Lessons from 2014

Times have changed
There is already evidence of change taking place. Take project time spans, for example. A typical government IT project used to last between three to five years, but this is beginning to shift as the realisation has hit that the longer a project runs with no realisable gains, the less chance there is of success.

According to APM board director and consultant Brian Wernham, an advocate of agile techniques in project management and author of Agile Project Management for Government, projects need a shake-up to jump into the 21st century. He says: “US government statistics show that the majority of projects that run for longer than a year with no intermediate deliveries never deliver, no matter how detailed and convincing their business cases are.” Wernham is helping the project management profession to evolve by leading the development of a new agile governance guide, due to be published by APM next year.

Tim Parr, a partner at Deloitte who leads the firm’s major programmes consulting business, says the main lesson he took from 2014 is the need to invest for the future. “People have recognised the need to invest in project management,” he says. “But most of that investment has been in the discipline. If you look at the improvements, it’s been marginal.

“What people are beginning to understand now is that, unless you invest in leaders and skills, projects won’t succeed. Companies are starting to think about how to organise.”

The government changes tack
Changes in approach to project management are also taking place within government, which is investing in major projects training for around 300 senior project managers a year from now. 

In August, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced the Project Leadership Programme (PLP), which is the next phase of the government’s approach to major taxpayer-funded projects. It is part of the government’s longer-term plans to develop its project leadership skills. At the time, Maude said: “As part of this government’s long-term economic plan, we are improving the way our major projects are run, saving billions along the way.”

Many would argue that the government’s plans couldn’t come sooner. What is notable, Parr explains, is that the PLP curriculum doesn’t focus heavily on techniques so much as capabilities, and the need to establish what he refers to as ‘temporary organisations’ for major projects.

“When you establish a purpose-built organisation to deliver the project, you stand a much greater chance of success,” explains Parr, who has worked on major public projects such as the 2012 Olympic Games and Crossrail.

As an example, he points to the Olympics, which delivered a highly successful outcome based on a temporary organisational structure. The two years of planning before London 2012 were modelled around an agile approach, with regular testing and live simulations taking place. Then data was fed back into the model for further iterative testing.

The success of iterative project management for the Olympics supports Wernham’s belief that the agile approach – which, until recently, had primarily been a grassroots movement hooked around small-scale projects – can and should be applied by top management to large, innovative projects.

“Go for a smooth work flow,” he says. “Once your team is on track for delivering early, getting real benefits and incrementally improving the emerging final solution, concentrate on getting a regular heartbeat of work going – regular ‘sprints’ of development, with periodic business reviews of their output. The nearer you can get the workload to being consistent and regular, the less likely you are to be surprised by a big problem.”

Learning from catastrophes
In terms of what project managers can learn from the wider world, there was a number of major catastrophes in 2014 from which lessons can be drawn. The disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on 8 March and the spread of the ebola virus in West Africa were good examples of how not to execute a communications strategy. 

“Both of these highlight the need to plan and execute your stakeholder communications in a smart, timely manner,” says Dave Wakeman, an expert in leadership and management. “With the airliner, we saw that, even though the authorities were dealing with a very fluid situation, they didn’t do a good job of explaining how difficult the process of finding the airliner would be.”

Of course, disaster planning and risk management were (and, in the case of the ebola crisis, still are) lacking, but it was the poor dissemination of information and spread of misinformation relating to the epidemic that have really come in for heavy criticism.

“With ebola, we have seen fear fester in our populations in the West because the governments didn’t always do a good enough job of explaining exactly how the disease is transmitted, how few people in our countries had the disease, and the steps that were being taken to ensure safety. Instead, only the few negative stories were able to make their way through,” Wakeman adds. 

Focus on people and skills
Clearly, industry leaders have recognised the need for fundamental changes in project management in the past. But what has become more apparent over the past year is the understanding that any shift of emphasis must focus on people and skills in order to keep apace of developments within society.

No longer will the public or organisations put up with delays, failures and lost millions in major projects – whether they are capital, infrastructure or other types of work. Now projects need to show agility, not just in their structure, but also in their people. They need to ebb and flow and mirror the business or organisation. Most importantly, they need to deliver what they promise.

As Wernham puts it: “Organisations exhibiting these agile behaviours will prevail over those that stifle innovation by demanding unrealistically detailed estimates based purely on guesswork, rather than on practical, agile feedback from the coalface.”

Michelle Perry is a business journalist and a former editor of CFO World

Top five lessons learned in 2014 for project management professionals

1. Focus on organisational capabilities and temporary organisations
Companies and government departments are increasingly assessing the skills and specialism within project management teams in order to meet the needs of more complex projects.

2. More holistic approach to managing teams 
Organisations are taking a more rounded approach to managing project management teams, considering the training and career trajectories of teams to find out how to engage and motivate staff.

3.Increased adoption of 'Agile' project management across sectors
Once a grassroots movement reserved for small-scale projects only, project management leaders are increasingly proposing that senior management applies this approach to large-scale projects across sectors.

4. Increased maturity of change management 
Change management is growing as a stand-alone discipline within project management due to projects becoming more complex and requiring different skills at different stages.

5. Need to improve soft skills in project management teams
Project management professionals need to focus on the so-called ‘softer skills’ in their jobs in order to help accelerate the success of their projects.

Challenge of 2015 – Developing talent
One of next year’s big challenges, explains Dave Wakeman, is the continued need to recruit and retain talent. With increasingly specialised and complex projects, companies will have to recruit a broader skills base to fulfil their project needs. 

He says: “The way to combat this is for leaders of organisations to really spend time getting to understand the goals and aspirations of their teams. It’s easy to fall back on paying people more or other knee-jerk reactions, but true, long-term stability and talent retention within an organisation comes from a greater understanding of the workforce. This includes knowing why they like working in your business, what they don’t like, and ways that you can grow together.”

New Year's resolutions
Wondering what your New Year’s resolutions should be? These resolutions from leadership expert Dave Wakeman and project management coach Susanne Madsen might inspire you.

Dave Wakeman

• To continue to focus on the soft skills because these can really make a difference to an individual’s career and to the performance of their project.
• To find ways to introduce project management skills and tools to broader and non-traditional audiences and areas.
• To write a book on modern leadership. Over the past few years, I have had the chance to work with the US Department of State, the US National Institutes of Health, and President Barack Obama’s campaign, among others. I learned a lot about how globalisation and technology have changed the way leadership is performed.

Susanne Madsen

• To engage in a bigger dialogue with industry leaders about how we can create a better support network for project and programme managers. Leading a project isn’t just technically challenging, it also requires lots of social skills and emotional resources. Project management professionals need more than just technical training. 
• To work alongside a very experienced team of coaches. I’d love to see more companies reap the benefits and provide their project and programme managers with dedicated training, coaching and support.