DEFENCE
How programmatic project management improves outcomes Programmatic – rather than piecemeal – approaches to project management, writes Aurecon’s Stephen Carroll and Chris Woodward, improves outcomes for cost, risk and business performance.
Stephen Carroll CSM is Defence Infrastructure Industry Director at Aurecon, prior to which he was a Royal Australian Navy officer and held many roles within Australia’s Defence Force over 40 years.
Chris Woodward is a Program Advisory leader at Aurecon. He is a qualified civil engineer with over 20 years of expertise in project design and service delivery.
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For asset intensive sectors – such as aviation, mining, healthcare, rail and defence – taking a piecemeal approach to managing multiple similar projects concurrently is common, but it often misses the mark in terms of achieving the best possible outcomes across cost, risk and business performance for both people and assets. However, those who turn to a programmatic approach, grouping similar projects together either by type, function, region or other relevant grouping – are realising significant value for money, reducing risk and achieving better business performance. This approach can be more important and appropriate in the uncertain financial environment that many organisations are currently facing due to Covid-19. There is a perception among many asset-intensive organisations and sectors that planning processes do not necessarily lend themselves well to delivering projects as a group. In the face of different funding sources, separate approvals processes for individual projects, and the immense size of businesses across multiple locations, many organisations opt for a piecemeal approach to simultaneously managing ‘like’ projects and programmes. This approach usually entails each project starting from scratch, individual procurements, bespoke designs and numerous teams administering each project, as well as multiple project managers, designers, contractors, and so on. As these piecemeal projects roll out, there is growing acknowledgement across asset
intensive sectors that this approach often results in time and cost blowouts, lack of consistency across facilities, re-inventing the wheel from facility to facility, not learning from safety improvements and reduced efficiencies for business performance. Organisations have also witnessed first-hand how this piecemeal approach lends itself to disruption across operations at sites from increased stakeholder meetings, repeated user requirement meetings and a lack of coordination of multiple projects occurring on sites concurrently. These organisations have also experienced how the approach can limit knowledge transfer or retention between similar projects. However, for those sectors overcoming planning process challenges and turning away from the piecemeal approach to instead manage multiple, simultaneous projects in a more coordinated, integrated way (i.e. taking a programmatic approach), it’s a vastly different story. Better certainty for good outcomes Whether projects are grouped into a region to align local industry involvement, grouped by similar budget spend for greater cost efficiency or grouped by type of project – such as health projects, mine site facilities or aviation air traffic control towers – to get a more consistent outcome for a single type of project nationally, there are a multitude of benefits. Perhaps the ultimate benefit is that a programmatic approach provides a higher degree of certainty to achieve better and more consistent outcomes Line of Defence
