APM Project Winter 2021

cover VERSION

ISSUE 309 WINTER 2021 £14.50

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TH E VO I C E O F TH E PROJ EC T M A N AG E M E NT CO M M U N IT Y

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APM AWARDS

MEET THE 2021 WINNERS

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The voice of the project management community

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MAKE EVERY PROJECT MATTER IN THE RACE TO NET ZERO WINTER 2021 / ISSUE 309

THE BIG INTERVIEW THE UK GREEN BUILDING COUNCIL’S CEO JULIE HIRIGOYEN ON THE NEED TO RETHINK THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT + HOW TO HAVE CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS

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FROM THE EDITOR

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You have more power than you might think

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I write this during week two of COP26, the UN’s Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. While the bigwigs meet, it’s easy to feel powerless in the face of such a global challenge. Maybe I can cycle more instead of driving? Put less water in the kettle when I make a cup of tea? Turn the heating down a notch? But these tiny efforts to mitigate my carbon emissions felt a bit, well, pathetic. Then I read what Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s chief scientist, told the COP26 delegates that day.

“Behavioural change is part of [climate action],” said Vallance. “Some of that comes down to what we do as individuals, and some of it is what needs to happen to make things easier for us, because we can’t assume that there’s going to be dramatic personal behaviour change unless we can make some way of making that easier, so that the green choice is actually an easy choice. I cycle to work, I eat less meat than I used to and I came here by train,” he said.

“I think [behaviour change] is starting. Is it where it needs to be yet? Probably not and I think there’s more to go. But I think there’s a willingness and an engagement taking place that is going to be important.”

Adding eating less meat to my net zero to-do list, I reminded myself that the change starts with the individual and that my daily seemingly pathetic tweaks do matter. But what’s even better, is that you, as a project professional by influencing

This issue of Project is a wake-up call; a reminder that the power to make change happen lies within your hands

every project you work on to become more sustainable, have the potential to make a much bigger positive impact. You sit in an enviable position of power because the projects you deliver, from the construction of new buildings and the development of renewable energy to every award-winning project we pay tribute to in this issue, can collectively deliver massive and very real benefits for the environment and society in our race to net zero.

This issue of Project is a wake-up call; a reminder that the power to make change happen lies within your hands. We showcase some of the inspirational people and projects who are making a start. As our Big Interview this issue, Julie Hirigoyen of the UK Green Building Council, told me, “Every single project manager should be trying to figure out how to make the project they are working on not contribute to climate change at all.” So, what are you waiting for?

Emma De Vita is editor of Project

Editor Emma De Vita emma.devita @thinkpublishing.co.uk Managing editor Mike Hine Group art director Jes Stanfield Senior sales executive Samantha Tkaczyk 020 3771 7198 samantha.tkaczyk @thinkpublishing.co.uk Client engagement director Kieran Paul

The views expressed in Project are not necessarily those of APM, the publisher or its agents, and they do not accept responsibility for any solicited material, or for the views of contributors, or for actions arising from any claims made in any advertisements or inserts appearing in this journal.

This publication (or any part thereof) may not be reproduced in any form without express and written permission from the editor. © APM 2021 APM, Ibis House, Regent Park, Summerleys Road, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire HP27 9LE, United Kingdom apm.org.uk Tel (UK): 0845 458 1944 Tel (Int): +44 1844 271 640 Cover price: £14.50 Annual subscription fee: £58 (UK); £68.20 (Europe); £79 (international) PROJECT (ISSN 0957-7033) is published by the Association for Project Management in association with Think Media Group, 20 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JW Tel: 020 3771 7200 thinkpublishing.co.uk

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FROM CLIMATE TO COMMUNITY, THIS ISSUE OF PROJECT AT A GLANCE NEWS ANALYSIS

PERSPECTIVES

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Authenticity Why you shouldn’t shy away from your true self when you’re at work

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Servant leadership How to engender loyalty, respect and love in those you lead

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Learning legacy A structured approach to capturing lessons learned from major projects PRODUCTION

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Adam Boddison APM’s new chief executive on accelerating environmental sustainability

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6 London City Airport

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Big picture: the first remote-controlled major airport in the world

Professor Peter Morris Reflecting on the legacy of the former chair and vice-president of APM

What project leaders can learn from the biggest British evacuation since WWII

Carbon self-evaluation A new tool to help project professionals understand their climate impact

8 The Kabul evacuation

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FEATURES ■■■■■■■

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Big interview Project meets Julie Hirigoyen, chief executive of the UK Green Building Council

Alamy; Mike Wilkinson; Louise Haywood-Schiefer

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The climate emergency Against the backdrop of COP26, we profile professionals working on frontline climate projects

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Third sector projects The increasing professionalisation of project management among NGOs

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Hot projects Understanding what motivates teams and leads to die-hard commitment

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Eddie Obeng How project management solved the climate emergency in a day

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APM Project Management Awards 2021 Find out who took the accolades for project excellence amid challenging times

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66 PEER TO PEER ■■■■

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“Can we reuse what’s already out there? One of our biggest challenges is that we can’t keep using more resource to put something up, then tear it down and put something else up… We shouldn’t be demolishing anything unless it’s unsafe”

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Challenging conversations Top tips on how to navigate them and emerge with practical solutions

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Rethinking capabilities Valuable lessons for policy, scholarship and practice from Project X

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Delivering at speed A National Audit Office report points out that not all programmes can, or indeed should, be delivered rapidly

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Susanne Madsen Q&A: how to get out of the detail and find space to look ahead

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Chartered The latest additions to the Register of Chartered Project Professionals

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Rising star Hanna Osundina on why she puts community at the heart of her projects

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Beyond the job Using project skills to help deliver life-saving blood products by motorbike

OFFLINE

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PM meets pop culture Would TV’s affable Ted Lasso make a good project leader?

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Books and podcasts What we’ll be reading and listening to this winter

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THE FIRST REMOTECONTROLLED MAJOR AIRPORT IN THE WORLD

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London City became the first major airport to be fully remote-controlled after the 2021 APM award-winning project to build a digital control tower was successfully put into operation

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The days of air traffic controllers sitting in a tower surrounded by runways may be numbered if the precedent set by the Docklands airport is followed. Its new 50m digital control tower, complete with 14 HD cameras and two tilting binocular-style cameras, allows flights to be managed 90 miles away at the NATS control tower in Swanwick, Hampshire.

The images received by the cameras are sent to air traffic controllers via a dedicated fibre network and are screened on a panoramic video wall with useful information overlaid, such as aircraft call signs, altitude and speed overlaid. Despite the unerring lack of air traffic control officers in the tower, the new technology improves safety and efficiency.

The first of its scale anywhere in the world, the digital tower’s component parts were brought up the Thames in barges, where work was carried out solely overnight. While the tower was completed in 2019, the final switchover was not made until earlier this year. “Digital tower technology tears up a blueprint that’s remained largely unchanged for 100 years,” said Juliet Kennedy, operations director at NATS. Awarded APM’s Transformation Project of the Year, the project was praised by the judges for its innovative design and adaptability of its delivery (see page 18 for more details).

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The Kabul evacuation

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The UK government’s airlifting of British and Afghan citizens from Kabul via Operation Pitting in August 2021 was the largest British evacuation since World War II, and holds lessons for all project leaders

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n August, the UK government decided that more than 10,000 people who had worked with UK forces or other organisations would be airlifted from Kabul under the Afghan relocations and assistance policy (ARAP) scheme, which began in April after the US government announced it would be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan by 11 September. The deadline was subsequently brought forward to 31 August. NATO announced it would also be ending its mission in the country.

Operation Pitting was the British military project to evacuate British nationals and eligible Afghans from Afghanistan following the 2021 Taliban offensive. The two-week operation consisted of more than 1,000 military personnel, and ran concurrently with the evacuation efforts of numerous other countries. In a statement to parliament, the Ministry of Defence explained that, “While Op Pitting itself was a two-week-long operation, the planning had begun long before that. As the US withdrawal took shape, the MoD’s plans were continuously reviewed and refined, up until the point of execution.”

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A highly adaptable plan

According to the MoD, preparations for the evacuation began in April 2021, when a UK military team carried out an in-country reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan to review Operation Pitting’s contingency plans. The British tri-service headquarters – the Permanent Join Headquarters, which commands joint and multinational military operations on behalf of the MoD – developed a joint contingency plan. This would see ARAP-eligible people airlifted from Kabul to other locations in the

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The Royal Air Force airlifting people from Afghanistan to the UK

Middle East by military aircraft before being transferred to the UK. By necessity, Operation Pitting’s plan was highly adaptable and included a number of graduated response options that were put into action once the takeover by the Taliban became far more rapid than initially expected.

It was a project on a vast scale, to be delivered at high speed and subject to significant danger. Having assumed leadership of the delivery of the project, the MoD’s responsibilities included the operation of the Temporary Safe Location in the UAE; providing security to the Evacuation Handling Centre at

“More than 1,000 British troops, commanded by the Joint Force Headquarters, airlifted to safety an average of 1,000 people a day”

the Baron Hotel in Kabul; and inserting forces to secure a section of Kabul airport alongside a large US Security Force, which was critical in enabling an evacuation to take place.

Biggest and fastest evacuation in recent history

The evacuation was a cross-government effort between the MOD, Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Home Office and Border Force. “Our armed forces, diplomats and civil servants completed the biggest and fastest emergency evacuation in recent history, overcoming significant challenges, in the most harrowing conditions – and bringing around 15,000 people to safety in the UK and helping 36 other countries airlift their own nationals. More than 1,000 British troops, commanded by the Joint Force Headquarters, airlifted

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Evacuation from Kabul in August.

Inset: Passengers on a flight during Operation Pitting, under the ARAP scheme

Alamy; MOD

this process. But I am proud of this remarkable achievement from our Border Force, Armed Forces, MOD, FCDO, Home Office who have evacuated over 13,000 people in 14 days during Operation Pitting. We will continue to honour our debt to all those who have not yet been able to leave Afghanistan. We will do all that we can to ensure they reach safety.” to safety an average of 1,000 people a day,” the MoD stated.

With more than 100 flights used, this was the largest British evacuation since World War II and the largest airlift since the Berlin Blockade of 1948–9.

Of those evacuated, 5,000 were British nationals and 8,000 were Afghans who were vulnerable to persecution by the Taliban due to their role in assisting British forces. Around 2,200 evacuees were also children, with the youngest just one day old.

In August, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told The Guardian that: “It is with deep regret that not everyone has been able to be evacuated during

Lessons for project leaders

Lt Col Langley Sharp, who runs the British Army’s centre for leadership at Sandhurst (see his Perspectives column on page 15), has also served five operational tours in Afghanistan.

Although he did not take part in Operation Pitting, he told Project what it would be like to work on such a mission.

“It would have been a highpressured, complex and dynamic environment where troops on the ground would be having to face both a volatile and dangerous security situation – as proved to be the case when the terrorist group ISIS-K conducted a suicide attack on 26 August 2021, killing 183

people – simultaneously with a fraught and emotionally charged humanitarian crisis… Soldiers would be variously scared, emotionally charged and near exhaustion, but consistently professional, compassionate and determined.”

As a leader of a risk-laden and fast-moving project like this, several leadership qualities are required, explained Sharp. First is the cognitive ability to understand the ever-evolving context in which you are operating so that you can make the most effective decisions. Second is being able to maintain a clarity of purpose – knowing what you are there to achieve.

“Emotional intelligence is also key,” he said. “The ability to understand yourself and your soldiers, all of whom will be operating under intense and, at times, debilitating pressure, as well as

“We will continue to honour our debt to all those who have not yet been able to leave Afghanistan. We will do all that we can to ensure they reach safety”

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Airborne soldiers are praised following the troops’ efforts in evacuating entitled Afghans and civilians

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“To have any chance of success in this increasingly complex and evolving world, you have to build cohesive, high-performing teams, forged through trust”

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understanding the people you are there to help and other principal actors. In this instance, this included the Taliban, who for the past 20 years had been our adversary and now stood a matter of meters from our own troops.”

He said that the transferable lessons for leaders of any project carried out in an uncontrollable environment is to know that, “What is important is that you control the things you can, maintain a sharp focus on your mission, trust your people and their professionalism, delegate control to the lowest level at which decisions are required and communicate – and keep on communicating, up, down and sideways. A vacuum of information and understanding can prove fatal in such environments.

“To have any chance of success in this increasingly complex and evolving world, you have to build cohesive, high-performing teams, forged through trust, which work collaboratively and consistently towards a common purpose. This can’t be achieved through rank or authority; it takes leadership.

The teams that thrive in the most demanding environments have a strong binding ethos, are clear on their intent, know and trust one another intimately, have a ruthless determination to succeed and are consistently learning and adapting.”

One further piece of advice to project leaders was that, “It might sound a little counterintuitive, but relish the opportunity to work in such environments… Such situations see you operating at the peak of your personal and professional performance.”

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Applying an adaptable leadership style

Emma Dutton, CEO of Applied Influence Group, trains project professionals in the art of influencing, having previously gathered intelligence

HOW TO LEAD A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM

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Be clear about goals and objectives, and create an inclusive and coordinated environment.

Enable differences to be aired and conflict resolved in a positive way.

Provide process, clear roles and responsibilities, and timely feedback.

for the British armed forces in Afghanistan. She said that as a leader of a project like this, “You have to adapt Emma Dutton your leadership style and decision-making process in all situations, and it’s likely this situation demands quicker decisions and less consensus – important to still listen to those around you, but you won’t have the luxury of time to do that fully.

Therefore, being deliberate and quick in recognising that you’ve heard their opinions on important decisions will be more important for pace.”

To handle projects in uncertain environments, Dutton told Project it pays to make everyone who needs to be aware of the fixed constraints that are relevant to your mission. “Focusing time and energy on what we have control over will be infinitely more productive.

Be mindful that what’s obvious to you won’t be obvious to everyone else – you want to ensure those constraints are out in the open and visible to all.”

Promote openness, honesty and the development of trusting relationships so the team can perform.

Ensure that team members are transitioned back into the business or their organisation.

Source: APM Body of Knowledge, 7th Edition

Military wisdom for civilians

Drawing out the lessons for project professionals from the military sphere to the civilian one, she pointed out that, “The number one thing the military does better than civilian projects is for each role to understand the intent of the role above them, and the ultimate intent of the project – not thinking of actions and tasks but the outcome we want to achieve. If everyone has unified understanding of this, we can empower all to act to support that intent, rather than prescribe tasks. And that leads to quicker results, greater reach of effect on the problem, more creative solutions and happier people empowered to carry out their ‘commander’s intent’.

“The number two thing is having a shared consciousness around the ‘main effort’ – what is the most important thing that’s going to move us forward.

It could be to acquire a certain resource, or to get a decision, or to meet a deadline – but what’s the thing that will unlock momentum and leap us forward in progress? If everyone knows this… we maintain focus on what matters most.”

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Professor Peter Morris: A life’s work

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The former chair and vice‑president of APM sadly passed away in September, but his legacy will endure

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eter Morris was emeritus professor of construction and project management at University College London (UCL), and head of its Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management from 2002 to 2012. Prior to that, he was professor of project management at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and also enjoyed successful spells in the private sector as executive director of INDECO, a consultancy specialising in the management of projects, and as a main board member of global construction company Bovis.

A need to address society’s bigger challenges

Professor Morris was chair of APM from 1993 to 1996, becoming vice‑president in 1996. Among his many contributions to the organisation were directing the research that fed into subsequent editions of the APM Body of Knowledge and producing the report Climate Change and What the Project Profession Should Be Doing About It: a UK perspective, which was published in 2017.

CLIMATE CHANGE CT MANAGEMENT AND WHAT THE PROJE IT D BE DOING ABOUT PROFESSION SHOUL – A UK PERSPECTIVE

In the wake of the UN’s climate change conference COP26, Professor Morris’ introduction to the report seems highly prescient. He urged project professionals to think beyond the preoccupation with project management processes, and become more concerned with what the profession’s impact is on producing outcomes of real value and contributing in the most effective way as possible to society. “Society faces many challenges – it always has done. One of the most serious in many people’s eyes (but not everyone’s) currently is climate change,” he wrote in the report’s introduction. “There has always been climate change, but this time the size, speed and consequences are so much greater than before, and have often been so thoughtlessly created that we would surely be foolish not to be addressing it.”

Miles Shepherd, former vice‑president and chair of APM, said: “Peter was a colossus in the world of project management. As a profession, we owe him a huge amount and

Peter W. G. Morris

not just for his academic contribution. He was the person who moved APM from being the Association of Project Managers to being Association for Project Management, which, at a stroke, moved it into a more strategic area with broader reach and greater significance. He was a first‑class researcher, an original thinker and a man who sought to bridge any gap between academia and practice. He will be greatly missed.”

Dear friend, colleague and mentor

Andrew Edkins, professor of the management of complex projects at UCL, added: “Peter was a dear friend, close colleague and mentor. He did not simply straddle the three areas of being a scholar, being a project management practitioner and being involved in the profession of project management, but was world class in all these areas.

Being one of the first to study project management at PhD level, Peter connected existing theory to help understand, explain and improve the discipline of project management.”

A TRIBUTE TO MIKE WALLACE APM Board trustee Mike Wallace – a respected and experienced member of the project management community – sadly passed away in November.

In 2015, Mike became, at the time, the youngest person ever to achieve Registered Project Professional status, aged 29. He later went on to achieve Chartered Project Professional status.

After studying engineering science at Keble College, Oxford, Mike joined Mott MacDonald, where he managed rail projects. He also worked with the Nichols Group and PA Consulting.

During his career he successfully delivered large procurement projects and business change initiatives around the world.

Paying tribute on behalf of the Board of trustees, APM chair Debbie Lewis said: “Mike was a delight to work with and entered the boardroom full of energy and enthusiasm. I know all who knew him will miss him personally, as well as his commitment to the profession and APM. Our thoughts are with his family.”

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Every little helps

Working on a project and can’t see how to do your bit for the climate?

A new Carbon Self‑Evaluation Tool could come to the rescue

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new Carbon Self‑Evaluation Tool, due to be launched in December, will help project professionals in any organisation benchmark how well project data is supporting carbon reduction decisions. The tool will also help teams understand how well their project carbon reduction is performing against their peers in their own and other sectors. The tool will be open source, and therefore enables the sharing of insights on a scale rarely seen in the sector.

The brainchild of the Project Data Analytics Task Force (PDATF) founded

by Martin Paver, CEO of consultancy Projecting Success, the intention is that the tool will encourage climate action to be taken from the bottom‑up, while providing data that will challenge the effectiveness of top‑down policies in relation to the use of data. Through the online evaluation, project professionals will be able to see what action is being taken, where improvements can be made, and where help and support is needed to reduce carbon and promote sustainability throughout all of project delivery.

The PDATF was launched in 2020 with a vision to deliver a tenfold improvement in project performance within five years. Its ambition is to seize “the immense opportunities enabled by project data and the power of analytical tools”; taking action through meet‑ups and hackathons. Member organisations include the Major Projects Association, Sir Robert McAlpine, the Environment Agency, Projecting Success, Petrofac,

“People make decisions based on what information they have. If that information is non‑existent or poor, then good decisions cannot be made”

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Left to right: Jo Jolly and Donnie MacNicol

Saïd Business School, BAE Systems, Jacobs, University College London and the Office for National Statistics, with the task force comprising a team of senior professionals.

Driving out waste

Those who complete the carbon self‑evaluation using the tool will be asked questions across six different areas that reflect the task force’s areas of focus, from engagement with the issue to the quality of data that exists.

It should help project teams discover what data could be or is already collected around carbon emissions and where the gaps are. The aim is then to start publishing the findings through reports and insights that will share best practice across the community.

The tool is the work of the PDATF’s Climate & Nature Emergency workstream, led by Donnie MacNicol, founder of consultancy Team Animation, and Jo Jolly, deputy director in the Environment Agency, who leads its Bespoke & Emerging Projects team.

As well as APM, multiple member organisations have agreed to promote and encourage its completion.

MacNicol and Jolly believe that, for project professionals, one of the biggest untapped areas of potential to help tackle the climate and nature emergencies is effective data analytics, which can be used to drive out waste in every aspect of decision‑making

in project delivery. The Climate & Nature Emergency workstream’s objectives include inspiring project professionals to make a difference by bringing attention to the climate and nature emergencies and urging change (see right).

