. So why so many failed COVID projects?
It’s partly due to the way we’re set up to get things done in this country. This is not political, but something any government could address. There are 23 ministerial departments. Their job is to make policy and manage very large budgets. For the most part they don’t have the resources to run the projects that are needed to implement those policies. The exceptions are HMRC and the DWP, and that partly explains why the rollout of the furlough scheme and the expansion of universal credit were so successful; relatively small in-house teams focused entirely on those projects.
The other departments delegate project delivery to other public bodies. And there are a lot of them:
- 20 non-ministerial departments, including the regulators Ofqual, Ofgem and Ofsted
- 412 government agencies including NHS England and Public Health England
- 343 local authorities in England alone
- 223 NHS trusts, again just in England
- and, bottom of gov.uk’s list of public bodies, three devolved administrations.
Each of these bodies has its own highly paid senior management team. But if more than one public body is involved in a project, they need to put aside any internal agendas and work together for the good of the project. Working collaboratively across organizational boundaries is something we need to do better. It often works best at a regional level. The response to the Salisbury poisonings in 2018 is a good example. All of the agencies were Wiltshire: the local council, the police force, the NHS partnership and the fire and rescue service.
There also needs to be more accountability at ministerial level. I’ve often heard people in ministerial departments refer to government agencies as “arm’s length” agencies. Delegating a project to another public body and blaming them when it goes wrong does not constitute effective project leadership.
The second reason for the large number of “operational difficulties” is project management education. In the UK it’s big business. But 90% of training courses focus on preparing people for certification, rather than developing the practical skills they need to deliver great projects.
Project management isn’t rocket science, unless you’re building a rocket. The principles are universal and apply to any industry sector. The Infrastructure and Projects Authority – one of the 412 government agencies – has recently published its latest iteration of the principles for project success. It describes them as a set of ‘basic truths’, to be used to guide thinking and behaviour in project delivery.
We urgently need to innovate and provide project management education that enables people – at all managerial levels – to work collaboratively and put those principles into practice. It’s essential if we’re going to deliver the great projects that we so desperately need right now.
