The government is committed to reforming programme and project management in the civil service. Tim Gibson reports on a Civil Service World round table that discussed how to ensure that its reform plans meet with success.
A Civil Service World round table isn’t meant to be an exercise in self-flagellation. But if there’s a topic to make even the most positive civil servant reach for the birch twig and cilice, it’s programme and project management (PPM).
The public sector’s project management shortcomings are well known. Just think of the Eurofighter procurement, the early years of the Department for Transport’s shared services scheme, the NOMIS IT system, the regional fire control project, or the bungled letting of the West Coast Mainline contract. To make things more difficult, a content-hungry media pounces on any hint of wasted public money and uses it as a large stick with which to beat the government. With newspapers like ours, civil servants needn’t punish themselves for failure. The media takes care of all that.
So a recent CSW round table on project management – sponsored by global membership organisation the Project Management Institute, and bringing together a range of civil service project managers and leaders – might have been rather a gloomy affair. This event wasn’t about wallowing in past failures, though. Instead, the aim was to see how the government’s reforms to PPM can realise their potential and lead to more effective delivery in the civil service.
Why delivery matters
Good PPM matters in government, in part, because of the scrutiny under which it operates. And that doesn’t just mean the glare of the media spotlight: the National Audit Office, Public Accounts Committee and other select committees are also watching the way that public money is used. Overspends and delays can seriously damage organisations’ reputations, and affect the willingness of ministers and other departments to trust them with major projects.
What’s more, poor project management can result in missed deadlines – which in turn raises costs – and leave citizens waiting for new or upgraded services. Meanwhile, delivery failures can mean that the anticipated benefits of a project or programme are never fully realised, undermining its value in the long term.
The challenges
Part of the reason for past failings in government projects is the stakeholder complexity that’s inherent in publicly-funded projects or programmes. Civil servants often need to work together across departmental boundaries, and with other public bodies as well as voluntary sector groups and private companies. Coordinating all these different groups, and getting them united behind a common purpose, is a major challenge – yet project managers must create such “strategic alignment” at the earliest possible stage in the project’s lifecycle, said Sue Higgins, the communities department’s director general for finance and corporate services.
Even once strategic alignment has been secured, the winds of changing political calculations or ministerial reshuffles can suddenly change a project’s aims or remit – as several participants pointed out. “A change of government, or minister, [can mean that] the project changes,” observed John Stubley, the Cabinet Office’s PSN operations director. “So we’re forever trying to keep the direction going, but it’s subject to change.”
Talking of change, one feature of civil service PPM is that people move between jobs more frequently than many observers would like. Ann Coad, a lead project review manager from the Home Office, pointed out that this is especially problematic at the level of senior responsible owners (SRO) – the people with whom the buck stops on any particular project.
The Welsh Government’s Richard Wilson, a deputy director in the PPM division, contended that the challenge here is twofold: on the one hand, the fluidity in civil service appointments means there is no guarantee of a project being managed by the same person throughout its duration; and on the other, people with valuable project management experience and training can be moved into completely new fields – an approach to career development that is, these days, pretty much unique to the civil service.
The Civil Service Reform Plan sets out the aim of retaining SROs for the duration of a project; but Wilson’s colleague Kim Saboor – head of the Welsh Government’s Portfolio Office – pointed out that on long programmes such people can get “project fatigue”, and their contributions become inimical to successful delivery. Stubley echoed this, adding that another risk of keeping personnel on projects for their duration is that they become entrenched in a fixed approach, and aren’t able to adjust to evolving needs and expectations. A middle way, participants suggested, is to break projects down into coherent chunks, and allow personnel changes – with careful handovers – at ‘break points’.
Clearly, a great deal rests on the quality of the people involved in overseeing and managing projects and programmes. Julie Pierce, the director of corporate services from the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency, said: “I wonder whether, when we’re embarking on projects, this is the first thing we abandon as we head off in to the planning, and project office, and business case? It’s a challenge: are we spending enough time on the people side of things?”
Wilson agreed: “People deliver projects,” he said. “My reflection is that often we spend insufficient time at the early stage to get that bit right: to make sure you’ve built a team that has got the right mix of people who believe [in the project], and visible leadership to create that vision and stakeholder coalition in order to take things forward.”
The reform plan
Taking things forward is very much the order of the day when it comes to the Civil Service Reform Plan. Talking to CSW before Christmas, David Pitchford – executive director of the Major Projects Authority (MPA) – said that the notion that government can improve the delivery of major projects is central to reform, and will drive efficiencies and lead to better public services.
The MPA is the agent of such reform. Not only does it have a mandate to scrutinise all substantial projects at key ‘gateway’ moments, intervening if necessary to rescope or stop them; it is also the recipient of quarterly reports from project delivery teams on the progress of major projects, and has a right to veto a new project or programme if its business case doesn’t stack up.