The hope is that project data analytics will be used to help steer projects towards net zero and wider sustainability targets and to encourage project professionals to collaborate to make the necessary changes in alleviating the effects of climate change through the development of data‑driven solutions, by challenging decision‑makers and informing the project profession of best practice. The greatest benefit will be achieved when data is shared across organisations and sectors for the greater good, they argue.

How data can help us make better decisions

MacNicol told Project that: “My world is very much about the human dimension of project delivery, which seems diametrically opposed to data and analytics, but people make decisions based on what information they have.

If that information is non‑existent or poor, then good decisions cannot be made.” The primary purpose of the Carbon Self‑Evaluation Tool, he explained, is “to try and motivate people to take more ownership of their project’s carbon performance; for example, speaking to their programme manager or the PMO and asking whether they are gathering relevant data and what they are doing with what they have.

“Project data analytics is essentially about using past and current project data to enable better decision‑making, which will drive better project performance. The Carbon

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THE PDATF’S CLIMATE ACTION OBJECTIVES Using carbon as a proxy for leading sustainability through all aspects of delivery, bringing to life the importance of data and the resulting knowledge and insight that informs the decisions we make on a day‑to‑day basis, and how we can shape these decisions using the Carbon Self‑Evaluation Tool.

Gather and share with the community the challenges and successes from the responses provided.

“If we optimise every single decision we make to get the maximum sustainability output… then we will systemically create a better world” Self‑Evaluation Tool is about providing shared knowledge of where there are good areas of carbon management or where it really needs to improve.”

The intention, MacNicol said, is to motivate people to become aware of the kind of impact they are having on the environment, to make this part of their

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Use the resulting data to allow individuals to benchmark themselves against others by professional area, level and sector.

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From the analysis of the data gathered, provide insights on the level of adoption and effectiveness of top‑down strategies, policies and initiatives.

Provide a foundation for future phases of the self‑evaluation tool that will help teams, organisations and industries to understand their collective position and relative levels of climate action and identify what they can do to make a difference.

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To inspire professionals in the projects world to make a difference by bringing attention to the climate and nature emergencies, and urge change.

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From these insights, assess what needs to be done and where, at the PDATF, we can focus our efforts for the greatest benefit to society and the environment through the lenses of the six core workstreams.

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To encourage people to take action within their own sphere of influence and volunteer to support the PDATF.

everyday work and to motivate them to do better by comparison. Eventually, MacNicol hopes that data will have been analysed and best practice collated around data skills and data solutions that any project professional could implement for themselves.

“That’s the motivation for it; that’s the outcome that we would love to have.”

The Environment Agency’s Jolly explained that: “If we optimise every single decision we make to get the maximum sustainability output through everything we do and minimise the harm, then we will systemically create

a better world. We need to trust and empower our teams and cut across the silos between and within sectors and share our data.” She said that taking climate action “primarily requires a big mindset shift, and the Carbon Self‑Evaluation Tool can help us start.

We need a shared level of ambition and courage to collaborate on a scale we haven’t yet seen.”

For more information on how to get involved, visit pdataskforce.com/ climate‑nature‑emergency or email contact@pdataskforce.com

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GET AHEAD BUT DON’T LOSE YOURSELF

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Debbie Lewis urges you not to shy away from your true self when you’re at work

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Debbie Lewis is portfolio programme manager at Fujitsu Services. She was a guest on APM’s podcast ‘How to Thrive in Your Career as a Woman’.

Listen at bit.ly/3qm7HUZ

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Within business there are often unwritten rules to which we feel compelled to conform. These can range from dress codes to the acceptance of tattoos, certain hairstyles or behaviours.

I remember when I was quite new to one organisation asking whether or not it would be acceptable to have my hair in braided extensions; thankfully the answer was yes. Over time my hairstyles have taken many forms and colours. None have impacted my ability to undertake my role any more or any less effectively or had a direct effect on my career progression. However, we do mostly conform to what we deem to be acceptable codes.

How can we progress in the world of project management and remain true to who we are? First, it’s worth reflecting on the most important aspects of your life – the things that make you the whole you. For each of us, the elements of our lives and the importance we place on them will differ. Broadly speaking there are four: self; work life/career; family/ home; and wider society.

As with most aspects of our lives, we will find there is often a need for

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compromise. As we move through life, the importance of each of the elements will change. At times they can be in direct conflict with each other. Visually we can think of each element as a circle. The size of each circle can vary; sometimes they’re of equal importance, and at other times we need to focus more on one than the others.

For a couple of years I had my parents living with me, both requiring support for various hospital and GP visits. During this time, I was in a role that required limited travel away from home. I was also in a position where I could adjust my working pattern around their needs. During this period, the family/home circle was larger than my work life/career circle. Once my parents returned to living independently, the family/home circle shrunk and the work life/career circle became larger.

This model forms part of the Leading with Values training by Stew Friedman – Wharton professor since 1984 and CEO of Total Leadership.

Within the model, he also explains how the overlap and space between the circles can vary depending on the stage we’re at in our lives.

Another area to explore is how much of your true self you are willing to share with those you work with, including those who can influence your career. Often when we enter the office environment we leave a part of the true us at the door. For some this may be their gender, sexual orientation, a regional accent or a hidden disability.

It can be anything which you think will have a negative impact on how you are perceived by others.

The danger in leaving a part of you at the door is that you’re not in a position to give your role the attention

The danger in leaving a part of you at the door is that you’re not in a position to give your role the attention you need. You’re always going to worry that someone is going to find out about your secret you need. You’re always going to worry that someone is going to find out about your secret so you invest time in hiding it when that time would be better spent doing what you really want to do with your work life. Working in a way that isn’t the true you will eventually impact your mental health and wellbeing, along with your ability to build a thriving career.

You need to assess what is important to you and accept that at different times your priorities will

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SUCCESS DEMANDS SERVICE

British Army leadership lessons apply to every project team leader; it’s about knowing how to engender loyalty, respect and love

Barack and Michelle Obama have never forgotten where they come from, and are always finding ways to give back

change and flex. If you need to focus on an area outside of your work life for a period of time, allow yourself to do this. Once your work life again becomes a bigger focus, you will be able to give it the dedication it deserves and others will see the results.

Don’t shy away from being the true you. None of us is going to be liked by everyone all of the time. Embrace your regional dialect; work with those around you to make the reasonable adjustments required if you have a hidden disability.

Be proud of who you are; you will then be in a position to perform at your best and a thriving career will follow. Grasp the opportunities being the unique, true you can bring.

As a 6'3" black woman who wears heels, I have learnt to duck under doors, but not to duck away from who I am.

Last December, General Sir Patrick Sanders took to the stand at Sandhurst’s Sovereign’s Parade to address 200 Army officers on the eve of their commissioning: “Service is about giving. Your colour sergeants and the staff here have spent the last 44 weeks serving you. They’ve given their all. It may not have felt like they were serving you, but they put every waking moment into developing, nurturing and challenging you. They’ve engendered feelings of love, loyalty and respect in you. That’s the role you must now occupy for your new charges.”

General Sanders was drawing on more than three decades of personal experience in the concept of ‘servant leadership’, a term coined in 1970

by American philosopher Robert K Greenleaf. While a nascent theory to academia, the principles of such an approach have been intrinsic to the British Army for generations, evidenced by the inauguration in 1947 of Sandhurst’s motto, ‘Serve To Lead’.

This service mindset presents a deliberate paradox, demanding that, to lead most effectively and harness the very best from their people, the leader must serve those they lead. Stripped bare, leadership is fundamentally about influencing, motivating and inspiring others towards a common objective. Stripped bare, leadership It is a social relationship, fused is fundamentally about through trust. Trust is built when those influencing, motivating and being led know that they are valued, inspiring others towards a that their interests are foremost and common objective that their potential is being nurtured.

Servant leadership is a fast track to earning and sustaining trust. And with trust comes respect, loyalty and a willingness to follow.

Servant leadership, however, extends far beyond just doing right by your people. It underpins the notion of responsibility that is inherent to any leader.

By nurturing this sense of responsibility and embedding it into the culture of an organisation, associated behaviours become habitual and intuitive for both leaders and followers. In turn, leaders can unleash the full potential of their people. Any credible leader recognises that individual talent can only go so far. Moreover, no matter how credible the leader is, we all have our personal shortfalls and all are limited by time, resources, knowledge and understanding. Persistent high performance comes not through individual endeavour, but through the collaborative achievements of the team.

The impact of service before self also helps to mitigate another paradox of leadership: the more senior – and therefore responsible – a leader, the less visibility they are likely to have of the daily business of their team. The true impact of any leader, therefore, is understood when they are not present.

It is marked by how willing others are to follow in their absence. Hence the responsibility of every leader to establish the conditions for success by serving others, supporting their needs, challenging their ambitions, setting a vision and nurturing a positive culture of shared purpose and identity.

Lt Col Langley Sharp is head of the Centre for Army Leadership and author of The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works

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LEARNING LEGACY: A SOCIAL VALUE INITIATIVE FOR THE PROFESSIONS?

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Karen Elson explains how HS2’s learning legacy is helping embed the idea as an industry standard approach Project to industry knowledge‑sharing (public)

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Karen Elson is director of knowledge at Co.Cre8

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Learning legacy is a structured approach to the capture and dissemination of lessons, good practice and innovation from major projects aimed at raising the bar in industry.

Ten years after London 2012 launched the industry’s first learning legacy to much acclaim in the industry, and building on the subsequent learning legacies of Crossrail and Thameslink London Bridge, HS2 has taken the metaphorical baton and launched its own learning legacy.

I led the development of the London 2012 learning legacy framework as part of my role as a programme assurance executive for the Olympic Delivery Authority, and also set up the Crossrail and HS2 learning legacies. What is particularly brilliant, however, is that, having published the learning legacy framework for Crossrail, Thameslink developed its own learning legacy for London Bridge, demonstrating that the learning legacy is becoming an industry standard approach.

While I was scoping out the HS2 learning legacy, one particularly engaged main contractor whom I interviewed described the learning legacy as a social value initiative for the professions.

That’s the best description I’ve heard to date. Giving back to the industry and supporting professional learning, and ultimately raising the bar, is the goal of learning legacies.

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So how effective are learning legacies?

Knowledge management purists argue that you can’t codify knowledge. Others say that 20 per cent of knowledge is explicit and can be captured, while the other 80 per cent is in people’s heads. I say that, while the articles and the resources on the learning legacy websites focus on sharing the 20 per cent, learning legacies can also tap into the 80 per cent through active dissemination programmes with industry partners that enable experts from across the project to connect with peers through presentations, discussions and conversations. At HS2, we’ll be rolling out the Author Speaker programme to do this.

Project to project knowledge‑sharing (private)

HS2 is the first project to launch its learning legacy programme this early in the life cycle. This has the benefit of being able to capture the learnings around the early stages of a project, such as procurement, initiation, enabling works and mobilisation, which were distant memories on previous learning legacies.

However, starting this early means that there is still some way to go, so it is important that learning legacy is not a one‑way vehicle, and that HS2 can share its learning but also learn from other projects. We are setting up reciprocal knowledge‑sharing agreements/mutual NDAs between HS2 and other major projects to enable detailed learning between projects and support candid conversations behind closed doors that you might not want published on an open forum. While this is necessarily a very HS2‑centric approach, I can see a future where there

is a major projects knowledge‑sharing network with a standard approach to knowledge‑sharing.

Individual knowledge‑sharing At the launch of the HS2 learning legacy we asked attendees: what would make you more likely to share knowledge?

Fifty‑five per cent of the 159 people who responded said ‘Recognition of your contribution to the profession’ and 39 per cent said ‘Being published’. There has been a huge level of engagement on the HS2 learning legacy across the whole supply chain – 220 authors across 39 organisations in the first two tranches of content. This is a real step change from previous learning legacies, in which the majority of content was from the client body and where my conversations with the supply chain inevitably led to their concerns over guarding their IP.

A systems approach

Learning legacies provide a social value platform for knowledge‑sharing across industry and provide professional recognition for individuals. However, they are just one cog in the system of learning and innovation. A joined‑ up approach to lessons learned, innovation, continuous improvement and knowledge provides much greater opportunity to raise the bar in industry.

A good example of this systems approach came from enabling works contractors on HS2, who have developed a series of learning legacy papers to hand over their learning and innovation to the main works contractors. They then got together at a knowledge‑sharing event to discuss them and transfer that learning. A systems approach to learning and innovation by major projects is the next big opportunity for improved productivity in our industry.

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ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY IN PROJECTS: BUILT‑IN, NOT BOLT‑ON New chief executive of APM, Adam Boddison, on why project professionals are perfectly poised to accelerate environmental sustainability

In my first few weeks and months at APM I have found the organisation bursting with energy and innovation.

There is an emerging alignment of supply and demand in relation to environmental sustainability within the workforce of project professionals, and APM is well placed to nurture and accelerate this.

There is significant global demand for the projects of the future to be sustainable and to support the wider climate change challenge of achieving net‑zero carbon emissions.

Ordinarily this would put pressure on professional bodies such as APM to reposition their approach and their membership proposition to ensure it remains relevant. However, the reality is that we are already on the case, having recognised and prioritised environmental sustainability within our work.

Our support for sustainability

In June 2020 we published a blog by APM member Richard Samworth (bit.ly/3qmaRbx), who argued that project professionals could take five steps to support environmental sustainability: define sustainability as a project tolerance; embed sustainability in the business case; configure project management tools to measure and manage sustainability tolerances; roll up sustainability tolerances

through programmes and portfolios; and make small changes to the way you work.

A year earlier, we published a series of challenge papers, including Climate Change, Clean Growth and Sustainability (bit.ly/3mWD1rp).

There is also an excellent essay on the APM website from the late Professor Peter Morris, who makes the point that APM, as the chartered body for the project profession, is central to providing a platform for debating the role of project management in tackling climate change (bit.ly/3qj5Dx6).

Even as far back as the 2015 Paris Agreement, APM’s professional community was making the case that projects are central to the solution.

Indeed, in 2016, the project manager Marc de Graaf and the author Gilbert Silvius were clear that sustainability must be on the agenda for the project profession (bit.ly/3qiUPz7).

COP26, held in Glasgow last month, represented an opportunity for governments to make a clear statement on their commitments to tackling climate change and supporting environmental sustainability. However, even the most dirigiste of governments cannot achieve success without collaboration and partnership. As a pan‑sector profession, it is project professionals who are exceptionally well placed to support governments around the globe in achieving their carbon‑neutral ambitions.

Through our diverse membership and network of corporate partners, we will continue to emphasise the urgency of optimising the sustainability of projects and innovating for the future.

Sustaining sustainability

In the longer term, it is essential that environmental sustainability becomes built in to what routinely happens in projects. To achieve this, project professionals need to have a clear understanding of how sustainability benefits individual projects, not just the bigger picture. We must play a leading role in building the evidence base, so that those project professionals with the most agency become more likely to make the most environmentally sustainable choices.

Project professionals may be loyal to their traditional ways of working, but it is clear that they also understand the importance of contextualisation.

Navigating an appropriate balance of fidelity and flexibility will be essential for a sustainable future.

The role of collaboration

It is vital that APM members, Fellows and chartered professionals play their part. The power of collaboration between project professionals cannot be underestimated, so I would encourage anybody reading this to consider how they might contribute to the project community. This might be through their own direct channels or through communities of practice, such as the APM Hub (hub.apm.org.uk).

In summary, a significant number of projects already make a difference, as they are designed with environmental sustainability as a central expectation. While governments will come and go, project professionals are a constant in society. It is in the gift of our profession to make a difference – what will you do to move us forwards?

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HEADLINE SPONSOR VERSION REPRO OP SUBS ART PRODUCTION

MEET THE APM PROJECT MANAGEMENT AWARDS 2021 WINNERS…

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The breadth of projects winning accolades this year are testament to the amazing efforts of professionals working across every sector, from government to UK plc. With such a testing year behind us, it’s time to celebrate the successes we showcase here and give every professional involved in these innovative projects the acknowledgement they deserve

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rom keeping the very fabric of society together to pioneering new technology and ways of working, it’s been a year of courage, hard work and excellence. Every project, every programme, has had to be steered through another tumultuous year of the pandemic – and some were born from it. Read on to find out more about the innovations project professionals have been embracing, from ground‑breaking AI technology to assist the diagnosis of strokes, and helping to prove the case for hydrogen‑powered domestic heating to helping organisations move towards more responsive and agile ways of working that allow every worker to share their knowledge and lift their teams higher. The year 2021 has been about innovation and collaboration, so let’s celebrate such well‑deserved success…

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Medica Reporting Ltd took home Technology Project of the Year and Overall Project of the Year

TECHNOLOGY PROJECT OF THE YEAR AND OVERALL PROJECT OF THE YEAR INTRODUCING AI INTO THE TELERADIOLOGY WORKFLOW, MEDICA REPORTING LTD Teleradiology is the transmission of radiological patient images, such as X‑rays, CTs and MRIs, from one location to another for the purposes of sharing studies with other radiologists and physicians. Teleradiology allows highly trained clinical specialists to provide expert radiology reports even if thousands of miles away from the originating hospital, and Medica Reporting Ltd provides hospital radiology departments with independent capacity reporting.

Initiating this ground‑breaking project, Medica intended to become the first company in the UK to use AI to identify patients suffering from an intracranial haemorrhage, and use this information to support prioritisation within its clinical reporting processes.

One of the key factors that can minimise the harm caused by a stroke is the speed of clinical response. Medica believed that the adoption of a specific algorithm (qER) would streamline workflows, enhance efficiency and

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Essex County Council, winner of the Contribution to Project Management: Not‑for‑profit award

support the delivery of an even faster diagnostic service.

The three primary objectives were to: deliver significant service transformation; deliver recognisable and valuable clinical improvements; and support Medica’s stated strategic ambition for future growth and market consolidation as the leader in technical innovation in teleradiology.

As a result of this project, Medica is now confident it has the data required to actively prioritise studies that are likely to contain an intracranial haemorrhage, thus ensuring they are reported on and returned to the client even more quickly. Its current turnaround times for acute studies is now 23 minutes.

The project has delivered positive benefits to patients and has also provided a valuable learning experience to the wider organisation in terms of the implementation of augmented intelligence. It has enabled Medica to become the first teleradiology company in the UK to actively deploy the qER algorithm within its live workflows.

The holistic approach to this life‑saving project really impressed the judges, who felt the iterative lessons learned process clearly helped the project to continuously improve as it progressed. When deciding on a winner

for the Overall Project of the Year award, they were looking for an outstanding project that has been well executed and delivers significant, meaningful benefits both now and in the future – this project ticked all these boxes. The judges felt this was an overwhelmingly vital project for healthcare and were inspired by the passionate response to the project shown by the team.

CONTRIBUTION TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT: NOT‑FOR‑PROFIT ESSEX COUNTY COUNCIL Essex County Council (ECC) is one of the largest local authorities in England, serving a population of more than 1.4m. Effective delivery of change is fundamental to Essex achieving its strategic aims, not least with ongoing financial pressures and the multitude of challenges, including the pandemic.

The range of transformation projects in ECC is vast and supporting this portfolio of change is Transformation Delivery and Support (TDS), home for around 100 project professionals.

One of ECC’s key innovations is the set of Project, Programme and Portfolio Books that have been developed in‑house. The Project

Book is an Excel‑based toolkit that automates the production of project documentation at the click of a button, and facilitates a project health check.

The development of the Books comes through the innovative thinking of ECC’s project management community.

Its recent launch of a new Programme Book incorporates functionality to roll up project information from individual Project Books to the Programme Level.

Having experienced project managers and project management tools in place was critical in ECC’s emergency response to COVID‑19. Response efforts included collaborating with partners to deliver initiatives such as test and trace, vaccinations and emergency mortuaries.

ECC had to quickly deploy project management professionals to respond, and having the Project Book meant project managers were equipped to hit the ground running.

Described by the judges as a “really great entry with fantastic project management principles”, TDS was a clear winner, recognised for its commitment to continuous improvement, and its considerable positive impact on ECC and the wider community through a professional, efficient and effective project and business change capability.

