Lucky 13

First, a little background to put you in the picture. In 2019, Mott MacDonald was appointed by the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) as the delivery partner for its South East Asia Future Cities programme. It’s part of a wider investment in overseas development aid (ODA) called the Prosperity Fund, delivered by the FCO on behalf of the UK government.

The fund is targeted at six middle-income countries in south-east Asia: Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. It aims to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. It prioritises the needs of girls, women and the most excluded people in these communities. It will also promote increased resilience to, or mitigation of, climate change as part of sustainable economic development. Future Cities will seek to deliver outcomes that are aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The fund’s interventions will cover economic reform, health, carbon reduction, digital capacity building and improving the urban environment. As a programme within this, Future Cities’ interventions are focused on technical deliverables, such as specifications, digital twin models or governance and protocols in cities including Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City and Surabaya (see page 65).

It’s no mean feat.

A mind-bogglingly complex programme

I’m often asked why this set of Future Cities projects is a programme. What connects them all? This is difficult to answer when projects range from a smart ticketing system in Ho Chi Minh City to an assessment of the vulnerability and warning system for earthquakes and tsunamis in Surabaya. It’s this element of the programme management that is most challenging to me.

A second huge challenge is boiling down the sometimes very hypothetical and often high-level requirements of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (such as ‘taking people out of poverty’) into activities, task and outputs that project delivery teams can get a grip on. For example, how is a smart ticketing system on a metro and bus system taking people out of poverty? And how do you easily demonstrate that it has delivered the outcome?

With 13 projects, each with their own unique context, resource needs and outputs, achieving a clarity of purpose that translates programme outcomes into project outputs is difficult. But without this, the core motivating focus is lost.

Getting the right resources in place

I became programme director when Future Cities kicked off in 2019, and from the bid planning stage concluded that, because of its high level of complexity in terms of scale and diversity, it required a much stronger focus on project and programme management skills than the usual ODA programme. We decided to form a team of more than 20 sub-consultants to cover the geographic and skills diversity it demanded – at its peak, Future Cities will involve between 200 and 300 people across the nine cities.

To deliver the projects, we required technical resource: engineers, scientists and project managers, who are highly experienced with the long and slow process of government planning, as well as working with the private sector to deliver well-defined change. They are in the eye of the programme storm: defining the change, agreeing it with stakeholders and ensuring that the outputs contribute to the outcomes.

For example, in Yangon, my team is scoping the regeneration of a busy city centre streetscape that must be sympathetic to the heritage of Yangon’s historic buildings. There must be greener corridors, greater equality in access for those who are less able and an economically sensitive price that can be replicated citywide. All these requirements – sometimes with competing needs – must be carefully considered and incorporated.

The need for such highly dynamic skills from technicians across all the projects meant we decided to structure a team of strategic partners: EY, Broadway Maylan and BSi, which, along with Mott MacDonald, provide in-depth advanced technical input from a worldwide base.

We also needed to bring in ODA specialists as our country managers. These are experienced individuals who could translate the complex programme outputs into project outcomes, and are able to talk to stakeholders, including the client, in a way they could understand. I also brought in gender and inclusion specialists into each country project team to complement their technical skills to ensure outcomes were met in this important area.

The final part of the team structure puzzle has been balancing these international specialists with local people in every city who can build relationships with clients and stakeholders in their own language and culture. We did this by bringing in more than 15 local or regional businesses and universities who support the Mott MacDonald city teams, and can understand, as people say, ‘the smell of the air’. Together this has formed a strong matrix of collaborators to deliver the programme’s needs.

Launching with the right approach

The first task of the programme was to get it launched. There were in-country teams and my programme management office (PMO) in Singapore, and it was clear that Future Cities was not going to work through a top-down management approach. The primary requirement was to get a team comprising the right people, give them the right tools and create an agile environment.

The quality of this PMO team was critical. Although no one had delivered a programme like this before, I needed dynamic individuals who could turn their hand quickly to solutions – people who would be energetic in simplifying a process to its most important constituent parts. A team who would not accept the tools that have been used before, but challenge norms so that we were lean and agile.

The PMO set up a framework of tools, ranging from digital dashboards to collaborative information management systems. These would provide the next 200 team members with a clear and consistent platform from which to run the programme. This approach is fundamental to me. I believe that a continuous culling of the waste that creeps into processes is crucial to project efficiency. It also improves the chance that the tools will actually be used by the team – a consideration that project managers often lose sight of when producing highly complex project management solutions.

But the PMO is more than just a set of tools – it’s a communication hub. In such a diverse team and range of countries, challenges in communications, cultural understanding and sensitivities are never far away. We have overcome this by making the assistant project managers on each project nationals of the country, but also part of the PMO. They understand the use of language and the dynamics of varying cultural calendars. For example, having deliverables on 25 December is acceptable in Malaysia, but not in the Philippines. Equally Tet, or the Lunar New Year (a non-fixed holiday), shuts down Vietnam and Thailand, but has no impact in Indonesia.

The foundations are in

Beyond the PMO, each country team has a country manager with ODA knowledge; an assistant project manager from the country itself, who is the all-important glue between the central PMO and the country team; and technical specialists for each intervention, without whom the stakeholders would not develop confidence in us, and nor would the problems be possible to pull apart.

With these teams in place, my foundations are set, and we have a high chance of achieving great things. This is not to say that the programme has not had difficulties. We have struggled with suppliers and teams who have not met their commitments. With such a large team, there were always going to be some that had the right paper CV but didn’t quite work out in the field.

There have been some amazing highs as well. In one of the projects in Surabaya, we are planning and implementing the regeneration of the former red-light district, Putat Jaya. When local organisations and stakeholders met us and understood that this project was real, there was high emotion in the room, as they realised we were about to make a real and desperately needed change. These personal and touching events are one of the amazing components of the programme, mixing the two worlds of engineering and aid.

Complexity magnifies challenges

For this programme, the diversity of outcomes, locations, languages, stakeholder desires and social, political and economic contexts magnifies every challenge. It can be very easy to find the scale and complexity of it overwhelming – it’s simply not possible to review every deliverable, sit in each meeting or meet each stakeholder. With each location being a two- or three-hour flight away, face-to-face contact and relationships are a challenge.

Each country and project can only realistically get a few hours of my focus per month, and can only be visited a few times a year. This puts an emphasis, more than in any programme I have previously worked for, on the importance of pre-planning, structure and concentration in these interactions for all parties to get the best value from the discussions.

What it personally takes

To make a programme like this a success requires an ability to judge quickly what matters and what doesn’t. It requires the strength of conviction to stand up for yourself and your judgements, and to have a singular view that you are only one person, with a finite capacity, and can only focus and give a set amount of time to any one thing. These are important characteristics that reinforce your ego – something that, as a programme director, is under constant challenge from above, below and within.

Approaching the challenge

I have three techniques that help me. First, I maintain my mental health through exercise and protected downtime. I push a wellbeing agenda through my team that enables us all to keep on top of that.

Second, I ensure I am equipped with the skills to undertake the task. I have practised for several years as a professional project and programme practitioner, and have pursued the RPP and ChPP accreditations. These enable me to maintain confidence in the approaches I’m prescribing and help me to keep momentum when doubt and indecision could slow me down.

Finally, I use a risk/opportunity approach to where I focus my time. This means that my weeks are not consistent, and I rely heavily on my excellent team to address the routine demands. However, I am across the challenges when I am needed, making decisions and aiding others to keep moving. I review data and reports by exception and spend most of my time talking to the teams and working through problems with them, coaching and enabling them to find solutions.

The four skills required for success