Of these activities, it’s the MPA’s ongoing quality assurance role that had brought it into contact with most of the round table participants. Now that it’s been around for a couple of years, reflected the Department for Transport’s assurance coordinator Michelle Dawson, the MPA’s influence is starting to be felt – especially via its gateway reviews. And there’s a growing sense that the MPA will flex its muscles if projects start to go awry.
Alex Bouras, a senior project manager from HM Treasury, concurred, saying: “Gateway reviews are very effective as an enforcement arm of the MPA. They are also a chance for reviewers to learn about other projects – so a review is a learning opportunity for both the peer reviewers and those under scrutiny.”
In these ways, Bouras argued, the MPA is operating as more than a watchdog. Its presence is also generating opportunities to share best practice, thereby helping improve PPM across the civil service.
Delivering change
Julie Pierce said that, if the MPA is to be effective, it needs to celebrate success as well as identify failure. “The Olympics is a great example of things going right,” she opined, “but it’s already ageing. The MPA needs the maturity to celebrate when people are achieving delivery success, or to stop things that aren’t working.”
While she agreed that the example of London 2012 is time-sensitive, Emma Norris – a senior researcher from the Institute for Government, and author of its recent Olympics report – asserted that it provides a useful source of learning for PPM reform.
For example, she observed, “one thing about the Olympics is that project management skills were really emphasised”. Norris noted that Jeremy Beeton, director general of the government’s Olympic Executive, came from a project management background; this indicates the commitment to PPM skills in the delivery of the Olympics, she said – and such a commitment needs to be enshrined throughout the civil service if the reform process is to prove successful.
The need to improve the skills of the civil service project management workforce was a recurrent theme in the discussion of what more can be done to improve PPM; and Craig Killough, a vice president of the PMI, argued that progress is being made. He reminded the group that the Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA), established with the SaÏd Business School at the University of Oxford (see p19), is now in operation. Civil servants have to undergo an 18-month training course with the MPLA in order to take up an appointment as a senior responsible owner (SRO).
Sue Higgins noted that every department has a “head of profession”, responsible for facilitating training opportunities for project managers – but it was clear from participants’ comments that some are more active than others. Nonetheless, Alex Bouras suggested that the growing number of people with project-management qualifications such as PRINCE2 is a sign that the civil service is taking PPM more seriously.
Even so, Steve Sumitomo-Wyatt – an assistant director working on project management at the UKBA – argued that project management continues to suffer from a lack of professional recognition in the public sector. “If you look at the reform plan,” he said, “one of the things that comes out of that is a growing recognition for commercial and procurement staff. I wonder if PPM is just a little behind these areas in terms of its profile in the civil service.” To change this, Sumitomo-Wyatt said, the pay grades of project managers need to be more closely aligned with those in the private sector, in order to attract the best talent.
In addition, said Julie Pierce, the civil service should strive to transfer capacity from the private sector. This can happen both through effective use of consultants, if civil servants ensure that they learn from external experts working on short-term projects within government; and by means of secondments, where civil servants develop their delivery skills in a commercial environment.
Room for improvement
There is, of course, scope to do more when it comes to reforming civil service PPM, the group concluded. The MPA has a role to play in reviewing completed projects to see whether they’ve achieved their objectives, some participants said – though the DfT’s Michelle Dawson noted that this will always be challenging, because many of the benefits of a project are not seen until a number of years down the line, by which time the personnel involved in it have moved on.
In addition, it is clear that more attention needs to be given to developing PPM as a profession within the civil service. While the MPA has been extending its formal organisational and oversight operations across Whitehall, some participants suggested that the PPM profession has actually become less active and supportive since the general election. David Pitchford, who heads the PPM profession as well as the MPA, is presumably busy developing the authority’s capabilities and systems – but there was a clear desire around the table for more cross-departmental networking opportunities, training and PPM communications. In addition, participants argued, the government should offer its specialist PPM staff remuneration that reflects their importance in efficient public service delivery in order to attract and retain the best people, and to give them an incentive to continue developing their skills.
One corollary of enhanced professional recognition would be a rise in direct accountability. Pierce argued that projects should be divided into “chunks”, with specific responsibility being allocated to project managers for each constituent part. This needs to be part of the initial design, she said, and the MPA needs to monitor performance against clearly defined objectives for each component.
Finally, the MPA should work harder to identify and disseminate good practice, so that future projects can learn from the effective delivery of programmes such as the Olympics.
If these steps are taken, PPM in the public sector should indeed become more effective and efficient. And with any luck, when civil service project managers get together in future, there’ll be nary a hair shirt in sight.