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APM PROJECT MANAGEMENT AWARDS 2021 VERSION REPRO OP SUBS

Contribution to Project Management: Company or Consultancy award winner, Balfour Beatty

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CONTRIBUTION TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT: COMPANY OR CONSULTANCY BALFOUR BEATTY

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Engineering and construction business Balfour Beatty has 1,300 members in its UK project management community. Under the sponsorship of its executive committee, Balfour Beatty has established the Project Management Leadership Group (PMLG), which has clear, defined objectives around developing and communicating best practice, talent development, improving project controls and increasing diversity.

Launched in 2020 and supporting the PMLG is the Shadow PMLG (SPMLG), a nominated group of project managers who bring a diversity of thought from across the business to deliver organisational change and development projects. Sponsoring both the PMLG and the SPMLG is the Project Directors Council, which strives for excellence across the full Balfour Beatty project management community and raises the status of project management across the business.

In 2018, Balfour Beatty launched ‘My Contribution’, a Yammer‑based engagement tool for employees to share innovations. Anyone with an idea writes a post on any Yammer page with the hashtag #idea, which triggers a chatbot to message the author of the post. The ideas are reviewed by expert panels, which decide whether or not to implement it more widely and put a team in place to support the delivery. More than 7,600 ideas have been submitted, and 1,268

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developed into projects delivering cost savings of more than £31m.

The judges were impressed by the company’s commitment to improving project management, with a good description of the cultural change approach, beneficial use of digital tools and a solid best practice framework.

CONTRIBUTION TO PROJECT MANAGEMENT: SMALL TO MEDIUM ENTERPRISE P2 CONSULTING Sponsored by

When P2 was established, the consultancy was tasked with not only delivering clients’ most challenging projects, but also

providing the expertise to help radically transform their own project management capability. For P2, success is leaving a client organisation more capable than when it arrived – and being an excellent project manager is no longer just about classic project delivery but a wide range of technical and soft skills, as well as knowledge of the end‑to‑end delivery cycle and a strong grasp of digital techniques, such as automation and predictive analytics.

To enable this, P2 uses the ‘T‑shaped’ consultant model – the vertical line represents the broad base of project management knowledge and core skills, such as business analysis, PMO and testing. The horizontal line represents expertise in areas such as problem‑solving, team management and conflict resolution. P2 promotes a holistic approach, with project managers being multi‑skilled and able to support and coach team members, alongside assuring all aspects of delivery. All P2 team members are trained in agile and waterfall methodologies (including Prince2 and MSP), and some specialist agile project managers also have Scaled Agile certification.

The judges found P2 to be a well‑structured company with a clear commitment to the development of its people and clients, and specifically saw great value in the use of tools to ensure learning is shared and used on future assignments.

P2 Consulting won the Contribution to Project Management: Small to Medium Enterprise award

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PMO OF THE YEAR BT’S CLIENT SERVICES PMO The Client Services PMO is a portfolio, programme and project management office supporting the delivery of complex programmes for BT’s Enterprise customers. Since being established in the summer of 2019, the PMO has been on a radical transformation to launch new services and dramatically increase its maturity. It has established a robust methodology, launched an industry‑ leading tool, set up strong governance and reporting arrangements, improved the likelihood of successful delivery and now manages the assignment of 850 professionals. This has led to the improvement of key business metrics, including successful project delivery and customer satisfaction.

The judges found the winner provided a strong and clear presentation of a PMO driving improvement and were impressed by its use of best practice for both delivery and people.

The team from BT’s Client Services PMO, who took home the PMO of the Year award

PROGRAMME OF THE YEAR HY4HEAT, ARUP Sponsored by

Arup’s Hy4Heat programme was named Programme of the Year for 2021

Heating homes contributes to about a third of all carbon emissions in the UK. The Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy’s (BEIS) Hy4Heat programme’s overall objective was to provide the technical, performance, usability and safety evidence to de‑risk the use of hydrogen in homes and lay the groundwork for a community trial. Leading the £25m programme, launched in 2017, was Arup+, a team that brought together Arup’s programme management expertise, with leaders in energy and hydrogen. Overcoming widespread scepticism in the gas industry about the technical and commercial viability of hydrogen technology, the evidence‑based, stakeholder‑led approach resulted in a shift in

industry mindset and established the foundations for a community trial.

The key deliverable of the programme was a final report that provides the technical, performance, usability and safety evidence to demonstrate whether hydrogen can be used for heat in buildings.

The outcomes and benefits of the programme were broader and more significant than expected at the start as there’s been a transformation in the mindset of industry towards a hydrogen future. This has enabled the government to commit to a hydrogen village by 2025 in its Ten‑Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution (2020).

By adopting an evidence‑based, stakeholder‑led approach, Arup+

mobilised manufacturers, supply chains and academic partners to collaborate on developing the boilers, meters, cookers, heaters and other appliances that will be central to a community‑level trial that it is a priority for the UK government. In a short time, the programme has moved UK hydrogen heating technology to commercial market readiness.

The judges described this as “a truly fantastic programme”, finding the programme management principles applied as “very good indeed”. There was clear evidence that a logical and pragmatic approach had been used to extract the best out of the innovative process and manage challenges as part of the mission plan.

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APM PROJECT MANAGEMENT AWARDS 2021 VERSION REPRO OP

SHELL HEALTH, SAFETY, SECURITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL (HSSE) AWARD SAFETY TASK FORCE, NETWORK RAIL Sponsored by

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The Safety Task Force (STF) was formed to improve the safety of Network Rail’s track workers. Some 13,000 workers are on track every day and their families expect them to come home every day. But since July 2019, it has lost four track colleagues and Network Rail was determined nobody would be next. It is reducing risk by providing improved planning methods, track safety equipment and training.

The STF’s biggest achievement so far is the reduction in lookout working.

Since track workers naturally trust the teammate who’s looking out for them, the STF team has used data from analysis of near‑miss and operational close‑call events, and encouraged colleagues to understand and trust the track safety equipment. Lookout working used to account for around 25 per cent of all work, yet nearly 70 per cent of near misses. Lookout working has been reduced by 83 per cent and now comprises just four per cent of work undertaken, with plans in place to eliminate this by December 2021.

For the STF’s route teams it was clear that organisational stories needed to be busted around a number of

The Shell HSSE award went to Network Rail for its Safety Task Force

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London City Airport’s Digital Tower was awarded Transformation Project of the Year

things, including ‘lookout working is the safest way of working’. The STF carried out hundreds of visits and employed innovative communications approaches, such as sending messages in their paper payslips.

The judges were impressed by the innovative solution in response to a clear recognition for change to improve health and safety, and were encouraged by the positive way the solution was put forward, where input was sought and gained across the whole of Network Rail.

TRANSFORMATION PROJECT OF THE YEAR LONDON CITY AIRPORT DIGITAL TOWER, NATS Sponsored by

London City Airport (LCA) is the first major commercial airport in the UK to transfer Air Traffic operations from a traditional, on‑site function to a purpose‑built digital facility 80 miles away. Following four years of development, the London City Digital Tower entered live operations in January 2021 with the air traffic controllers relocated to the NATS Control Centre in Hampshire, from where they manage every flight using live images presented on a panoramic video wall.

From the airport’s perspective, the key benefits were to recover valuable real estate at the airport, support their terminal development plans and enable a 360‑degree view of the airport to be presented remotely. From a NATS perspective, the Air Traffic Control operation would benefit from increased visibility of airport and surroundings, and increased situational awareness and safety enhancement. This also presented an opportunity to create a showcase for digital towers in the UK and secure NATS’ international reputation.

The project comprised the delivery of a new 50m mast with secure, resilient equipment rooms for the critical assets required by LCA and NATS to provide the remote service; the delivery and integration of equipment and services required at the airport to support the Digital Tower; the delivery and integration of all equipment and services needed for a new remote digital tower operations room in Hampshire; and a staff relocation programme.

The innovative design and delivery of this transformational project got the judges’ attention. Particularly impressive was the adaptability of the project, which was delivered successfully despite increasing complexity as the project progressed.

It was clear that lessons learned had been applied effectively throughout the project to adapt project management delivery tools and techniques.

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SOCIAL PROJECT OF THE YEAR MANAGED QUARANTINE SERVICE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE Sponsored by

The Managed Quarantine Service (MQS) was rapidly established to protect UK Borders from health security risks arising from the pandemic. A minimum viable product was delivered from a standing start two and a half weeks after the Prime Minister’s announcement in January 2021. Within four months the project had scaled to successfully match growing demand, extending to 60 hotels accommodating around 19,000 passengers at any one time. It was a complex project encompassing changes in legislation and digital delivery.

The judges felt this project stood out as a fantastic example of a project successfully responding to an urgent and evolving need, and by implementing an ongoing lessons learned process, the project delivered what it planned to do. With an interesting mix of customer and stakeholder, the delivery plan included very good project management and showed a clear ability to manage a changing requirement. The examples of communication, rapid feedback and adaptation were exemplary.

A recent IPA review also noted that the project was: “an astonishing feat.

The MQS team has worked furiously hard with a strong sense of purpose to create an effective hotel quarantine service for countries classed as Red by

The Department of Health and Social Care, winner of Social Project of the Year

Boston Barrier was named Engineering, Construction and Infrastructure Project of the Year

Ministers… Some two to three per cent of the quarantined guests have Covid or a variant: people who would otherwise have entered the population at large”.

The system has scaled massively and faced numerous challenges but delivered what it set out to do. The most innovative action taken from a project management perspective was the appointment of a full‑time SRO (who are a rarity in government). This has paid dividends in ensuring due time was given to managing through the complexity, allowing the team to deliver at pace. The IPA has highlighted a keenness to use MQS as a case study for future major projects in government.

ENGINEERING, CONSTRUCTION AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT OF THE YEAR BOSTON BARRIER PROJECT – TIDAL BARRIER, ENVIRONMENT AGENCY AND TURNER & TOWNSEND The town of Boston has a history of tidal flooding (most recently in 2013) and is at significant risk from further events. The Environment Agency (EA) responded with the £110m Boston Barrier project, which is set to reduce the tidal flood risk from a one in 50 to one in 300 chance of occurring in any given year. The project comprises the construction of a 25m‑wide tidal rising sector gate in the Haven, along

with associated control facilities and land‑based flood‑risk management structures that tie into the barrier structure. The project scope includes the replacement of the Port of Boston’s wet dock entrance mitre gates with a new set of vertical sector gates to increase flood resilience.

The project was identified as a national priority project in the UK government’s 2014 Autumn Statement, forming part of a programme to reduce the risk of flooding to 300,000 homes by 2021. Construction work commenced on‑site in early 2018 and is due to be completed in 2022. The project delivery within the EA’s framework agreements was a key factor of success as it enabled long‑term partnerships to be forged within the supply chain and skills and knowledge to be retained. The team followed the PRINCE2 Project Management methodology, which is used for the delivery of capital projects within the EA. Although the project has not yet been completed, more than 13,000 properties are already better protected, due to the primary barrier installation and handover for operation in December 2020.

The clear context for the project, along with a sound project management method and good risk management and assurance, made it a stand‑out winner, with the judges impressed by the development of the team, especially the open culture created by project leadership to promote innovation.

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APM PROJECT MANAGEMENT AWARDS 2021 VERSION REPRO OP

INNOVATION IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT ACCELERATING INNOVATION IN THE RAIL INDUSTRY, PA CONSULTING AND NETWORK RAIL Sponsored by

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PA Consulting and Network Rail are revolutionising the railway through the delivery of the Accelerated Innovation programme by employing agile ways of working and a bespoke delivery framework to test ideas from the front line, enabling the business to deliver benefits faster and progress ideas to a prototype concept in weeks rather than years. It has the potential to deliver benefits in excess of £231m.

The rail industry has a culture of safety and efficiency with the entire operating model focused on delivering value for money for passengers and freight. However, that is not enough to deliver the transformational performance improvement the industry needs. The rail regulator and Network Rail determined that R&D and Innovation were an important tool to deliver the performance improvement and granted Network Rail £245m to deliver an ambitious R&D portfolio.

Network Rail and PA Consulting came together to design the Accelerated Innovation programme, which identifies and progresses ideas to a prototype concept in weeks, and consists of a five‑stage agile‑based delivery framework.

The judges were looking for examples of progressive, diverse and innovative approaches to project delivery, including techniques, processes or methods that directly contributed to successful project outcomes.

This programme did not disappoint.

They felt that this has clearly been a successful programme that has challenged the traditional approach to change through the introduction of agile techniques. One judge particularly wished to champion the introduction of agile working, describing it as being implemented “almost by stealth to a very waterfall industry”.

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Jacob Bould (centre), winner of Project Professional of the Year

Jess Tray (right) took home the Young Project Professional of the Year award

PROJECT PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR JACOB BOULD, ROLLS-ROYCE PLC

significant project that offered some great benefits to the organisation and wider stakeholders. They found him to demonstrate many examples of good engagement with his team, which served as an inspiration to other projects. Bould’s clarity about the project management techniques he used, as well as his great team approach, made him the clear winner.

To pioneer the jet engines of the future you need world‑leading testing capability. That’s why, after 4.5 years of design and construction, and £90m of investment, Rolls‑Royce Plc has transformed a car park in Derby into the biggest, smartest aero engine test facility in the world. Working with a global team, project manager Bould led this project to successful delivery on time, to budget and to quality, overcoming the challenges presented by the pandemic.

The facility will serve as a base for testing UltraFan, Rolls‑Royce’s engine for the future. Project completion has also enabled the business to execute a strategic exercise of global site consolidation, reducing the number of testing facilities utilised – in particular those externally owned, reducing costs and increasing flexibility. The project is a key enabler for the company commitment to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.

The judges were impressed

by Bould’s delivery of a clearly

Innovation in Project Management winners PA Consulting and Network Rail

YOUNG PROJECT PROFESSIONAL OF THE YEAR JESS TRAY, GATE ONE Sponsored by

The pandemic disproportionately affected Londoners from minority ethnic communities and those experiencing inequalities. To address this, Good Thinking (a digital NHS mental health service) sought to produce specific content to help those communities access support. Tray joined the team in December 2020, with the initial brief to engage with three faith communities and develop three pieces of culturally relatable content, as well as a reusable faith engagement methodology. By March 2021, she’d engaged more than 30 organisations and produced over 40 pieces of content – significantly exceeding the brief and delivering to time and budget.

She designed a process with two different engagement approaches: a faster‑moving faith‑based approach and

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a slower‑moving population‑based one.

This enabled her to engage communities with the highest level of inequalities, while working with established faith organisations to rapidly reach diverse audiences. Taking an agile project management approach, Tray designed a visual pipeline showcasing where organisations were along this six‑step process, meaning she could flex her approach with each organisation and manage asynchronous delivery, while presenting a concise view of the evolving status to the core team.

She launched a new faith and belief communities section and ‘Five Ways to Good Mental Wellbeing & Islam’. By combining data analysis, project management and creativity, Tray designed an innovative approach that looked beyond the boundaries of the brief and brought together stakeholders across mental health and faith in a way that’s not been done before. The approach and resources have been shared widely, including with the Public Health Mental Health Network, vaccination leads, interfaith organisations, social‑prescribing link workers and primary care networks.

Tray’s innovative approach to this highly impactful project made her stand out to the judges, who were impressed by her energy and enthusiasm. They felt she went above and beyond to demonstrate excellent stakeholder management and a strong capability for building effective relationships.

OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARD JOHN McNAMEE There are no formal criteria for this award but the expectation is clearly that the individual needs to have delivered something extra special for the profession. The winner of this highly prized accolade is debated and decided by the APM Board of Trustees.

This year, they unanimously agreed to recommend the project manager behind the successful NASA JPL Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission, John McNamee, who delivered such a

Special Recognition Award winner NHS Charities Together

SPECIAL RECOGNITION AWARD NHS CHARITIES TOGETHER In 2021, APM chose to give a Special Recognition Award to NHS Charities Together, for its swift and effective response to the pandemic. This included delivering an urgent Covid‑19 response appeal that raised more than £150m, and ensuring that funding was allocated to those who needed it most in the NHS. In 2020, Captain Sir Tom Moore provided a £33m legacy by walking 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday; NHS Charities Together has been instrumental in making sure that funding was used for projects to support NHS workers focus on their life‑saving work more effectively at a time of immense pressure.

“We are delighted to have won this award, which recognises the efforts of our small and dedicated team during

positive project during a time of great adversity and challenge, and that went a long way to lift the spirits of the public worldwide – giving everyone hope for future progress.

Says McNamee, “I am incredibly humbled and appreciative to accept this award, but I receive it on the backs of the thousands of individuals involved in making the project happen. It has been a privilege to lead such a committed group of people, especially during such unprecedented times, and I will ensure that they are all aware of this honour in recognition of everything they have achieved.”

the pandemic,” says Ellie Orton OBE, chief executive of NHS Charities Together. “With our 240 member charities, we worked together to ensure the funds raised went to where they were needed most – benefitting NHS staff, patients and volunteers in every corner of the UK. I would like to thank every person who supported the Covid‑19 Appeal and helped us raise such a huge amount of money.

“We’re still here to support the people of the NHS in every part the country, every day of the week. Because the pandemic’s impact is expected to last for many years, partnerships between the NHS and NHS charities are now more vital than ever. Together, we can provide the extra support needed in hospitals, ambulance teams, community and mental health services, and help the NHS go further for everyone – now and in the future.”

NASA’s John McNamee

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THE BIG INTERVIEW

JULIE HIRIGOYEN Emma De Vita meets a leader in sustainability who

demands a radical rethink of how we construct the built environment. It means viewing every construction project as a co-owned collaboration over its entire life cycle with everyone playing their part in the race to net zero

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ulie Hirigoyen has her work cut out. She is chief executive of the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC), a membership organisation that has an ambitious mission to radically improve the sustainability of the built environment across all its life cycle stages. Its members are drawn from a broad spectrum, from those working in investment, development, construction, products and materials to architects, engineers, project managers and academics, and it’s Hirigoyen’s job to galvanise consensus and collaboration between them. “At UKGBC, we’re concerned with all types of built assets, any kind of scale of scheme – across the whole design, build, operate and decommission process,” she explains. “We’re really there to convene the sector together to find ways of overcoming obstacles and challenges, and find new ways of doing things,” she says.

Hirigoyen has spent most of her career in real estate, fiercely banging on the sustainability drum, most recently as UK head of sustainability at services company JLL. Now she’s in the right place, at the right time to help accelerate the race to net zero carbon emissions for a sector at the “I am genuinely heart of the debate. Since she worried about joined the UKGBC in 2015, their future.

I really just find it Hirigoyen has articulated a clear quite frightening” vision of what it should achieve – to have a built environment that enables both people and the planet to thrive, and to do this in a measurable and meaningful way. Her sense of urgency is palpable.

How does the UKGBC make change happen is what Hirigoyen has been focusing on over the past six years, helping to coalesce a clear vision, objectives, as well as creating impact reports that tangibly measure success. For

the first time, the membership organisation is also requiring its members to take real action when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Through collaboration, the sharing of best practice, and advocating for action by government and business on climate change mitigation, resource efficiency and circularity, Hirigoyen hopes to affect real change.

UKGBC’s Gold Leaf members (around 10 per cent of its 600 members) are now required to sign up to the UNFCCC Race to Zero campaign, while other standard business members are expected to have an organisation-wide climate commitment of some kind.

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e speak via Zoom a fortnight before COP26 happens in Glasgow, in a year identified for taking action globally on climate change. Hirigoyen sits in her running gear, back from her own race around the Oxfordshire countryside where she lives with her husband and two children. She says it’s her nine-year-old and 13-year-old who motivate her work. “I am genuinely worried about their future. I really just find it quite frightening,” she explains.

“And I’m also very upset by the number of the generation of my nieces and nephews who are saying they will never have kids because it’s irresponsible. In this vein of work one finds oneself constantly oscillating between hope and despair.”

Hirigoyen has been crunching data from the 2018 National Statistics data, which suggests that the built environment is directly responsible for 27 per cent of UK net carbon emissions, rising to 40 per cent if surface transport is included. “Obviously, it needs to reduce its contribution to emissions, but I think what’s a really exciting possibility that is not being talked enough about is the kind of technological innovation and visions of the future that are more progressive,” she says.

