Patterns in Project and Programme Management

Major projects and programmes occur in many aspects of a developed economy, in IT, construction, defence, healthcare and major events, such as the Olympics. Sadly, they seem to be prone to cost overruns, delays and inadequate performance. Although professional bodies, auditors and academics have tried to build up knowledge and tools to help with managing these complex entities, projects and programmes still fail to deliver as expected disappointingly often.

We are proposing to take a new approach to the generation and dissemination of knowledge in this field, one that puts the practitioners at the centre of the knowledge generation. Rather than relaying on case studies, which are long-term, very detailed and require highly skilled academic researchers, we propose to develop, extend and apply a technique that is already in use by the software engineering community - patterns. Patterns, in this context, are not a decorative design or motif, but are a structured description of behaviours or problem-solving approaches.

At Oxford University, we have been teaching an MSc course on Major Programme Management, and the use of patterns has been enthusiastically endorsed by our students, some of who will be participating in this project.

We plan to run six workshops of about 20 people each in Oxford, London, Nottingham and one other location to develop more patterns for PPM (Project and Programme Management). We will launch an interactive website that will host the patterns, and enable the community to debate and develop the patterns. More patterns will be added, and refined, on the website. They will be characterised by attributes such as project size, phase, sector, level in the hierarchy etc. We will prepare a book proposal and a course on patterns. We will learn from our colleagues in software engineering and PPM on the structure of patterns and the organisation of pattern workshops.

We are also keen to inquire whether patterns could be a more widely used tool for research in the social sciences, especially in practitioner-led fields. Thus, organisational behaviour, operations management and governance, for example, could all make use of this technique. Therefore, the final workshop of the series will be open to academic colleagues who may be interested in applying these methods in their own domain.

This project will have a considerable impact. First, we will address the problem of knowledge development and training in PPM by placing the practitioners at the centre of the knoweldge generating process. We will provide tools and processes that will help them to generate knowledge, discuss it, compare with their lived experience and record these lessons. The impact of this will be the rapid development and deployment of an expanding language of patterns, which will improve the skill level of project and programme managers. The second main impact of the improved quality and timeliness of knowledge generation and dissemination will be an improvement in the quality and delivery of major projects and programmes in the UK and beyond. The annual costs in the UK alone of project delays and cost overruns amount to billions of pounds, so even a 1% improvement would save tens of millions of pounds each year. The third major impact will be the introduction of a new technique for carrying out fieldwork in the social sciences, which can be used to disseminate knowledge from practitioner domains, and contribute to the development and testing of theory.

Improvements in the national infrastructure, whether roads, national IT networks, railways, are vital to the success and growth of a nation's economy. Successful major sporting events have benefited the UK's perceived success around the world, as well as creating a sense of national pride and achievement. All these rely for their successful outcomes on programme managers. By improving the skills of programme managers in the UK, this project will benefit the UK taxpayer. By improving the training, skills and insight of the managers of major programmes, this project will benefit taxpayers, by leading to more efficient use of public money in major government-funded projects. Furthermore, for private sector major projects, this project will help programme managers make better decisions, which should help companies and businesses to avoid losses.

Project and Programme managers will benefit from this project since they will increase their skills and insight by having a new structure that will bring together their own experiences, supported by a framework that links process and outcome. They will be encouraged to think about project successes and disasters in a structured way, to publish their insights, and to share and discuss them with colleagues. The workshop events will encourage a collegiate atmosphere, based on mutual trust, and enable participants to network and extend their links within their professional community. The Patterns website will initially be accessible to workshop and invited participants only, so that the ideas can be tested and developed safely, but if the project is successful, we will open the website to other project and programme managers, and make the findings available to them through a book of patterns and a course. Articles in professional magazines, talks a local events and conference presentations will alert project managers to this project, so that they may contribute to the development of the PPM pattern language.

Academics will also benefit from this project, since they will possibly have another approach to gathering data from professional communities and other communities of expertise. These should be useful for theory-building and as a means of rapid dissemination of research findings to practitioners. The outcomes of this project will be disseminated to academics through conference and journal articles. Interested academics will be invited to the end-of-project event, so that they may observe the pattern generation process in practice, and feed back their comments through a questionnaire and short interviews. This benefit will not be limited to academics working in project and programme management, since it is likely that this approach would be of use to social scientists working in many management fields who study practice on site. This could include those working on change management, operations management, governance, and organisational behaviour, for example. At the end of the project, the website will seek follow-on funding, and will be accessible to interested academics. A book and course materials will be proposed at the end of this short project, and these resources will ultimately be available to colleagues too.