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“We might eventually conceive of buildings and built assets as mini-power stations in their own right, generating renewable energy of their own – and they could also be carbon sinks. There are construction materials now being developed that are sucking back carbon from the atmosphere or they’re locking carbon in… so actually they could be genuinely regenerative rather than just being a bit less bad,” she says.

Constructing net zero new-builds is one thing, but 80 per cent of the buildings that we will have in 2050 in the UK have been built already. “Our biggest challenge is decarbonising our existing stock,” she says. “There’s no excuse though for still not building new buildings to net zero because that’s doable today – truth is we’re still not.” The UKGBC is big on sharing best practice, and Hirigoyen points to the whole list of retrofit projects that it is showcasing in its Build Better Now exhibition as part of the lead-up to COP26, ranging from projects in Nottingham and Bristol to Glasgow where fossil fuel boilers are replaced with heat pumps or buildings clad in airtight insulation.

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ut what about the use of high-carbon materials like concrete? “That’s a big challenge, but the Global Cement and Concrete Association has just launched its road map to net zero by 2050 with no offsets. Obviously, it will have to use carbon capture and storage, and massively invest in renewable energies – and some of that will come at a cost, but it is exciting to see the industry start to shift its attention to the embodied carbon associated with the manufacture and transportation of materials,” she says.

That shift also requires a seismic move in mindset, which is to ask the fundamental question: do we need to build it in the first place? “Can we reuse what’s already out there?

One of our biggest challenges is that we can’t keep using more resource to put something up, then tear it down and put something else up. We just can’t keep doing that. We shouldn’t be demolishing anything unless it’s unsafe and can’t be reused in some capacity. It’s completely crazy,” she argues.

“When new buildings are being designed, this should be with the long term in mind, to stand for 100 years and be reused, adapted or taken apart, like a car or a phone to be recycled.”

Hirigoyen talks enthusiastically about the idea of building products as services that can be leased, such as lifts, where you lease the right to ‘vertical transport’ in a building.

“One could conceivably think about leasing a building façade or a steel beam, then giving it back to the manufacturer… We should and could get a lot better with that because it’s basically incentivising the manufacturer to take back, reuse and recycle – upgrade and put it back into a valuable use.” It’s a radical rethink in how we think about constructing our built environment, but it’s already happening in places, says Hirigoyen.

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UK Green Building Council chief executive Julie Hirigoyen was photographed by Mike Wilkinson at Cadworks in Glasgow, one of the most sustainable buildings in Scotland

In the meantime, the UK should be designing and constructing for the lowest amount of carbon emissions, measured across the real whole life cycle impact of a building and driving it down wherever possible through the choice of materials and the amount of product that is being used across the project. Once constructed, a building should then be measuring for real-life energy usage every year, which should be actively managed down.

Hirigoyen acknowledges that this vision requires a massive mindset shift for the construction industry, away from a focus on financial cost and short-term return on investment towards a redefinition of value. “The system doesn’t reward a more holistic view of value, and it doesn’t allow us to take in other externalities that actually do have an important economic value, but we should be thinking much more widely… If you’re thinking of cost, then not doing it today means in 10 years’ time or less, you’re going to need to go back to those buildings and retrofit them, and the costs will be far higher than the real costs today. It’s complete lunacy,” she says.

“There’s a big piece there for insurers, the finance community, banks and lenders to get behind, because once the market starts to shift, it can reach a tipping point very quickly, and we might find these financial institutions suddenly say that they are not lending to projects that aren’t generally net zero because they think that in 10 years’ time it won’t be

“One of our biggest challenges is that we can’t keep using more resource to put something up, then tear it down and put something else up. We just can’t keep doing that. We shouldn’t be demolishing anything unless it’s unsafe and can’t be reused in some capacity.

It’s completely crazy”

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CV: Julie Hirigoyen Born in 1973 in Versailles, Paris 2015 Chief executive, UK Green Building Council 2013 UK head of sustainability, JLL 2007 Head of energy & sustainability services EMEA, JLL 2003 Joint managing director, Upstream 1998 Various roles, Upstream 1998 Master’s in Sustainable Development, Middlesex University London 1997 MSc, Environmental Protection & Management, The University of Edinburgh 1994 LLB, law, University of Bristol

worth anything and that’s going to lead to a whole load of stranded investment assets.”

She may be right. “Non-circular buildings made with concrete and steel today run a higher risk of becoming stranded assets by 2050,” Mathew Vola, project director at Arup, which has designed what will be the world’s largest wood-hybrid office building near Amsterdam, told the Financial Times. Vola believes that “governments will increasingly regulate for circular buildings to meet the Paris Agreement”. Japan has been promoting the use of wood in public buildings for more than a decade and has been joined

by France and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

But how do these big ideas filter down to the individual project professional? If you find yourself working with an ‘ostrich’ client with no appreciation of the moral imperative of pushing for net zero, then Hirigoyen recommends going for the economic jugular. “I would say: this project is not going to be viable in the longer term. Use the statistics – that 50 per cent of GDP is in the race to zero and in a couple of years most of business will be. It’s a litmus test for the future marketplace, and clients can’t get away with saying it’s not important.”

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he biggest barrier is the mindset of business as usual, Hirigoyen believes. “The question we need to ask is how could we do this completely differently? It means moving away from thinking about making a building slightly less ‘brown’, that’s just a slower way to die. Stop kidding yourself

that a little bit better is anywhere good enough, the minimum goal needs to be no adverse impact whatsoever. What would that look like? How do we reimagine a building? Every single project manager should be trying to figure out how to make the project they are working on not contribute to climate change at all.”

Collaboration and the real co-ownership of projects is what would work, she believes, so that everyone has ‘skin in the game’ rather than ticking the right boxes and getting away with greenwashing. “[Clients] should say work with me to achieve the impossible on this together and I will reward you by appointing you on my next project. Neither of us know how to do this, but if we can work it out together, then we will partner again in the future. It’s about incentivising the risk so that if they end up going down difficult rabbit holes, that’s OK, and they’ll be rewarded for that… It’s all about changing the contractual arrangements and incentivising different stakeholder groups so that everyone feels they co-won the project and will get the benefit from it.”

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irigoyen has a global perspective and a deep commitment to environmental concerns. She grew up just outside of Paris, but moved to the UK with her Irish mother at the age of 12 after her parents separated. She studied law at university but it was her travels to South America that inspired her passion for the environment – witnessing the destruction caused by mining to communities and to the landscape. She pursued a master’s degree in Environmental Protection & Management, and another in Leadership for Sustainable Development in the mid-1990s, before falling into real estate. Her biggest career lesson?

“My sense of urgency was curtailed in some of my early years by a sense of needing to fit in and convince people that I was professional. I could have made more of an impact if I’d been a bit bolder and asked difficult questions.” She’s less afraid to ask those difficult questions of all of us now.

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With COP26 and the UN’s Race to Net Zero global campaign to accelerate action on carbon emissions, minds are focusing on the climate emergency.

Emma De Vita finds inspiration in the work of project professionals working on frontline climate projects, and finds advice for everyone who wants to push sustainability up the project agenda everywhere

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he Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change report published in August made for depressing reading: “Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some changes already set in motion – such as continued sea level rise – are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.” The message is clear. There is no time to lose in our transition to sustainable energy decarbonisation if we are to curtail temperature rises to 1.5¡C by 2100. Project professionals across every sector will have a critical role to play in reaching net‑zero emissions by 2050, and when there is no silver bullet to the climate problems we face, every effort everywhere counts, from working on projects with climate change mitigation at their core (see boxes) to simply making every project you work on more sustainable.

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The question is how

Any project can be made greener by reducing waste, says Andrew Wright, director of Dynamic Technologies and co‑chair of APM’s Systems Thinking SIG. “Waste always has a carbon or environmental footprint, so being more focused on eliminating waste is vitally important – and that comes from making sure that you’re doing the right thing.”

This, explains Wright, means ensuring a project is “fit for purpose”, will solve the problem that needs fixing and is being done in the right way, so little rework is needed. Systems thinking can help achieve this. “Systems thinking is about understanding how that problem is interacting with everything else, how the solution will fix the problem and how that solution will interact with everything else.”

If, for example, you work on a business change project, you have to get the green benefits into the costing and benefits models up front, Wright says. “If you’re reducing the amount of electricity as part of this, you could have high‑efficiency, low‑power lighting. You’re eliminating waste, aren’t you? So, it brings efficiencies. You can cost up the waste elimination and show the running cost reductions. One of the things I think is really important is looking at the total cost of ownership

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Clockwise from left: Climate protesters gather outside COP26; Joe Biden takes the stage at the event; Greta Thunberg during a Fridays for Future march; the SEC Centre in Glasgow; Boris Johnson and Sir David Attenborough alongside school children in London

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of the asset with projects. In order to appreciate that longer‑term value, you have to be invested in that project for a long time. You have to be thinking more long term.”

A challenge as global in scale and nature as climate change requires collaborative, long‑term big thinking across projects. “What stops people thinking [this way] is their prejudices, habits and values,” says Wright. “If you want to change someone’s values and beliefs, you have to tap into the human aspect of their psyche, not their professional side. You have to draw out the benefits of working in this different way to them as a person.

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construction and engineering, it’s very heavily siloed. And if you’ve got that sort of culture, how do you get around that? You have to educate people.

You have to tap into the fact that, as human beings, they would actually much prefer to be friendly with those people and we would then be more successful together.”

As lean as possible

Jason Sprague, principal of Sprague & Co, works on large‑scale innovation and transformation projects and is a member of APM’s Contracts & Procurement SIG. He says that projects can be made more sustainable if consumption is actively reduced.

“If you consume, you are dealing with issues of sustainability, because by consuming, you are creating. If you disagree with that, then there’s no way in the world you’ll ever be able to adopt and understand sustainability.

Anybody who tells me that their project is green or that they are driving sustainability, and then uses the word ‘investment’, where investment implies consumption, then in most cases, they are trying to consume their way out or simply follow the crowd.” It comes down to designing and managing projects to be as lean as possible to achieve the outcomes you want. “We can’t consume our way into being net zero,” he reiterates.

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THE NET ZERO TECHNOLOGY CENTRE Glen Littlejohn is a project manager (and former engineer who is currently studying for his APM qualifications) at the Net Zero Technology Centre in Aberdeen, the purpose of which is to develop and deploy technology for an affordable net‑zero energy industry. Littlejohn manages projects that accelerate the move from fossil fuels to sustainable energy in Scotland, working with multiple stakeholders, including technology developers who are ready to scale up. He takes a dynamic approach to project management. “Each project I’m involved with has very different attributes. It can be mainly stakeholder management or commercial management – or it can be managing the small specialist technology developers, helping them to organise their work using project management fundamentals so that our deadlines and budget commitments are met.”

While he works across a portfolio of projects, Littlejohn spends most of

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his time at the moment on bringing to life a project supported by the Scottish Government’s Energy Transition Fund.

The fund will look at decarbonising traditional on‑site power generation in major industrial worksites, including existing oil and gas installations, by replacing 100 per cent hydrocarbons with alternative fuel blends, particularly hydrogen and ammonia. “It’s an exciting project which we hope will deliver real‑terms decarbonisation of industrial power generation by the mid‑2020s.”

Creative thinking

Littlejohn’s work requires him to “get really creative” to help build the innovative operational capability and knowledge base that Scotland needs, and to get it up and running quickly.

“We need to build resource; we need to build highly technical capability,” he says, finding ways to connect capabilities across Scotland. “There’s a lot of creative thinking, negotiation

and stakeholder engagement. What aspects of this can be anchored down?

How can we contribute to a just energy transition? How can we build a future skills base? How can we create value for the region?”

Littlejohn has seen much change in the Scottish offshore energy industry.

“Even six years ago, when the last oil and gas price crash hit hard, I think all of us here felt Aberdeen was lost in its own bubble, perhaps embedded in many of the old ways of a 40‑year‑old oil and gas industry value chain.

Thinking and project drivers were all planted in the many paradigms of that

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industry, and resistance to change was heavy. In this drive towards net zero 2030, I believe we’re now looking at projects with fundamentally different definitions of success. It’s a fascinating time in which a dynamic and open‑minded approach to building and managing projects is essential – that’s where an APM approach is so great. It is like having solid foundations and utilities in a building. Having those in place allows you to not worry about the things which should and must be routine and consistent, and then to concentrate on creative thinking and problem solving.

“I’m just trying to anchor this back into projects that deal with very modern urgent solutions, so getting to net zero and the mindset that goes with that.” With a strong project framework in place, and the objectives known, it pays to be creative about the strategy used to get there, argues

Littlejohn: “There are different ways to organise, monitor and manage progress and actions. Use the tools and do just what you need to. There’s little sense in a cumbersome, all‑parties Gantt chart review when all the scope and scale of the project really require is robust, visible task management.”

Change is a constant

Littlejohn works closely with his team, reviewing everyone’s priorities regularly. “You have to blend the big picture objectives with flexibility at task level, being aware that the best way to get things done might change and shift every week – and that’s okay. You’ve got to have that ability to change tactics quickly to keep things moving.”

Littlejohn has witnessed how decarbonisation and future proofing of energy facilities have become influential success criteria in projects over the past five or more years. “Say

you have a ‘brownfield’ modification project, then you need to be thinking how, in 10 to 20 years, we might hook in a wind turbine, enable power from shore for electrification or repurpose it entirely as some form of future energy hub. The nature of projects is changing. If we think of high‑level success criteria, then a few years ago, they might have been purely economic, but now, carbon abatement is truly a project fundamental. Everybody gets that [climate change] is real now, and that’s the fundamental shift in the last couple of years.”

His plea to project professionals?

“The fact that we’ve got to reach these targets in 10 to 20 years. The fact that the big companies are behind it. The fact that there’s a great deal of work to do that might be exportable around the world. We’ve all got to play our part now. If you’ve got the capability and the knowledge, tear in and get involved.”

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In project contracts, this translates into creating incentives that make a supply chain seek to not consume virgin metals, for example. Sprague explains: “None of our contracts talk about the whole‑life cost of the infrastructure and materials used to maintain it, and this is a really exciting bit of innovation and invention. Industry is talking about ‘how do I use waste materials better?’ But capitalism is based on consumerism, so this is a big mindset problem – infinite consumption in a finite system is the problem. The future of sustainable contracts is about performance, where you are asking: what is the least amount I can consume to achieve my performance outcomes?”

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Each organisation needs to own the carbon that it is responsible for, argues Sprague. “That is the whole life cycle of their fleet, their asset and of those employed to work on and to maintain it. There’s a lot of hidden carbon. The contract must not drive perverse incentives to keep a perpetual motion machine going for the sake of revenue because we create the waste in carbon.” So, if there are three things every project professional can do to make their projects more sustainable, they are: eliminate any waste anywhere, look at the environmental impact of the whole life cycle of a project and make the project absolutely fit for purpose.

APM RESOURCES l Webinar, ‘COP26 is Coming! How project managers influence sustainable development’, bit.ly/3bWHvaY l Peter Morris, Climate Change and What the Project Profession Should Be Doing About It (APM/UCL), bit.ly/3wBlfxc l Climate change, Clean Growth and Sustainability, bit.ly/3H016FD l Blog, ‘Sustainability – The programme leaders’ legacy’, bit.ly/3bRKF00 l Blog, ‘Put sustainability on the agenda’, bit.ly/3EY34V8 l Podcast, ‘From the Frontline’ with Tim Rose (Energy Superhub Oxford), bit.ly/2YympwF

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Peter Lawrence (pictured), founding partner at Evolution Blue, has for the past two years been supporting the work of the Tyseley Energy Park (TEP) in Birmingham. TEP is a collaboration between academia, industry and the public sector, including a 300‑year‑old family business, Webster & Horsfall, and the University of Birmingham. Its mission is to create an energy park that allows low‑carbon and green‑tech projects to flourish, whether that’s recycling rare earth materials from car batteries, becoming the first publicly accessible multi‑fuel low and zero carbon refuelling station in the UK or providing cleantech start‑up support.

David Horsfall, a director of TEP, explains that his wire manufacturing business, which sits on 15 acres of land in the centre of Birmingham, made the armoured wire for the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866. “This is a family business that has had to continually innovate to stay successful,” he says.

The company wants to transform itself into a sustainable net‑zero business

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while helping Birmingham become the epicentre of the new green industrial revolution in the UK. Lawrence, a project manager with a deep interest in renewable energy, explains that CoGen, a Birmingham‑based company that develops energy from waste, spotted the potential to partner with TEP in 2010. “It was a natural fit as one of the biggest cost expenditures in manufacturing wire is power,” he explains. The Birmingham Biomass plant built by CoGen supplies TEP with power at competitive rates that enables the manufacturing business to reduce costs while meeting its sustainability goals. “That was the cornerstone and catalyst for the start of the energy park,” Lawrence says.

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TEP now aims to create low and zero carbon energy, fuels, transportation and waste and recycling solutions to help Birmingham reduce its carbon footprint by 60 per cent by 2030, and to create a green energy

cluster. Lawrence brings the project management discipline and clarity of vision to this constantly evolving project. “Articulating [the vision] simply and consistently, while being its custodian, is critical in ensuring that the multiple parties from multiple industries with multiple agendas can collaborate. As project manager, I am just the guy trying to create bite‑sized, understandable chunks to take forward in a managed process, while keeping TEP true to its ultimate vision.”

He explains that a co‑creation meeting is held quarterly, where all 35 project players come together

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PROJECT SEAGRASS Project Seagrass, a charity set up by a team from Swansea University, is dedicated to restoring and growing seagrass meadows around the UK as a way to conserve those environments and sequester carbon.

Seagrasses produce oxygen, clean coastal water, absorb greenhouse gas emissions and help to keep oceans healthy. Since 1900, the UK has lost approximately 90 per cent of its seagrass meadows.

A model for the world

Dr Mark Townley is a project management consultant for Babcock International, a trained marine biologist and an APM Fellow. He volunteers for the Bridgend‑based environmental project. “We can’t just

to work on projects. “The whole mindset around silos, specific project deliverables, fixed project timelines is far more fluid. I know that’s unusual coming from a project professional, but we consider the project travelling on a motorway, not a single lane road.

The destination is reached on both, but in our way we can change lanes, speeds and durations.”

Incredibly rewarding

Lawrence explains how TEP would like to build on its current hydrogen production and scale to meet hydrogen demands in the surrounding area and industries. This might include decarbonisation of heat networks and hydrogen for a fleet of buses, HGVs or trains. “It’s not ideal when timelines are so far in the future, so we need to reframe the opportunity and look at what we can do now to enable that longer‑term vision. It’s about holding onto the vision and being prepared to be flexible in terms of how you get there, how long it takes and which bits come first. The mindset of holding onto preconceived ideas or plans needs to be left at the door. It’s not

sit by and watch nothing happen,” he says. Outside of his consultancy work, he has the free time to carry on doing the thing he loves – project management – while doing something of real benefit. “This is a great vehicle for me personally, but I also hope it’s going to benefit the UK in the long term.” His consultancy EVMT also provides financial support through an annual sponsorship.

Townley gives project management assurance and governance advice as the team locates the best environments for new seagrass meadows, and then ensures it is being done the right way to maximise the amount of carbon that can be fixed. He was asked to help run the charity’s research as a

just about you and your direction, it’s about the collective direction.”

Over the coming months, TEP’s partner ITM Motive will be refuelling 20 new hydrogen buses bought by Birmingham City Council, as well as working with partners across the West Midlands to consider how the region can expand its hydrogen refuelling infrastructure. Some of Webster & Horsfall’s existing manufacturing shops are also going to get a £1m facelift to refurbish existing industrial space for innovative energy businesses to access.

“There is a massive range of projects at TEP. It’s incredibly rewarding doing stuff that you fully believe in, and knowing you have a role in making them happen,” says Lawrence. Horsfall adds that the number‑one attribute a project professional must have is the ability to create and tell the story of a project, and to hold that story passionately, “because sometimes when things go wrong, it’s you holding that narrative, that passion, that story together that will keep other parties together and the project on track”.

‘proper’ project because, “while the academics were doing everything right research‑wise, they were struggling with achieving project outcomes and tangible benefits”.

And getting the project managed right matters. “They’re going to really help the UK get to net zero and then build a model that would allow other people to try it in other parts of the world.”

Assurance and governance Townley manages the project using APM guidelines and best practice: “It’s quite difficult with research projects because they need to be agile. They need to be flexible enough to change very quickly when things don’t quite go the way you expect. But what they haven’t managed to do in seagrass projects in general is to implement a clear plan – where they want to go, where the benefits of that plan are going to be, and to make sure that they achieve those to a schedule.

Research projects do seem to run and run, and it’s necessary always get to an end product. So, my role is to initially set it up and then put in place the assurance and governance.”

Townley also mentors two of the eight‑strong academic team in project management, to train them up and help them to get project management qualifications so that they are well prepared for their next project. “You need both the research side of life and you need the more technical side of life to manage your project properly,” Townley says.

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Delivering third sector projects demands tenacity, agility and, increasingly, professionalised project management skills, finds Conrad Heine

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ife‑saving or life‑changing third sector projects are, as Peter Marlow, co‑chair of PM4NGOs, puts it, part of a sector that is “really big”. In 2019 alone, the UK government spent £14bn of public money on foreign aid.

“Projects in uncontrolled environments”, as Marlow calls them, are needed on a huge scale – a need likely only to grow in the face of, for example, the huge numbers of refugees displaced by ongoing conflicts or the hardships likely to emerge on the back of climate change and the Covid‑19 pandemic.

Project managers in the sector face the same challenges as elsewhere. But the contexts – including conflict zones, rapid onset emergencies, food relief distribution and refugee camps – differ wildly. Says John Cropper of Pyramid Learning, which develops sectoral norms, professional certifications and learning products: “NGOs work in difficult situations that can change very quickly.” The focus is also very different – about outcomes, often life‑changing, rather than output.

Cropper is vivid on the challenges project managers in the sector can face. “If you are doing first‑stage emergency response in a big natural disaster, during the first couple of days,

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Mercy Corps has delivered food supplies to over 10,000 displaced Lebanese people

if anybody says they have a longer planning timeframe than 24 hours, they are lying. That doesn’t mean you can’t do longer‑term planning in parallel, but if you are on the ground somewhere like that, the one thing you can be sure of is that any information you have got is incomplete, possibly wrong and that everything is going to change over the next 24 hours.”

The sector’s employment model poses another challenge. Development projects call for particular technical skills, with recruitment of specialists on

that basis. Says Marlow: “They are then required to manage projects and lead teams. As a consequence the quality of project management can be variable.

Wheels are constantly being reinvented.

There is no culture of improvement to embed good practice. Inevitably, many projects under‑deliver despite best intentions.”

Oliver Filler of Mercy Corps (see box) points out the gap: “The development and humanitarian sectors have always been primarily project delivery sectors, but until the last

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A South Sudanese food and tea vendor during a hygiene training session.

Inset: An Entrepreneurial Leaders Program session in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

for Development Professionals Guide (since rebranded Project DPro) the was launched.

At the same time, PM4NGOs (an APM corporate partner) was launched to own the certification, with APMG administrating the exams. Says Marlow: “Our buzzphrase is: it is owned by the sector, for the sector.”

Getting learning to the people in the field

decade project management was never really acknowledged by the sector as a professional function in its own right.”

Learning materials

But things are evolving. Filler refers to his own experience working in north‑eastern Kenya for Save the Children in 2011. “I was a member of response personnel for rapid onset acute emergencies. A team of us would be deployed to countries as surge capacity. We were dealing with very difficult contexts and situations.

It was really the first time when, institutionally, across the board and across agencies, beneficiary accountability was seen as an incredibly important thing to invest in. The idea that we should be asking our programme participants for feedback, this aligned with the concept of communication as aid.”

But with actual access to communication tools difficult, work

“The one thing you can be sure of is that any information you have got is incomplete… and everything is going to change over the next 24 hours” with the Vodafone Foundation on roving mobile networks was launched. “That has now evolved into programmes like Mercy Corps’ partnership with NASA, using satellites to predict fluctuations in food security.

It was also the beginning of digital data collection,” says Filler.

In fact, since 2007, a gradual change has been underway, with recognition of the need for professionalisation of project management in the sector.

Integral to the change was the initiative, that year, by a group of large NGOs who came together to drive the development of tools and learning materials for the sector. Consequently, in 2010, the first edition of the Project Management

With its translation into six languages, free online learning tools, resources designed for mobile use and ongoing continued professional development features, the guide’s mantra is to be “appropriate, affordable, accessible and actionable”, says Cropper, who was involved in its initial development.

“It is a way to get learning to the people who need it most – the field staff with no access to head office. If you don’t train them, you don’t have a strong base.” Thus, there is a notable lack of terminology – of sprints, scrums and the like. “You try explaining what a scrum master is to someone who has English as a third language.”

Over its life, the guide has reached some 34,000 development workers in over 170 countries and 1,300 organisations. Marlow is ambitious, aiming for it to reach “hundreds of thousands more, many working for small local organisations”. Regular adaptations keep it relevant, with case studies put together with stakeholders. “Charitable sectors rely on donors, and donors expect responses in a certain way.” Thus the ubiquitous Logical Framework (LogFrame) project‑mapping tool has been incorporated, along with other tools, such as the Problem Tree and Objective Tree. “We take the best bits

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of project management and apply them to development situations.”

Cropper identifies a clear trend of greater professionalisation of project management in the sector since the guide was launched. “In 2007, you would have chief executives of NGOs who did not know that certification in project management even existed.”

As the guide has been taken up by organisations, word has got around.

“Project management is not a standard part of the nuns’ curriculum. They are working all hours of the day. They are not going to sit down at a laptop”

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How organisations are using the product varies greatly. Cropper describes how one course was delivered by WhatsApp to an organisation of nuns based in Mexico, offering relief services to migrants from Central America passing through towards the US border. “They are running small projects, but project management is not a standard part of the nuns’ curriculum. They are working all hours of the day. They are not going to sit down at a laptop.”

Filler cautions against the idea that a professionally accredited project manager is the sole answer. “There is so much more at play with regards to project success.” However, it does make a project far more likely to succeed and less likely to fail. “Trained project managers are better able to adapt tools and processes to context, which in our sector varies hugely.

They can create consistency, establish clear communication using a common language and much more.”

While a different approach to that in other sectors is required, the same standards, tools and principles apply.

“You just apply them in a different way,” says Filler. Mercy Corps operates in locations where “access to some field locations is impossible, either due to security or geography. In these situations, a command‑and‑control

This Colombian coffee farmer also tends a kitchen garden, which Mercy Corps helped him develop by providing seeds and fencing.

Inset: Training in Cambodia.

Below: Distributing food supplies in Lebanon

approach is obsolete. The sector was “utilising agile project management before it became a thing. You have to adaptively and iteratively manage your project, because the context changes so rapidly.”

As an early adopter of the guide, Mercy Corps was instrumental in the sector adopting tools, with the guide as the standard methodology.

Over the decade since, most large international NGOs (INGOs) have identified project management as a function in its own right requiring resourcing, says Filler.

“We can also see this responsiveness in the number of APM corporate partners who are INGOs.”

A common vocabulary

Establishing a “common language” of project management across NGOs is advantageous. Says Sarah Cashore, a senior programme officer at Catholic Relief Services, a US‑based humanitarian organisation active in more than 100 countries: “The

Left to right: John Cropper, Peter Marlow, Sarah Cashore, Terver Kuegh

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common vocabulary to engage across organisations is really useful and important. It highlights a core set of project management disciplines and tools which organisations can easily adapt, especially around key concepts such as risk and issue management.”

Nigeria‑based Terver Kuegh of Sabi Consulting has long experience of capacity‑building for NGOs, including working with organisations supporting the “huge numbers” of refugees displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency in northern Nigeria. The guide’s methodology was the “missing link. [Beforehand], there was no standard for managing projects.” Work between larger NGOs and smaller organisations “was not in synch”. Now, the big difference is “the framework that makes people speak one language.

Bringing teams together in this simple way really changed things around.”

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He worked with one organisation supplying food to refugee camps. “They had hired huge numbers of staff and needed to deploy them quickly. This involved using an online mobile‑ready learning management system to deploy project management training and tools to frontline staff. Because it was mobile ready, they did not have to stop work to train. Over a period of time, it really improved what they were doing.”

Is the sector adjusting to the professionalisation of project management? Kuegh believes so. “When I support teams and organisations, I use the analogy of being on the table for surgery and the doctor is not able to describe the surgery tools properly. The work the sector does is life‑saving and requires a certain level of professionalisation.”

Getting buy‑in from the top

Challenges remain, cautions Cropper.

“The private sector has dedicated project planners, but NGOs don’t have the same resources – they can feel overwhelmed.” Getting management buy‑in can also be difficult, says Kuegh.

“If the people at the top see a need for a standardised approach, there is going to be long‑term support for such an initiative, but if they don’t it won’t go far.”

Marlow suggests scepticism still exists. “The sector is moving slowly.

There are the leading lights – their

OLIVER FILLER, MERCY CORPS Oliver Filler is programme standards director for Mercy Corps and is based in London. He has worked in the humanitarian and development sectors since 2007, with field experience in refugee response and in fragile/conflict states including in Kashmir, the Horn of Africa, South Sudan and the Syria refugee crisis based in Lebanon and Turkey. As a project and programme management technical specialist, Filler led Plan International’s global project management strengthening initiative before his current role at Mercy Corps, which works in over 40 countries and defines its mission as alleviating suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities.

Having worked on the roll‑out of PMD Pro (the Project Management for Development Professionals Guide, now known as Project DPro) at Plan International, he lauds the usefulness of the common project management framework, which made the transition to Mercy Corps very straightforward.

“At Mercy Corps we like to look at project and programme management professional development within a broader maturity model. Having trained and qualified project and programme staff acts as an enabler or a catalyst for broader project maturity. Without them, it would be hard to meet minimum quality standards for the management of projects, harder still to optimise performance and almost impossible to innovate.

“Professional development has traditionally been the realm of the international NGOs, where staff have access to industry recognised training, but local NGO staff are often priced out.” Mercy Corps aligns with the ethos of PM4NGOs that project management is not just about project managers. “It only works if you train the whole team involved in programme delivery, not just the project manager.”

“At Mercy Corps we like to look at project and programme management professional development within a broader maturity model. Having trained and qualified project and programme staff acts as an enabler or a catalyst for broader project maturity”

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partners see what is going on and think this is a good thing. Progress is in the right direction – a positive trajectory, but a slow one.”

Beyond the larger NGOs, the challenge going forward is getting project management frameworks to the smaller non‑profit organisations and partner organisations in the field.

Kuegh argues for a localised approach.

“Large organisations can intentionally push support for capacity‑building for local organisations. One big step towards that would be a targeted sector approach that supports access to this methodology for grassroots organisations.”

A localised approach is also needed to avoid hierarchies between the larger international organisations and these local partners. Filler says: “There is undoubtedly a power imbalance within the sector.” Mercy Corps, like many INGOs, increasingly implements projects with local partner organisations that provide longer‑term sustainable support to local communities. “Local organisations are not seen as subcontractors but rather critical partners, where the transfer of power and resources as close to the community as possible is essential to realising project benefits.”

Cropper cites the funding model.

“Those who provide funding should keep an intentional eye on seeing that a reasonable amount of that funding goes to supporting local organisations.

For example, by donors stipulating that a good part of the budget goes into local capacity‑building.” Yet the donor‑funding model is itself a barrier.

Proposals typically require upfront planning, with an outline of outputs, outcomes and activities, “but you might be three years from the end”. Working to short application timelines for long‑term projects is inherently problematic for good project management. “In a fast‑changing environment, this can be the very antithesis of agile.”

While there is some way to go, the signs point to a sector becoming ever‑more professionalised. And the

Mercy Corps staff talking to those impacted

by Nepal’s 2015 earthquake.

Below: On the ground in Jordan

“A more human‑centred design approach to projects in general could make the world a better place”

learning does not go just one way: there is much other sectors can learn from the third sector about project management.

It’s all about people

Indeed, project management in the sector calls for quite a skill set, says Cropper, including “agility and a degree of unflappability. Stuff can go wrong; bad things can happen.” And above all are people skills. “Projects in this sector are all about people – the people doing the work, the local partner organisations. You need to be aware of their needs and skills. That needs people who believe in and value participatory processes.”

That people aspect is particularly relevant in the lessons the sector can teach about stakeholder management.

Development projects, says Cropper, “are all about power.” Understanding power dynamics is vital. Filler concurs, painting a scenario of the many steps a hypothetical NGO must go through

to realise a project to provide basic needs to internally displaced people (IDPs) in a conflict situation. These range from getting IDP buy‑in and getting local government and host communities onside, to seeking funding through a competitive process, accommodating the changing priorities of the donor, returning to the original stakeholders, and finally realising the project, all in a rapidly changing environment. “This requires exceptional stakeholder management.”

For Kuegh, project management in the sector offers valuable lessons in managing the risks of potential project change. His own work has included helping design a project management strategy for Nigeria’s government, utilising the principles of the guide.

“The critical assumptions that made us start this project – do they still hold? Have they changed? Does the community want something different?

In this sector the project plan is dynamic. Managers need to be adaptive, responding to the project environment each time it changes. Other sectors can learn from this – a more human‑centred design approach to projects in general could make the world a better place.”

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What makes some projects sizzle while others leave you feeling cold? Is it just about the size of the budget or the sense of urgency and mission? Andrew Saunders uncovers the secret sauce of projects that inspire deep dedication from their teams 42 W I NTER 2021 PROJECT

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hat makes a hot project – one people want to work on – and what can we learn from projects like these? The seemingly obvious answer to the first part is budget. Public interest and scrutiny tend to multiply as the number of noughts on the end of the bill gets larger.

But money isn’t everything – a project doesn’t have to come with a nine‑figure price tag to be high stakes and high profile. Take the overall winner of the 2020 APM Project Management Awards, the Counter Unmanned Aerial System at Heathrow Airport. Designed and delivered at breakneck speed to counter the threat of disruption by drones flown by protest groups, the budget wasn’t megaproject‑sized – it was in the tens of millions – but the level of jeopardy was disproportionately high.

With 260,000 passengers a day using Heathrow in the peak summer season, the financial and reputational costs of being forced to suspend activity in the event of unauthorised drone flights are huge. It was enough to get any project team’s adrenalin pumping.

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Highly urgent, highly public, highly exciting

Ben Hooper, programme manager for the counter‑drone system, recalls the night in September 2019 when the new radar‑based technology faced its first real test. A protest group called Heathrow Pause was threatening to hold a ‘drone party’ in the skies over the airport, something with the potential to stop all flights in and out of one of Europe’s busiest air hubs. “Suddenly there’s media attention, the police are standing up 1,000 extra officers to help, there’s a huge liaison with airport security – even the MOD stepped in with their own countermeasures.”

With the new drone detection system only just operational and still with restricted coverage, tension in the control room was running pretty high. “It was a fly‑or‑die moment. The

Countering the threat of drones at Heathrow was a project with dramatic financial and reputational risks attached

“Suddenly there’s media attention, the police are standing up 1,000 extra officers to help and there’s a huge liaison with airport security” police chief operations officer was sat right next to our controller; we even had Heathrow’s head of comms there, because they knew the CEO would be phoning them about it in the morning.

We had tested the system, but we hadn’t had time to fly drones over every inch of the airport to make sure we had full coverage. It could have gone either way.”

In the event, the technology worked perfectly, the airport remained fully operational and Hooper and his team heaved a sigh of relief. “From that moment on, all the external stakeholders had real faith that the system worked – and worked well,” he says. It was the vindication of a project delivered in an unconventional way to tackle a novel and unconventional threat, driven by executive interest from the very top.

“The CEO effectively said: ‘Sort this out. How much money do you need?’

I had an executive order – basically a letter with his signature on it – that I could wave around to get people

to move. Although I didn’t have to do that often because everyone understood the situation.”

But even in such exceptional circumstances, Heathrow’s established project gateways system was not subverted completely, but rather modified and accelerated. The most important aspect of the project was the realisation of benefits – in this case, providing drone detection as soon as possible. So mobile drone detector units were deployed to provide at least some coverage while the main network of fixed sensors was being installed. The gateway methodology was tweaked to speed up delivery. “We went straight in at gateway three – the final investment decision – and we also started work on site at gateway three, which you wouldn’t normally do until gateway five.”

Flexible waterfall

The major lesson, says Hooper, is that flexibility and agility can coexist with necessary procedural controls. “We tailored the project to suit the context.

It was still a waterfall methodology, but delivered in a flexible and agile way. The important controls were still there, but we achieved things in a few weeks that would normally have taken months or years.”

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It’s a view that ties in with the research on megaproject success and failure by Saïd Business School’s Bent Flyvbjerg. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Flyvbjerg cites examples such as the Madrid Metro and the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada to argue that breaking big projects into smaller discrete modules is a success characteristic, precisely because it allows benefits to start accruing well before the project is complete.

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But perhaps the hottest of hot projects are those rarities that are both high budget and very high stakes. Take the UK vaccine procurement and roll‑out programme, a scheme where not only huge sums of money (around £13bn), but also thousands of lives, depended on fast, effective and perfectly coordinated action. Having to take fast decisions about which vaccines to order, very early and with limited information sounds like a potential recipe for disaster, but a public health crisis on the scale of the pandemic necessitates a fast‑tracked permission process, says Nick Elliott, former director general of the Vaccine Taskforce and now a director at Turner & Townsend.

“You can get access to decision‑makers more quickly in a crisis, especially in a government environment where process normally rules. It allows you to play your cards in a slightly different way.

People recognise the importance of delivering outcomes so you can push the process and be more agile.”

Clarity on what those outcomes should be from day one helped guide effective decision‑making – for example, there was no point investing

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“You can get access to decision-makers more quickly in a crisis, especially in a government environment where process normally rules” in a vaccine that couldn’t be ready in a few weeks, even if it was shown to be effective. “Government projects tend to be process‑driven rather than outcomes‑driven, but we set the Vaccine Taskforce up for success right from the start – we were absolutely clear on what success looked like and what our goals were, and we worked backwards from that.”

Getting the right people in place at the top was another critical factor, Elliott says. “I had spent four years running defence programmes so I knew how long things could take, but I also knew which buttons to press. I knew that if we said, ‘We’re not going to follow government process because we haven’t got time’, we would come up against a brick wall. And Kate Bingham [chair of the taskforce] came from a venture capital background, so she knew the clinical and drug development side.

Between us, we had a really good

understanding of the environment we were operating in.”

Yet not every project will have a nationally important mission or a galvanising sense of urgency, so how do you achieve success without the excitement of being a headline‑making piece of work?

It’s about creating a shift towards an environment that fosters success, as highlighted by APM’s new report Dynamic Conditions for Project Success. The report looks at project success through a post‑Covid lens and identifies nine dynamic conditions that can help you sprinkle some gold‑dust on any project. These include ‘hard’ project management favourites such as the use of technology and data, contracts, knowledge management and the importance of training, while also encompassing ‘soft’ factors like interpersonal skills, diversity, agility and team ethos, which are perhaps not so commonly equated with a project professional’s toolkit.

Diversity

Elliott echoes the importance of diversity of thought, citing the wide range of cross‑industry capability and experience that was built into the Vaccine Taskforce’s steering committee. This 11‑strong group brought together experts in manufacturing, medical devices, clinical research and the NHS. It included individuals with backgrounds in everything from supply chain management to corporate M&A, and even a former ambassador to advise on developing international relationships for vaccine delivery overseas. “It was a naturally diverse team that gave us every capability we needed at that level,” Elliott says.

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The great urgency driving the UK Vaccine Taskforce meant that cumbersome bureaucracy could be streamlined

Working on a hot project

As well as agility and telescoping processes, hot projects can also teach you the benefits of being open to innovative ways of getting things done in trying circumstances, says Gary Poole, group head of programmes for aerospace systems business Meggitt. He was a member of the cross‑industry consortium that came together to scale up the production of ventilators at the start of the pandemic. One of their

key challenges was setting up new manufacturing lines across the country so that production runs that pre‑Covid might have been measured in tens of ventilators could be ramped up to thousands of machines in the space of a few weeks.

Testing, inspecting and certifying these new production lines was made much easier thanks to the use of augmented reality (AR) Hololens technology from Microsoft. One operative with an AR headset could

TIPS FOR FOSTERING DYNAMIC PROJECT SUCCESS

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Creating the right environment for success doesn’t have to cost a fortune. As APM’s Dynamic Conditions for Project Success research reveals, there are some simple actions that all project professionals can take that are low cost and easy to implement.

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Informal mentoring. Take time out of delivering your current project to mentor and support the next generation of project managers and build the future talent pipeline in your organisation. If you think you are too busy, remember that mentoring is a two-way street – you will learn as much from your mentee as they do from you.

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Encourage diversity. The greater the diversity of thought, opinions and backgrounds that can be included in a project team, the smaller the risk of groupthink and the more thoroughly tested and robust its ideas will be. Diversity can generate challenge and potential disagreement, but project professionals with good leadership can channel this into constructive debate and ultimately a greater chance of success.

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Adopt financial sustainability as a mindset. Always think lean and look for efficiency savings.

Avoiding process duplication saves money and time as well as leading to faster outcomes.

be the eyes and ears for a whole team of experts dialling in remotely, dramatically speeding up the process and minimising the need for travel amid pandemic restrictions. “Like most project managers, I am a pretty structured kind of guy, and people who come up with what look like wild and wacky ideas can tend to frustrate me,” Poole admits. “I had to challenge myself to be more open to those ideas – that’s where things like using Hololens came from, and it was really key for us.”

The power of a hot project

And despite the substantial pressures and heavy workload involved, Poole reckons that being part of a hot project has its compensations. “I’ve worked on a number of high‑profile projects in my career and in my view they are easier to deliver than normal ones, because they take priority and get the resources they need.”

For Elliott, one of the most lasting impressions from his time on the Vaccine Taskforce was the power of a ‘burning platform’ to bring people together with a single overriding aim. But surely the problem is that most projects simply don’t have such a compelling goal – how do you galvanise effort when the burning platform simply isn’t there? “Often they are there, we just don’t recognise it. Of course, the Vaccine Taskforce was a bit different, but the outcomes of many projects – whether they are financial or something else – are actually really important and we should treat them that way.”

So perhaps the most universal lesson is that, with the right approach and mindset, every project can be a hot project – or a much warmer one, at the very least.

“I’ve worked on a number of high-profile projects… in my view they are easier to deliver, because they take priority and get the resources they need”

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HOW TO

HAVE CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS Leadership coach Susanne Madsen gives her advice on navigating difficult conversations smoothly

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orking effectively on a project, interacting with stakeholders and leading a team to deliver the best outcomes requires hundreds of conversations.

Not all of these are going to be easy or pleasant. Customer expectations need to be managed and the team needs to find its feet.

Many heated exchanges may be had about scope, quality, timelines, budget, resources etc. Team members represent diverse cultures, values and languages. They have different ways of working and solving problems. Negotiating a way forward, giving feedback and delivering bad news is often necessary, but not easy.

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Think of a conversation that you typically find challenging. When you examine it, you will probably find that, first, there is a lot at stake; second, there are opposing opinions; and third, there are strong emotions. For example, if you need to tell your client that you’ve hit a major roadblock and the project will be delayed, it will turn out to be a challenging conversation – especially if your client has a strong emotional reaction and suggests a solution that you know isn’t possible.

The conversations I find challenging are when I need to say no to a piece of work for an important client. I feel that there is a lot at stake, because I’m worried about damaging the relationship. That also means that I’m likely to go into the conversations with strong emotions rooted in fear. I’m unsure how my client will react, and I’m worried they will try to put pressure on me or think less of me.

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The emotional component

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This is one of the most important aspects to examine, as it’s often the key to navigating and unlocking a challenging conversation. Humans aren’t as rational and logical as we like to think.

A large part of our behaviour is influenced by emotions that we’re not aware of. In situations where we get emotionally triggered, a fight, flight or freeze reaction is activated in our mind and body. When our emotional brain kicks in, it’s essentially trying to protect us and prepare us for danger. Our heart beats faster, our breathing speeds up, blood rushes to our muscles and our focus narrows.

This automatic reaction is great when we’re in physical danger, but in a conversation it’s more likely to hinder than help. When we get emotionally triggered, the brain’s focus is diverted from the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision‑making and complex cognitive behaviour, towards the emotional brain. In other words, when we become overly emotional, we lose the ability to think clearly, to make rational decisions and to draw conclusions. Unfortunately, we’re often emotionally triggered even before a conversation begins. We’re angry because a team member hasn’t delivered what they promised. Or we’re worried because our boss wants to add yet another project to our plate.

Our emotions are fully justified and serve the purpose of keeping us safe. But if we’re not able to manage them effectively, they will narrow our focus and prevent us from getting

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Think about the facts and tangible examples that you want to present to your counterpart. Then turn the tables and consider how the other person sees the problem and what they might want from the conversation

to the root of the problem. They might even influence us not to give feedback to someone even if we have a great deal to say. We simply avoid or delay the conversation because we find it too unpleasant. We’re worried that if we fully show up, speak our truth or put our demands on the table, we will be rejected or criticised. But when difficult topics aren’t openly discussed, they can mushroom under the surface and lead to dysfunctional team behaviour. So, to approach challenging conversations in the best way, I would recommend you do the following:

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Build self‑awareness Becoming aware of the conversations you tend to find most challenging, and understanding why, is the most fundamental step. That’s because you can only really change a pattern or a behaviour that you are aware of.

Set aside time to reflect on current and past projects. What types of conversations are most challenging for you? In which situations do they typically arise? What makes them challenging?

How do you feel entering into them? How do they usually unfold? What are some of your typical behavioural patterns? Do you tend to get defensive, competitive or aggressive?

Is it easy or difficult for you to express your thoughts during a conversation? Do you welcome challenging conversations or not at all? Be as objective and non‑judgemental as you can. Simply write down your observations and see if you can identify some traps that you usually fall into.

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Prepare for the conversation We sometimes expect that we should be able to navigate a complex conversation without any preparation. As a result, we don’t always get to say what we really wanted to, and end up beating ourselves up for having omitted an important point. Proper preparation cannot be underestimated. In the project leadership programmes I run, participants are asked to perform a number of roleplays with actors. The actors might play an angry client or an underperforming team member. Over time, the participants learn what to watch out for and they always emphasise how much they learn from the prep time before each role play.

So, set aside time to prepare and think through why you are having the conversation, what you perceive the problem to be and what your preferred outcome is. How would you like your working relationship with your counterpart to be and what kind of mindset would you like to show up with? Also think about the facts and tangible examples that you want to present to your counterpart. Then turn the tables and consider how the other person sees the problem and what they might want from the conversation. What are their underlying needs and what is their emotional state likely to be? By considering your counterpart’s perspective, you will be more perceptive during the conversation and less likely to be caught off guard.

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Seek first to understand, then to be understood As Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, said: “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” If you enter the conversation with an agenda to first be understood and to get your points across, the effectiveness of the conversation will be limited and you might end up arguing who is right and who is wrong. An open and curious attitude, where you suspend your judgements, listen and ask lots of open questions, will get you much further.

Even if you have a preferred outcome in mind, the goal of the conversation should

be to collaborate and to openly discuss the issue before a conclusion is reached. Don’t feel you need to have thought through the entire solution in advance. That leaves little room for collaboration. You can also improve the atmosphere by speaking in person and by sitting down rather than standing up. When it’s your turn to express your viewpoint, be honest and name the real issue. Don’t minimise it. You have to agree what the problem is before you can solve it. Be mindful, however, not to get confrontational, accusatory or to speak down to the other person. That undermines the entire process. Speak the truth as cleanly as you can by explaining how you see the issue, how it makes you feel and what potential solutions might be.

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Respond rather than react It’s important that you keep your emotions in check during the conversation, as they may otherwise highjack it and derail you. If the conversation goes as smoothly as you have planned, staying calm and clear‑headed will be easy enough. It’s much more difficult if your counterpart throws in a wildcard, starts to accuse you of something or makes you feel uncomfortable. If that happens, just stay quiet for a moment. Breathe as deeply and slowly as you can to slow down your heart rate and stay connected to the rational part of your brain.

The goal in any conversation is to consciously respond to what is being said rather than lashing out based on a kneejerk reaction. Don’t let yourself get provoked.

During the roleplays that our participants go through, they experience time after time how powerful silence can be. Five seconds of silence may feel like an eternity. But it works!

Not only does it send a strong message to your counterpart, it’s also an effective way to help you manage your own emotions. If your counterpart’s behaviour is unacceptable, for instance if they belittle you, then you need to call it out and express how you are experiencing their behaviour. Not that easy, but necessary.

EXTRA READING ■ APM’s Engaging Stakeholders on Projects – How to harness people power, bit.ly/3mCG487

■ APM blog: ‘How to Navigate Difficult Conversations on Projects’, bit.ly/3nSXYTg

■ APM’s Think Differently on-demand content, bit.ly/3BG1jKl

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RETHINKING CAP A New Project X research, published by APM, gives valuable lessons

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raditionally, major projects perform poorly, with the majority experiencing cost overruns, delays and shortfalls in intended benefits. However, in recent years, the UK has also witnessed several high‑performing projects, such as Heathrow Terminal 5 and the 2012 London Olympics.

Why do some projects perform poorly, while others perform well? Motivated by this question, Project X set out to examine how capabilities are developed to improve project performance. Project X is an ESRC‑funded research collaboration between government, academia and industry representatives, aiming to generate unique insights into the performance of major projects and programmes in government.

A suite of cases was developed investigating leadership capabilities, front‑end strategic capabilities, supply chain engagement and the dynamics of collaborative delivery (see box, overleaf).

These cases also consider knowledge transfer and learning, the challenge of sustaining gender equality and control capabilities to mitigate failure and learn from emergent risks. Three central findings emerged from this investigation: In complex projects, plurality, temporality and shifting ground affect project performance.

Rather than simplifying capability development into a standardised set of competencies, multiple lenses, reflexive learning techniques and engaged scholarship can help to navigate these three facets of project complexity.

Diverse thought and reflexive practice require an operational culture and core strategic values that embrace reflexive thinking, collective problem‑solving and experimentation.

This leads to a different model for capability development where resources, knowledge structures and routines are organised around a core set of values that meet the strategic expectations of a project. This value‑driven capability model has significant implications for professional

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practitioners in government and industry.

First, there is a need to develop reflexive learning skills that move beyond individualised learning from the past to a more proactive form of learning where experience is used to challenge and question assumptions. Second, structures and routines are required that make space for inquisitive inquiry and collective deliberation. This requires an organisational culture that recognises the benefits of joint problem‑solving, strategic envisionment and experimentation.

For practitioners, the challenge is to become aware of taken‑for‑granted blind spots and simplified frameworks and toolboxes. This suggests a need for the project profession to move beyond a preoccupation with the development of individuals based on standardised competency frameworks that may stifle innovative thinking. Engaged scholars can play an important role here by acting as a bridge between pragmatic solutions and the latest grand challenge thinking that underpins important debates.

A multi‑level understanding of capabilities

Standardised project management techniques tend to oversimplify the plurality of projects, the difficulty in managing shifting ground and the challenges of temporality. The case studies in the report recommend developing capabilities that are informed by different perspectives and bodies of knowledge that transcend disciplinary and professional boundaries. However, making connections between different lenses and levels is hard and takes time. Nevertheless, societal grand challenges, such as climate change, social inequalities and recovery from the severe social and economic effects of the pandemic, justify this extra effort.

Standardised project management techniques tend to oversimplify the plurality of projects, the difficulty in managing shifting ground and the challenges of temporality

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for policy, scholarship and practice. Project provides an extract here From prescription to engaged scholarship

A further key finding of our research was that the research process facilitated learning between practitioners in the field and academic researchers. Traditionally, project management research takes a prescriptive stance, viewing management issues as problems that need to be solved by generalising from a particular case. This research certainly has value, but it does not engage with the day‑to‑day management of projects.

Another approach to project scholarship is more interpretive, considering major projects as unique manifestations of organisational phenomena. This type of research seeks to understand a specific aspect of projects, while acknowledging that explanations are inherently incomplete but part of a larger complex picture.

Our cases use a ‘third type’ of project scholarship – an engaged scholarship approach that works closely with practitioners to reflect on their practice and offer pragmatic ways forward. This creates a bridge between practitioner knowledge and the latest evidence from project studies and neighbouring disciplines. This approach can produce a deeper understanding of ‘what works’ because the researcher is not fully immersed in practice. Instead, they can take a critical view of the taken‑for‑granted assumptions that guide situated practice and help consider the settings to which this learning can be transferred.

Reflective to reflexive learning

The case studies demonstrate how engaged scholarship can play an important role in examining a breadth of evidence to develop insights for future action. The Project X case studies describe: Moving beyond considering the past and present to also envision alternative futures.

Shifting attention from individual reflection to collective reflection.

These two steps enable a more reflexive form of learning, one that moves beyond

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In the current environment there is a need to refocus strategic values away from short-term aspirations of delivering projects on time and to budget towards developing sustainable solutions based on social, economic and environmental values

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reflecting on past events to challenging and questioning core assumptions. Rather than reacting to circumstances, it involves shaping situations and thinking more broadly about complexity and shifting ground. Reflexive learning is only possible if structures and routines support this form of inquisitive inquiry.

However, if project structures create a silo mentality, collective deliberation becomes difficult. If daily routines crowd out opportunities to search for alternatives, reflexive learning may be stifled. Fundamentally, reflexive learning requires a culture that recognises the benefit of collective problem‑solving and experimentation when faced with project complexity. We recommend that reflexive learning and engaged scholarship can play a dynamic role in shaping strategic capabilities, project structures and routines.

foster both stakeholder expectations and strategic values.

Within complex projects, the existence of multiple and sometimes conflicting stakeholder values means that this is not a straightforward task. However, in the current environment there is a need to refocus strategic values away from short‑term aspirations of delivering projects on time and to budget towards developing sustainable solutions based on social, economic and environmental values.

Engaged scholarship can offer significant benefits in terms of integrating sustainable thinking into reflexive practice.

This would involve extending our current understanding of reflective practice to a

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Developing capabilities from values

Capability development takes place at an operational and strategic level when knowledge structures and routine processes are organised to enhance project performance. Traditionally, studies of capability assume a multi‑level design that cascades down from strategic expectations and ends with project processes and routines. This model suggests that capability development requires an alignment of strategic capabilities, structures and routines to achieve expected outcomes. In contrast, our research examines how capabilities are successfully developed in practice.

Our findings augment the traditional cascading view of capabilities with a more holistic model made up of multiple layers where core values sit at the centre. This ‘onion’ model has implications for how organisations seek to develop, build and distribute capabilities. Fundamentally, it recommends placing values at the heart of capability development activities. This means that, for complex projects, once strategic expectations are understood, the focus would move to establishing a baseline of values.

Project organisation, routines and knowledge structures are then used as mechanisms to

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THE RESTORATION AND RENEWAL OF THE PALACE OF WESTMINSTER Dr Siavash Alimadadi, University of Sussex Business School, has investigated the strategic decision-making and governance capabilities of the programme, the biggest and most complex renovation of a heritage building in UK history.

Drawing on a real-time, longitudinal case study of the inception of the restoration and renewal programme, the research has been investigating how organisational actors develop a strategy for an uncertain and highly contested future, while safeguarding operations in the present and preserving the heritage of the past.

MAXIMISING GENDER EQUALITY IN UK MAJOR INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS Phillippa Groome, University of Sussex Business School, has investigated governance and leadership capabilities through her research, which explores how major projects can improve the delivery of equality, diversity and inclusion interventions across the UK infrastructure sector. Gender problems are used to unravel the sensitive issues underlying interventions, as well as the complex challenges practitioners face when delivering them. The case findings are based on a study commissioned by the Department for Transport.

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new reflexive thinking model focused on the past and present, but also envisionment of the future. This would involve collective inquiry and ongoing cross‑functional and inter‑disciplinary interaction.

Beyond standardised frameworks

Developing a more holistic view of capabilities has important implications for advancing the project profession. In particular, it suggests a need to move beyond a preoccupation with the selection and development of individuals based on standardised competency frameworks. Instead, reflexive thinking skills are needed to envision alternative futures and navigate the challenges of post‑pandemic recovery and sustainable growth.

Alamy

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF STRATEGIC CHANGE PROJECTS IN THE UK GOVERNMENT AND FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY

Interdisciplinary research by the University of Brighton’s Dr Dicle Kortantamer brings together studies of leadership and projects to identify different understandings of project leadership and how they shape how we respond to challenges facing individuals, organisations and societies.

To do this, it follows what the academic literature refers to as social theories of practice and draws on in-depth case studies of strategic change projects within a UK government department and a UK-based financial services institution.

n This is an edited extract from APM and Project X’s new report Rethinking capabilities: Lessons for policy, scholarship and practice, co-authored by Dr Dicle Kortantamer of the University of Brighton, Dr Jas Kalra of Newcastle University Business School and Dr Rebecca Vine of the University of Sussex Business School.

The report is available at apm.org.uk. Listen to the authors explain their research in more detail on APM’s From the Frontline podcast series at apm.org.uk/ resources

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Research by the University of Sussex Business School’s Dr Rebecca Vine examined the link between accountability management, everyday risk management and projectbased learning. It develops a longitudinal case study of the construction of Heathrow Terminal 2, a £2.5bn megaproject on the Eastern Campus of Heathrow Airport that successfully opened on time and to budget, despite an initial risk management ethos that emphasised boundary preservation.

INTEGRATING LOCAL SMEs IN THE HINKLEY POINT C SUPPLY CHAIN AND BUILDING THEIR CAPABILITIES Dr Jas Kalra of Newcastle University Business School looks at supply chain capabilities. His study examines how a large, inter-organisational project integrated small and medium-sized enterprises in its complex supply network and developed their capabilities.

Furthermore, it focused on the site supporting operations, which are an under-researched facet of large inter-organisational projects and examined how they could provide a unique opportunity to drive social value.

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In its report Lessons Learned: Delivering programmes at speed, the National Audit Office prompts project professionals to consider that not all programmes can, or indeed should, be delivered at speed.

Read on for an extract…

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he pandemic has meant government has needed to deliver programmes at speed, accelerating its normal processes. Government has sometimes done this well. However, delivering at speed creates new and heightened risks for both the programme and the organisation delivering the programme. Given these risks, not all programmes can, or indeed should, be delivered at speed, and we have identified insights to help decision‑makers determine when or how a programme should be delivered at speed and then continually test whether they can successfully deliver the programme.

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The National Audit Office reviewed programmes where government aimed to deliver outcomes much quicker than would normally be expected through effective and efficient processes. This includes where external events such as the Covid‑19 pandemic and Brexit meant programme outcomes must be achieved as soon as possible or by a fixed date. It also includes programmes where government had more choice over when outcomes needed to be achieved, such as transforming offender rehabilitation services or improving broadband.

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What to consider when deciding to deliver at speed

All programmes should be efficient, avoiding, for example, wasting time or money. However, in some cases, there will be an explicit reason for programmes to be delivered more quickly.

Before deciding whether to deliver at speed, decision‑makers must consider why speed is necessary and what this means for the risks they want to take on.

Decision‑makers need to be clear as to why speed is necessary before deciding if a programme should be delivered quickly.

Our framework to review programmes sets out the value of teams clarifying early on why a programme is needed and whether this particular programme meets the need. In this context, it includes the reason for speed, whether this is justified and its impact on delivery. This early thinking remains important even when delivering at speed.

The Infrastructure and Projects Authority sets out the need to “invest time in thorough up‑front planning to ensure the project is deliverable and affordable before commitments are given”. Programmes will be delivered at speed for different reasons. The reason will influence the decisions that need to be made and the risks that are taken. Some reasons for speed can be clear. They include:

■ An emergency situation. Given the

Decisionmakers need to be clear as to why speed is necessary before deciding if a programme should be delivered quickly

pandemic, government made significant spending decisions and decided to implement various programmes quickly. In a matter of weeks, ventilator procurement had been set up, employment support and business loan schemes were up and running, and the campaigns to house rough sleepers and deliver free school meals vouchers were designed and implemented.

■ A fixed deadline. From London being awarded the Olympic and Paralympic Games in July 2005, government and its delivery partners had seven years to get ready. This included acquiring and preparing land, securing planning permission, undertaking design work and procurement, building and fitting out the venues, alongside planning a lasting legacy.

We have also seen programmes delivered at speed simply because government wants to achieve the outcomes sooner. In these cases, without a clear rationale for speed, it can be more difficult to generate stakeholder support, and it will be harder to justify taking value‑for‑money risks. Decision‑makers need to weigh the advantages of earlier outcomes against the risks.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) launched its rehabilitation reforms with timescales set by

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ministers to deliver before the 2015 election. In setting out to meet these timescales, the MoJ did not adequately test how the transformed system might work before letting contracts, and did not have a good understanding of delivery models, working practices and governance. Its rushed implementation introduced significant risks with far‑reaching consequences, including poor value for money for the taxpayer.

Alongside achieving outcomes sooner, speed creates opportunities to learn how programmes could be more efficient. In 2020, HMRC conducted a specific exercise to capture lessons learned from introducing the Covid‑19 employment support schemes and is using these to inform how it is managing the schemes.

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Delivering programmes quickly can significantly increase value‑for‑money risks.

These risks may fall within a programme or more widely across government or a department. Government has sometimes recognised the increased risk – for example, accounting officers have sought ministerial directions where they have felt a proposal or programme raised feasibility or value‑for‑money concerns. When responding to the pandemic, and as prescribed by the Treasury’s Managing Public Money paper, some accounting officers obtained directions from ministers to proceed with programmes, as their speed meant they could not gain assurance over value for money.

Given the increased risks, and with limited finances and people, government cannot deliver all programmes at speed. Our report on initial learning from the government’s response to the pandemic highlighted the need to be clear about risk appetite and tolerance as the basis for choosing which trade‑offs should be made in emergencies.

At the start of a programme, decision‑makers need to identify and understand the risks, benefits and reasons for speed, to decide whether to take the increased risks or, for example, change what will be delivered. Risk may arise from the existing environment, such as an ageing digital landscape or inadequate data, or through simply doing things quickly.

When procuring for additional freight capacity in advance of Brexit, the Department

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for Transport (DfT) followed a procurement route that allowed it to act quickly, but carried greater legal risk. The accounting officer recognised that the DfT was taking forward a “novel and exceptional proposition” requiring careful judgement. The accounting officer concluded that there were high levels of risk, but that failure to act would lead to government losing the ability to secure the freight capacity needed to help protect the movement of critical goods.

There was subsequently a legal challenge to the procurement process, which led to an out‑of‑court settlement.

Examples of the risks of delivering programmes at speed We have seen how delivering programmes quickly can create potential risks. Here are three examples of risk and where we have seen aspects of this risk:

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Cost risk: Options being kept open for longer During the early stages of the pandemic, government started a programme to secure as many ventilators as possible, as quickly as possible. The approach prioritised speed and maximised the chances of success before considering cost. It included a willingness to accept that prices were higher than the normal market rate; deliberately supporting multiple options; and drawing significantly on technical expertise and capacity from the private sector. As its approach did not prioritise cost, government controlled costs where it could, and recovered some of its committed spending once it became apparent that fewer ventilators were needed than they had originally believed.

A government review of the Covid‑19 shielding programme for the clinically extremely vulnerable concluded that, due to the speed and context in which the programme was developed, it had to be largely offered to everyone, leading to inefficiencies. It noted that, should shielding be needed again, adopting a local support model could improve flexibility and potentially be more cost‑effective. Government applied many of these lessons to the second iteration of shielding in November 2020.

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Delivery risk: A greater chance things may go wrong To support small businesses facing cash‑flow problems due to the pandemic, government

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moved quickly to set up the Bounce Back Loan Scheme. It introduced the programme without the controls we would normally expect to see, such as those over duplicate applications, and with less strict eligibility criteria than other comparable government loan schemes. This increased credit and fraud‑related risks, which meant, at the time of our report in October 2020, the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the British Business Bank initially estimated that between 35 and 60 per cent of loans may not be repaid. They are currently reviewing these figures.

The deadlines to implement the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme constrained the time to consult with stakeholders, procure an administrator, and design and launch the scheme. BEIS and external assurance highlighted several risks of proceeding quickly, but BEIS accepted these risks. The fast pace constrained its procurement options, its engagement with the installer market and, alongside the short duration of the scheme, made it hard for energy efficiency installers to mobilise to meet demand. Despite BEIS’s considerable efforts, the rushed delivery and implementation of the scheme has significantly reduced the benefits that might have been achieved, caused frustration for homeowners and installers, and had limited impact on job creation for the longer term

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Capacity risk: Teams being overworked or unsustainable performance The volume of work required to prepare for Brexit was significant, with more than 22,000 civil servants working at the peak in October 2019. Staff turnover in Brexit‑related roles was higher than for the civil service in general, with a particularly acute problem at more senior grades.

The MoJ lacked the capacity and capability to manage the difficulties affecting the new‑generation electronic monitoring programme given competing priorities and wider challenges. There were high, competing demands for scarce skills, in particular for technical expertise, across the MoJ. We found many staff were pulled onto higher‑priority programmes such as the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, which were delivering at speed. During the pandemic, staff were moved to work seen as a higher priority, such as to support the Everyone In programme to support rough sleepers.

TO DELIVER A PROGRAMME SUCCESSFULLY AT SPEED, DECISION-MAKERS NEED TO ASK...

Why the programme needs to be delivered quickly Determining if speed is necessary and justifiable to decide where risks can be taken.

How much risk they want to, and can, take on within the programme and across the organisation Understanding the risks to value for money, such as things being missed or increased costs, and their risk appetite will help them decide whether those risks are worth taking.

Whether they can effectively monitor and manage the risks of speed by, for example: ■ Including speed as a specific programme objective to provide a clear framework for decision‑making and help make trade‑offs between speed, cost and outcomes.

■ Building teams with the right leadership, skills and experience to make clear, timely and reliable decisions.

■ Tailoring processes to add value and momentum to programme decision‑making.

■ Recognising the uncertainties of delivering at speed and managing these.

n This article is an edited extract from the National Audit Office’s report Lessons Learned: Delivering programmes at speed.

The full report, including advice and recommendations on what needs to be in place to monitor and manage risks, can be found at bit.ly/2ZYkGBo

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DEAR SUSANNE “I’m running an extremely hectic project and struggle to get everything done in the hours I have available. I spend far too much time deep in the detail. How do I create more space to look ahead and have strategic conversations about the project?”

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Susanne Madsen is an internationally recognised project leadership coach, trainer and consultant. She is the author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook and The Power of Project Leadership (second edition now available). For more information, visit www.susannemadsen.com

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Projects are becoming increasingly complex and deadline driven, and many project managers have to shoulder extremely heavy workloads. The natural response is to prioritise urgent activities, to run faster and work longer hours. But operating in a reactive fire-fighting mode quickly becomes a vicious circle. As you’ve experienced, you risk neglecting important activities on your project, and you may also end up paying a high price with your physical and mental health. It can take a great deal of courage to go against the tide – to sometimes switch off your email, find a quiet space to work from and decline a meeting request if your time is better spent elsewhere. But sometimes that is exactly what is needed.

Learn to delegate

One of the most significant changes you can make is to learn to delegate.

The most obvious tasks to start delegating are administrative tasks as well as detailed planning, decision-making and execution of specific work streams. It is essential

that these activities get done, but it isn’t necessary that you do them. As a project professional you need to constantly evaluate where you can add the most value.

You may feel that the people you work with don’t have the required skills, but if you want to free up time to focus on strategic priorities, it’s essential that you build up their ability to handle the detail.

As you consider how it’s possible to delegate more, be prepared for things to be done differently to how you would do them. That’s okay.

You also need to accept that it will require some up-front investment of your time. Don’t make the mistake of handing over a task too quickly without agreeing what is expected and what level of support is required.

Make the outcome as measurable as possible and agree a deadline. Then hand over the entire task and give the team member the support they need to succeed.

Don’t be a micromanager

You can avoid acting like a controlling micromanager by agreeing up front how often you will check in with the team member along the way. If you’re delegating to a person who is skilled and competent, you will patronise and demotivate them if you constantly breathe down their neck. I’ve seen this happen many times. It’s entirely different when a team member lacks knowledge and would genuinely appreciate being shown how to do something before embarking on it themselves. You could also find yourself in a situation where a team member lacks confidence despite being very knowledgeable. In this case, what they need is your moral

support, encouragement and praise, more than detailed instructions.

It’s this strategy of providing your team members with the right level of supervision while making the outcome as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound) as possible that is the essential ingredient of effective delegation. It enables you to gradually let go of the detail without the need to micromanage.

If you have difficulties letting go, begin by delegating smaller jobs with shorter timeframes.

Empowering the team

The beauty of delegation isn’t just that it frees up your time; it also has the potential to develop and empower your team. See the situation from your team member’s point of view. What’s in it for them?

In which ways do they get their own needs and desires fulfilled by taking on the tasks you want to hand over? The most elegant way to delegate is to match a task with a real interest from one of your team members. There are few things more motivating than trusting a team member with a task that stretches them to learn and that they would genuinely love to get their hands on.

Do you have a question for Susanne?

Email mail@susannemadsen.com

READER OFFER Enjoy a 25 per cent discount on The Power of Project Leadership, second edition, when you order the book from Kogan Page at www.koganpage.com Quote code: PROJ25

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The following individuals make up the latest cohort to achieve Chartered Project Professional status with APM. Congratulations to you all, from those based in the UK and US to Singapore and China! Full details of the criteria for achieving chartered status and the routes to get there can be found at apm.org.uk/chartered-standard, where you can also view the full Register of Chartered Project Professionals.

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First name

Surname

Country

Siva Rama

Krishnan

IND

Rusnah

Abdul Rahman

MYS

Sheng Yei

Lim

SGP

Ayo

Alagbe

UK

Hannah

Lomas

UK

Richard

Anderson

UK

Alex

Macaulay

UK

Mohamad Firdaus Nanda

Ariffin

MYS

Neil

Mackinnon

UK

Bhudia

UK

Alistair

Marsh

UK

Aseem

Bhutta

NLD

Jonathan

Maxwell

UK

Dan

Brown

UK

Anthony

McKay

UK

Lawrence

Cattrall

UK

Iain

Murdoch

NLD

Martin

Connolly

UK

Abby

Neal

UK

Andrew

Cook

UK

Denise

Neill

UK

Roscoe

Crawford

UK

Patsy

Northern

UK

Rebecca

Cumming

UK

Sean

O’Hara

UK

Olaniyi

Denloye

UK

Borhan Bin

Osman

MYS

Gabriel

Dimowo

UK

Andries

Otter

NLD

Neil

Franklin

UK

Gabriel

US

Sian

Gamlin

UK

Peter

Paes Machado de Andrade Paulus

David

Garcia Jurado

UK

Andrew

Peacock

UK

Sarah

Giddy

UK

Robert Noel V

Peria

UAE

Sorrel

Gilbert

UK

Richard

Price

UK

Shamala

Govindasamy

UK

David

Rae

UK

Lloyd

Hardman

UK

Simon

Reid

UK

Andrew

Heap

UK

Charles

Ross-Smith

UK

Michael

Hillier

UK

Jennifer

Rushe

UK

Alexander

Holmes

UK

Carlton

Sanders

UK

Fengcai

Hu

CHN

Jorge

Santos

UK

Dominik

Hungerbuhler

NLD

Steve

Savage

UK

Ammar

Hussain

UK

Kayhan

Sen

UAE

Ifunanya

Ifeacho

UK

Joanne

Sharples

UK

Rob

Jansen

UK

Helen

Simmons

UK

Trevor

Jones

UK

Miguel

Soriano

US

Laura

Kelly

UK

Andrew

Swaine

UK

Scott

Kelly

UK

Alaina

Tolhurst

UK

John

Kerambrum

UK

Nicholas

Vassallo

UK

Richard

Kollek

UK

Ellie

Zemani

UK

NLD

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ho says project management isn’t a childhood dream job? Hanna Osundina got the idea aged 11. “I was inspired to enter the industry after reading As Stars Shine Down by Sidney Sheldon,” she reveals. “In this novel, the protagonist, Lara Cameron, is an architect turned property developer and dominates a traditionally male industry. I was inspired by the strength and determination of Lara, and understood what I wanted to achieve in my own career.”

Sidney Sheldon’s heroines are famous for being strong women. “The thing I remember most was thinking, ‘Oh my god, she is epic.’ I read loads of books with women in romantic leads. Lara is surrounded by men and doing something no one expects of her. I thought this was super cool.” The idea of being the heir to Lara stuck. Not only did Osundina study architecture at university and then enter property project management, her CV is in keeping with her original mission.

Osundina’s current job is development director at Balfour Beatty Investments. To which we can add (deep breath): guest lecturer at Greenwich University and vice‑chair of its Construction, Property and Surveying Practices Industry Advisory Board; founder of Black Women in Real Estate; D&I advisor to Estates Gazette; and board member of E16 Community Land Trust.

Louise Haywood-Schiefer

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Hanna Osundina’s career has been devoted to regeneration, hoping to give the communities she works with a far better experience than she grew up with

A passion for regeneration

In all of her passions there’s a common thread, namely the idea of giving back to the community she came from. “I grew up on a council estate in Hackney. The council effectively let it go derelict. For 10 years we were promised regeneration and nothing happened. It was

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so frustrating. I don’t think anyone should be living in a left‑behind space.”

Her career has been devoted to regeneration.

“Always at the back of my mind, when I’m doing a project, I am thinking: ‘How would I have liked to have been consulted? How could my parents have been made part of the process? How do you get the best out of a neighbourhood?’”

Her first big role was with Peabody, the housing association with 67,000 homes. “I mostly worked on Section 106s [community impact agreements between councils and developers], but I also worked on a regeneration scheme in Elephant and Castle, and I realised regeneration is where my expertise and preference lie.”

Making the leap to the big time

She soon jumped ship for Linkcity, formerly Bouygues Development. “It’s a huge organisation. I was working on the Canning Town regeneration project over multiple phases. Phase 3 was for 620 homes.” Her ability to understand the community, and the detail of the project thanks to her architecture training, and natural high energy meant she was able to help the project move at pace.

From there she scaled up again: this time to Balfour Beatty Investments to work on the East Wick and Sweetwater projects. She was responsible for planning permission for 1,500 homes by the Olympic Park – essential work in a district crippled by under‑development and soaring house prices. In June 2021, another promotion made her development director of the £860m project.

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Hanna Osundina MRICS Current job ● Development director, Balfour Beatty Investments Previous jobs ● Senior development officer, Linkcity UK, ● Development officer, Peabody Other roles ● Diversity and inclusion advisor to Estates Gazette ● Founder, Black Women in Real Estate

● Volunteer, Habitat for Humanity ● Guest lecturer, Greenwich University ● Board member, E16 CLT Qualifications ● MSc, project management for the built environment, Oxford Brookes University ● BA, architecture, University of Sheffield ● CSCS Managers and Professionals

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An impressive day job. So why the plethora of extra gigs? Osundina speaks passionately about her desire to help others succeed in the profession. An instinct borne of her own realisation of how different her upbringing was.

“The biggest setback I had was when I got to Sheffield University,” she recalls. “I had an identity crisis. I had grown up in Hackney, where everyone was black and minority ethnic. My friends were Turkish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian and Pakistani. An eclectic culture.

Suddenly I was one of only four black people on my course out of a hundred. There was one other black person in the year above, and no black teaching staff. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m a minority, I’m different.’ I didn’t know how to handle that.”

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Taking action to connect and support

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She’s not the first person to find the culture shift at university a shock. Fortunately, she learned to see her upbringing as an advantage. “In the end, it helped my career. Now I can relate to people of all backgrounds and find it easier to connect with people.” And she ensures her industry offers support to those in a similar position.

“I founded Black Women in Real Estate to help women connect to each other. There aren’t many of us! I reached out to a bunch of amazing women on LinkedIn and asked if they wanted to have dinner.

That was the start. During “I founded Black Covid we did fortnightly calls.

Women in Real We discuss our careers and Estate to help what we are working on. At its women connect core it is a friendship group. to each other” If we’ve got an issue we can just pick up the phone to speak to someone. We make sure black women feel encouraged to enter and stay in our industry. Because at the moment there’s not much representation of black women.”

Her work at Greenwich University is also about helping the next generation. She advises course directors on whether their material is relevant for the workplace.

There’s also her work with the E16 Community Land Trust (CLT): “I live in Canning Town, E16. The CLT lobbies the local authority to give them land or properties for local people who are either in temporary accommodation or going to be displaced.” Naturally, her skills in project management and experience of working with council officials on property and planning issues are a huge help in the challenges faced by the CLT. After all this, does she have time to relax? “I was doing a pottery course before lockdown. It just calms me down.

It’s one of the nicest ways to decompress.”

It’s a formidable career. Osundina relied on a fiction writer for her inspiration as a girl. Today she’s ensuring young women have a real‑life role model, and active helper, to get them on the right path.

Hanna Osundina was speaking to Charles Orton‑Jones

HANNA’S TOP TIPS FOR PROJECT PROFESSIONALS

1

Work on your emotional intelligence

Project management requires great communication. So it’s important to work on your emotional intelligence to understand people better. It’s not easy. I’ve been on a few courses, which worked well. Myers‑Briggs can help too. You can determine whether people are in the green, red, blue or yellow quadrants of personality types. If they are more process‑driven, you know how to talk to them. If they are more sociable, then take that approach. And it’s important to get 360‑degree feedback from your colleagues, to check your assumptions about yourself. High emotional intelligence means you get the best out of people.

2

Research diversity and inclusion There is so much you can read to be better informed. For example, Renni Eddo‑Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

The information is out there if you really want to understand the issue. A question I ask is: what is your motivation? Is diversity and inclusion a marketing tool for you? Or is your aim to be genuinely more diverse and inclusive. Strong businesses need diverse voices.

Not just race, but sex, creed, religion and background.

This is what we should be striving for.

3

Run your life with to‑do lists I have a lot of to‑do lists! They are my saving grace. Make a weekly to‑do list. Then prioritise. When I started managing people, I made to‑do lists for them as well – what I’m expecting from them. I find it very satisfying to tick off each task as it gets done. I list absolutely everything, including what I need to do in my personal life. If I tick something off, but it’s only partially done, I’ll add a new task until it is complete.

It’s a great way to monitor not only what you need to do, but what you’ve achieved as well.

4

Be inspired by what you read I really like the book Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

It’s about being your most authentic self. I recommend it. It challenged me during the lockdown period, when I was managing a huge team, not to be who I am not supposed to be. When I get feedback, one of the things people mention a lot is that I am authentic in the way I approach leadership. I learned a lot about the concept from this book.

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PROJECT: TO DELIVER BLOOD FOR THE NHS Andrew Birkett, programme systems

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engineering manager at Clayton Systems Consultancy, volunteers for Bristol Blood Bikes, which delivers blood and other life-saving products by motorbike. Here’s how he applies his project management skills…

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hances are that the blood biker is a little‑known entity to most. Unless you have ever needed urgent life‑saving support from the NHS, your only form of contact with this group – collectively known as ‘clots’ – has probably been a fear‑inducing blur of fluorescent livery that appears in your mirrors and progresses to overtake you (safely and legally of course). The last thing on most people’s minds is “there goes one cog in a larger NHS integrated logistic support operating model”.

As a voluntary emergency service, blood bikers are but one link in a critical logistic chain that gets blood from donor to patient. Be it to a critical care paramedic who arrived by helicopter and is administering blood products on the roadside or to a surgeon performing a planned operation. It’s not just blood product either, it’s breast milk to and from Neo‑Natal Care Units, Covid‑19 samples, blood samples, controlled medication and surgical tools.

It’s about now that I can hear die‑hard project practitioners reading this and crying out, “What’s this got to do with project management? This sounds like operations or business as usual – project management is about change and capability not logistics and operations. Blasphemy!” They would, of course, be correct, but perhaps the opportunity is to

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reflect on how comparable the skill sets of operations and project management are.

Regardless, one thing I hope is agreed universally is the effort to ban project management buzzword bingo across domains. On that note, let’s ‘break it down’, ‘unpack this’ and start our ‘journey’ of comparison with the Bristol Blood Bikers (FreeWheelers EVS).

Blood bikers like Andrew are often first on scene during a crisis

Team communication is king

A normal night sees many reactive calls from various NHS ‘customers’, all of whom have a differing urgency, location, complexity and cargo type. A night also sees proactively planned blood replenishments with Air Ambulances. A central coordinator receives calls and, using available riders across four sizeable patches (North, East, South and West), plans jobs for riders based on priority, availability, perceived ‘critical paths’, ‘T‑Shirt sized’ timings and resulting rider utilisation.

Perhaps the most important factor are the riders, who, being at the coalface, have

Well‑intentioned plans usually spiral into chaos, with weather, road closures, emergent priority jobs, blood availability, mechanical failures and getting lost adding to a growing backlog

beyond the job

everyone together, motivated and safe.

Maintaining contact, promoting good spirits and touching base puts people skills at the heart of their role in understanding a rider’s state of mind. Changing a rider’s plans for their own benefit is a judgement skill of a leader, calling on ‘agile’ to ‘veer and haul’ with other riders, pulling them across patches to cover or even using off‑rota riders to help out for the benefit of a fatigued and less‑aware rider.

Decision‑making under pressure

route knowledge. Riders offer up alternative routes, options and waypoints often previously unknown to coordinators. This team consultation and feedback is critical to the success of the night. While the coordinator’s blueprint for the night can be reset, the acceptance of the team’s knowledge and ideas across four patches is critical, not only for saving time, fuel or rider fatigue, but also, more importantly, in gaining total team buy‑in and a great shift. Ignore it at a coordinator’s peril!

The people person in the sky

Well‑intentioned plans usually spiral into chaos, with weather, road closures, emergent priority jobs, blood availability, mechanical failures and getting lost adding to a growing backlog. With this chaos and pressure comes fatigue. Solo riding on dark, wet, cold roads for hours at a time puts due diligence and rider safety as a central factor in the coordinator’s mind. It is too easy to simply let things march on with the ‘we are where we are’ mantra.

Much like a project professional, the overseeing coordinator is charged with looking after the team and helping them in ‘sticky moments’, often as the only help around when it goes wrong. It’s more than tracking little motorbike symbols around a map. The coordinator is the team leader, keeping

Motorcyclist (noun) – a person crazy enough to strap a tank of fuel between their legs and ride it around among other UK road users.

Blood biker (noun) – a special type of crazy person; a motorcyclist who in addition carries blood product in the dead of night, in all weathers, quickly, quietly and for free to support the NHS.

Riders are often unintentionally first on scene, being nimble and cutting through traffic. Much like project professionals, they call on experience, judgement and personal safety considerations.

One memorable moment for me was when I was avoiding sudden‑braking traffic on the motorway and filtered through the cars to find the cause, which was a two‑lane accident. There were dazed and confused people wandering around live lanes talking and arguing, with children present. Being the liveried‑up bike with blue lights available for use, there is an expectation of being ‘the person in charge’ from the public (albeit without any actual authority), and it falls on a rider’s morality to act (or not).

As such, managing ‘stakeholders’ (road users) to help make a motorway safe and move people to safety is a call on a rider’s decision‑making. In the resulting minutes, watching people in shock behaving in different ways calls on leadership skills in sorting out ambulances, maintaining safety, calming tensions, supporting children in shock and supporting police when they arrive. At which point, emotions are put in a box and a bow tied around it as the rider continues on with the urgent blood product in the bike – remember that is the reason for being on the motorway!

The ‘so what?’

These skills are evidenced in operations but born from project management. They are skills practitioners have in varying degrees, but should be proud of whether in projects, programmes or operations. Not everybody can do project management, and the skills above are testament to project professionals’ natural tendency to be good at them. Noting how similar and transferable the skills are across operations and change projects, shouldn’t handover between them go more smoothly more often?

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Where project management meets popular culture

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Apple TV+ hit Ted Lasso reminds us that sometimes how you manage a project – and the effect it has on the team members – is as important as what it achieves

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‘Welcome to my TED talk’ F

eel‑good comedy Ted Lasso cleaned up at the 2021 Emmys. It’s the story of kooky second‑tier college American football coach Ted (Jason Sudeikis). He’s hired

by British socialite Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) in an attempt to sabotage Richmond FC, the football (soccer) team she has taken control of in her divorce settlement. Her ex, Rupert Manion (Anthony Head), loves the club. By bringing in what she hopes will be a laughably bad manager, Rebecca hopes to take revenge for Rupert’s philandering.

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The set‑up, from a project management point of view, is fascinating. Rebecca is obviously the project sponsor. She holds the purse strings, hires the team and has the clearest view of what constitutes success for the project – even if her own agenda is hidden. On the face of it, she’s better than most sponsors.

Of course, picking a completely inexperienced project leader looks like an insane decision. Her choice flies in the face of what is expected by both the business (the team’s players) and its customers (Richmond FC’s fans, whose expletive‑laden chants make clear how they view Ted’s appointment).

But as far as Ted can tell, she’s a model sponsor. She takes daily progress meetings with him, is supportive of even his most off‑the‑wall suggestions and backs him in public. Ted has no idea about her darker motives. And there can’t be many of us in the project management community who haven’t suspected, at one time or another, that what the project sponsors or programme managers say the goal is and what they actually want to happen are at odds.

This kind of problem is most evident in sponsorship by committee.

The board might have laid out the scope of the project and the key deliverables – but there’s a nagging feeling that someone needs you to fail in some way to bolster their own vision of how things might work better. At Richmond FC, Ted knows the business and customers expect and even want him to fail. But he takes Rebecca at face value.

The fiery midfielder Roy Kent is supposedly based on a certain ex-Man Utd captain…

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Key qualities

Guileless and relentlessly positive, Ted does precisely what every project manager should do when they’re faced with an unfamiliar and hostile environment. So, let’s look at his top five project management qualities:

1

Build a close‑knit team Ted isn’t flying solo. He brings with him a wingman, Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), who knows his methods and has a technical mind well‑suited to adapting their approach to a new sport. He might be taciturn and unenthusiastic, but he backs Ted’s ethos to the hilt. That support is critical.

2

Back your allies Ted enlarges his inner circle by winning over put‑upon kit man Nate (Nick Mohammed), whose tactical acumen has been overlooked thanks to his lowly status in the dressing room.

Those skills are valuable to the project, and the loyalty Ted engenders with his promotion to the coaching team also adds momentum to his unique vision for Richmond FC.

3

Don’t play politics This can be hard when you suspect everyone around you is doing just that. But Ted never plays a double game. What you see is what you get.

His transparency is initially perceived as weakness – or, at best, naivety. Yet both critics (such as The Independent’s cynical football columnist Trent Crimm, played by James Lance) and his own organisation come to realise that his methods are not some posturing facade – they’re a genuine attempt to elevate performance through positivity.

4

Keep your friends close…

Ted is always thinking about how to make people feel better. Every day he bakes biscuits for Rebecca, for example.

She initially treats them as some kind of bribe, but – especially when she learns he’s not buying them from a posh store – she realises they’re a symptom of just how open and, well, nice he is.

Ted never burdens his allies with his (considerable) problems, and always goes out of his way to keep them happy.

By the end, Ted and his inner circle are seen as human beings whose project comes from a place of positivity

5

… and your enemies closer Rebecca has Ted fooled – at least until her own Damascene conversion late in season one (technically that’s a spoiler, but you know it’s going to happen from episode one). His players and fans are openly hostile. He doesn’t take it personally. He understands their frustration with him. But he sticks with it – turning foes such as midfield hardman Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) into acolytes. Ted even drinks in the pub frequented by fans, who call him terrible names to his face, turning his project from a haughty insult to their passion into a noble (if doomed) quest to do the Right Thing.

In other words, for the cynics – and every project manager must deal with them in their organisation – the perception of the project team shifts. At the start, they are distant theoreticians who can never understand ‘how we do things’ and are imposing needless change. By the end, Ted and his inner circle are seen as human beings whose project comes from a place of positivity and seeks only to deliver the broad outcomes everyone wants – and in a way that makes them better people.

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Elevating the kit man to the coaching staff might sound drastic – but perhaps there’s a hidden talent somewhere on your project team

It’s rare that a project sponsor will bring you in to fulfil a hidden motive of sabotage, but it pays to remain vigilant

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Too much positivity?

There is a word of warning for project managers, too. Ted’s positivity is relentless, but underneath it he’s hiding a gnawing depression caused by the failure of his marriage. He suppresses it and is in denial about it for much of the series. But eventually it causes him to break down. Project management is about being a leader, being positive and creative. But you must also guard your own wellness – and look to those whose own positive energy can help you in turn. (Truthfully? It’s hard not to be sympathetic for his wife. Having Ted’s monotonous upbeatness in the workplace is one thing; it might get a bit much at home.)

A final word of warning. The concept of the show sounds saccharine, but the writers and actors manage to cut through it with enough wit, laughs and charm that it really works… in season one. Season two? Well, let’s just say the Ted Lasso TV project needed to have set tougher stage‑gate targets for new jokes in its sophomore outing. It’s a reminder that it’s great to be positive – but there does need to be output from your project, too.

CAN YOU AFFORD TO PUT PEOPLE OVER PROJECTS? Spoiler alert: at the end of the first season of Ted Lasso, Richmond FC are relegated from the Premier League after former star player Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) returns to face the club for the final game of the season with Manchester City and scores the goal that sends them down. Ted’s relationship with Jamie is the show in microcosm: the vapid, overpaid, arrogant, abusive sports star learns what really matters in life from the positive embrace of his guileless coach.

But relegation means that the Ted Lasso project – superficially at least – has failed. Yes, he’s won over the dressing room, and even Rebecca, by the end of the season. Unfortunately, sport is binary. No matter how prettily you perform, no matter how positive everyone feels, you either win or you don’t. To put it in project management terms, if you miss the deadline or blow the budget – or the project

just doesn’t get done – you have failed, no matter how positive the HR survey of team members came out.

Nevertheless, we live in an age where mental and physical wellness are becoming – quite rightly – just as important as a range of other outcomes. Hitting time and cost targets at the cost of burning out your project team or delivering a project that the organisation is hostile to as a direct result of how you implemented it – these are fails today (or certainly should be).

So while most of you won’t be able to win over your fickle sponsor with baked goods or love‑bomb that recalcitrant departmental manager like Ted Lasso, the message of the show still applies.

We need to create positive and open projects – and organisations more generally – so that, succeed or fail, we’re ready to go again for the next one.

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New books, recommended favourites and podcasts to keep you entertained

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Darren Dalcher welcomes a Harvard Business Review project management book and Sara Hasani considers a bullish approach to risk

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Project Management Handbook

Antonio Nieto‑Rodriguez

(Harvard Business Review Press) The rapidly changing world demands new ways of thinking.

It also necessitates courageous conversations about the role of projects that do not revolve around earned value, comprehensive contracts or scheduling methods.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the pandemic is the ultimate proof that major initiatives are critical in resetting society and pivoting towards a new reality.

The Project Management Handbook concurs that project‑based work is the engine driving change and progress. Its publication represents a significant landmark, refocusing attention on the critical role of projects, and heralds the rise of the project economy. Nieto‑Rodriguez sets

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himself the unenviable task of creating the first project management book for everyone.

Universalism requires a common starting point. Nieto‑Rodriguez eschews the complex and technical descriptions that typically adorn project management tomes, opting instead for a pragmatic way of explaining projects. The book develops a shared outlook, a simple framework presented as a project canvas and a common language that can be applied by all stakeholders.

The book comprises four parts.

The first sets the scene by providing definitions, exploring different characteristics and a range of approaches. The second focuses on the project canvas that defines the project through the purpose, people and its creation. The third explores the capabilities needed for success, and the final part aims to connect projects to essential organisational and societal megatrends.

Does the overarching ambition to provide a common way of thinking

about projects work? The short answer is yes, the book provides the basis for important new discourse around projects and their increasingly critical role in enabling organisations and society. It offers a fresh, stimulating and informed perspective.

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Review by Darren Dalcher, professor in strategic project management at Lancaster University

Risk: A User’s Guide

General Stanley McChrystal

(Penguin Business)

As an academic who teaches quantitative risk, I warn my students about the challenges facing projects and almost immediately provide them with some quantitative tools to tackle them. For me, storytelling only comes in as a way to

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foretell the warning signs. Risk does the opposite. Retired US army general McChrystal tells the story of risk as one of threat, and then gives you the solution from his military perspective.

He builds upon mostly man‑made crises, tells you what went wrong and what a military man would do to avoid it next time.

As an academic, I am trained to be terrified of the thought of stating the facts and not referencing them to hundreds of sources and connecting them to theories, but McChrystal mostly talks about his own personal experience (although, at the end of the book, there is an exhaustive list of events whose stories he tells). So, Risk needs to be treated as a good example of risk scenarios and an entertaining account of real‑life crises and lessons learned by practitioners who were directly involved in those events.

It is an easy read and the examples and scenes change so quickly that you don’t get bored. But this is a masculine voice coming out of a war as a victor. Even though there is a female co‑author (Anna Butrico), Risk seems to me to be predominantly written from a male soldier’s perspective. It also talks about projects (including wars) from a war‑room perspective – operational and practical. If you are looking for the voice of stakeholders (for example, casualties and those displaced by war), you won’t find them in this book.

However, from a pure leadership point of view, you can find a very useful toolkit for diagnosing the ‘symptoms’ you observe and mapping them to some practical solutions to boost your ‘risk immune system’.

Especially for me as an advocate of game‑based decision‑making, this book provides a good set of examples of how games have been used in real‑life situations for tackling man‑made risks.

It also officially counts games (war games) as a good tool to simulate a risk before it materialises.

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Review by Sara Hasani, senior lecturer in project management, London South Bank University

My Bedside Books

Hannah Gledhill, transformation management office, Hotel Chocolat GETTING TRANSFORMATION RIGHT: A LEADER’S GUIDE TO THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE AT SCALE Jane Logie

This is a collection of learnings that can be applied to digital or any other large‑scale business transformation. Logie guides you through five chapters from ‘Ways of Working’ to ‘Embedding’.

Checklists at the end of each chapter can be used to assess the status of your transformation programme, and prompt you to consider things that might otherwise have been missed.

VISUALIZING PROJECT MANAGEMENT: MODELS AND FRAMEWORKS FOR MASTERING COMPLEX SYSTEMS (3RD EDITION) Kevin Forsberg, Hal Mooz & Howard Cotterman

This book delves into a multitude of project management topics in detail and has a textbook feel to it, with

supporting explanatory diagrams.

For this reason, it is a great book to dip into. Whatever your project type, there will be one or more chapters to consult and help guide you through. This book was bought for me by a mentor and, although published in 2005, it has proven to be entirely relevant to project delivery today.

TASTE OF MY LIFE Raymond Blanc

For me, lockdown sparked a real interest in cooking. Raymond Blanc’s story demonstrates what can be achieved from humble beginnings through hard work, passion and self‑belief. What particularly resonates is his love for family and the fond memories he has of sharing meals and time together, something that the pandemic has made many of us value more than ever. His passion for simple, accessible ingredients shines through.

We’re all ears – podcasts to listen to

Send your own recommendations to emma.devita@thinkpublishing.co.uk FROM THE FRONTLINE APM Podcast APM’s series, hosted by Project editor Emma De Vita, provides an up‑close and personal account by professionals working on projects at the forefront of thinking and action, whether it’s getting behind the scenes with Gemma Roura Serra, who masterminds the Formula E programme of races, or researchers and academics explaining how their cutting‑edge research can help you make better decisions or focus on the right project capabilities.

BRIDGES TO THE FUTURE RSA Former RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor puts a range of experts and thinkers on the spot by asking for one big idea to help build

effective bridges to our new future.

Interviewees in this lively series include authors and journalists Will Storr on how to play the status game; Adrian Woolridge on meritocracy; and Professor Nichola Raihani on what the natural world can teach us about collaboration.

OUTRAGE + OPTIMISM Face the climate crisis head on but understand that we have the power to solve it. From former UN chief Christiana Figueres and the team who brought you the Paris Agreement, this podcast will inform, inspire and give you the will to do something. Recent episodes include a conversation with former CEO of Unilever Paul Polman and sustainability writer Andrew Winston on their book Net Positive.

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HOW PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOLVED THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY IN A DAY Eddie Obeng on how calling in other professionals and defining a problem correctly are critical to project success, even for the really big ones…

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I just can’t wait to go skiing again.

Waking up in a cosy chalet and spending all day outdoors physically doing something that’s so difficult that you can’t really think of anything else. Then, as daylight fades, returning to a delicious bowl of onion soup in front of an open fire. After two years of reduced global economic activity due to lockdowns, I hope the snow will be consistent. I’m hoping we’ve clawed back on greenhouse gas emissions. I wonder if we have, because I keep reading that we still face a climate emergency…

I’m doing a thought experiment.

I’m wondering what would happen if we gave the job of solving climate change to project managers, engineers and designers, instead of politicians, bureaucrats, planners and teenagers.

What would they do differently?

The climate emergency is a quest

As the project manager, you’d begin by understanding the problem and scoping it. You’d engage your key stakeholders early and bring your engineer and designer in to do the deep dive together.

You’d probably start with a ‘Gap Leap’.

The gap is defined as ‘the difference between where we are and where we need to be’. You’d conclude that the gap is that we have not ensured a habitat that sustains the ecosystem for all the interdependent living creatures in Earth’s biosphere. You might skip the next two steps and go directly to the fourth question: why haven’t we fixed this yet?

In no time there would be a powerful list: deforestation to plant monocultures destroys habitats; destroying mycorrhizal fungi in the subsoil releases greenhouse gases; forest management methods provide the opportunity for firestorms; and so on. This project is a quest. A

Professor Eddie Obeng is an educator, TED speaker and the author of Perfect Projects and All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook. You can join his masterclasses, courses and workshops on the QUBE #SuperReal campus: https://QUBE.cc

project where the goal is clear but will require many parallel routes to achieve it.

You know, as leader, that in quest‑style projects, success depends on your passion and determination and rests on the skills of your ‘knights’.

Reduce transportation, transmission and distribution losses, duh!

You quickly assign one sub‑project to the engineer. The purpose is to reduce the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. You use the iron triangle to frame the principles: it should be as fast as possible without creating habitat‑destroying unintended consequences. Quickly, your engineer concludes that though water vapour has the far bigger impact, the huge sea surface will make easy solutions impossible, but with CO2 we have a better chance. Five minutes later, by asking ‘why’ and not ‘who, where or what’, they announce the solution: reduce transportation, transmission and distribution losses.

Strangely, your engineer uses skiing as the analogy. Transportation losses

arise because though it takes less energy to bring the bowl of onion soup to you, you ski to it. While outside you’re insulated, kept warm and generate no CO2. Once back in the chalet you create huge transmission losses as you space‑heat the air that escapes up the chimney! Distribution losses arise because both the chalet and bistro have to be heated and lit even when you aren’t there!

Old solution becomes a new innovation

Problem scoped out, you on‑board the designer to redesign the system for implementation. A few minutes of user‑centred thinking and they’ve designed wicking clothing to avoid air conditioning and stylish insulated clothing (known as a cardigan) to avoid the need for space heating and transmission loss. By learning from commuters, they have redesigned virtual working from staring at a grid of other people’s foreheads for eight hours, to a virtual world accessible by all from anywhere. No transportation losses. And now you don’t have to simultaneously heat your home, car, train and office all day when you’re only in one at a time: distribution losses reduce.

Now you consider your wider stakeholders and conclude that they will find this less disruptive than the alternative. You work out the business case. Travel, heating or cooling account for almost half of global CO2 generated.

Your project execution will reduce that by three‑quarters. The payback is almost immediate because your solution is low risk. It does not require investments in unproven technology or replacement technology – like an electrical grid for electric cars. Now all that remains is to engage your stakeholders and make it happen.

74 W I NTER 2021 PROJECT

BLACK YELLOW MAGENTA CYAN

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