Improving Project Delivery (Project X)

This research project is a collaboration between academia, industry and the non-ministerial department responsible for the oversight and effective delivery of major projects and programmes in government, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA). We seek to enrich societies' understanding of the project and programme delivery landscape by generating high-quality evidence and insights that will inform future policy making, improve ministerial awareness and drive the development of the project delivery profession.

Projects are temporary, flexible organisational structures that are now the central way in which large scale, complicated systems and change programmes are delivered. New transport, energy and water infrastructure systems are typically delivered in projects, as are most large scale military systems like aircraft carriers. Similarly, when government seeks to implement a major policy that will transform how government delivers services and interacts with citizens, it will typically use projects to implement that policy change.

Unfortunately projects have a tendency to run over-budget, take longer than planned to finish and sometimes don't delivery the outcomes that were promised. It is common to find projects' costs and delivery times more than double, and many major projects have to be cancelled. When projects are delivered, they often represent poor value for money in hindsight and under-perform. Because the UK has so many large and expensive projects, the potential costs of poor performance are very high.

However, in recent years the UK has developed a world-class ability to delivery complex projects. The UK has some major project successes (Heathrow T5, the 2012 London Olympics, Crossrail, etc). This suggests poor performance is not inevitable. It is not easy to understand why some projects are successes and others perform poorly. This research project aims to deepen understanding of how project delivery can be improved. By working in partnership between university researchers and the Government, we aim to help the UK Government set up, deliver and hand over projects more effectively. In doing so, we hope to help reduce the costs of projects, ensure more are delivered on time, and improve how effectively they deliver final outcomes, so that Government policy is implemented more successfully. Because project are so expensive, and many are subject to cost-overruns and lower than expected outcomes, the potential cost-savings for the UK from this research are very significant, and could easily run into many billions of pounds.

To delivery on this potential, the research project proactively engages with the UK policy and practitioner communities and provide them with targeted, high quality research across six sub-theme that address:
Theme A: Defining value, understanding performance, achieving success over the life-cycle
Theme B: Front end and back end management practices
Theme C: Data quality and use as performance drivers
Theme D: Assurance, reporting and governance
Theme E: Capability & knowledge management
Theme F: Transformational projects

These sub-projects were co-designed with research users, to ensure our research addresses important questions. For some research we will be able to use high quality data that is being opened up to academics for the first time. Moreover, by having a larger research project across a number of universities, we can use more standardized methods to improve the quality of research, and make it more robust and useful. By working closely with the IPA our research findings can lead directly into changes in mandated Government advice to projects managers. The research fits within a wider body of research on improving the performance and profitability of project-based firms in the UK, which aims to improve their performance in international markets, creating high value jobs i

In co-produced, problem-focused, interdisciplinary research of the kind proposed in the Case for Support, research design and impact strategy are integrated rather than distinct. The 'pathway to impact' for this project has already been put in place and piloted. The project is co-produced as part of a research partnership with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) in the Cabinet Office who have oversight of major government projects, particularly the Government Major Project Portfolio, which currently contains some £485bn of projects of concern. Over the last two years we have worked with them and now #BetterGovProjects (Project-X) is an official part of their remit. By working with them research outputs from the project can move directly into official mandated guidance that is disseminated across government. This mandated guidance will then influence project design and management.

To further the dissemination and impact of the outputs our project has also partnered with the major project management industrial associations - the PMI, PMA, and APM. We will work with them to disseminate our research findings to the broader industrial community. Their networks provide access to thousands of project professionals.

Research has shown that the delivery of impact cannot be reduced to communications. Instead research findings need to be transformed into a usable form that fits within the existing routines of the organisation involved. This is often organisationally complex, cutting across internal and external boundaries and involving mediators and consultants. We know that there is a significant 'knowing - doing' gap in project delivery in the UK, and that research is rarely read by project professionals. Even when research is read, it is rarely implemented. The problem is therefore not necessarily to transfer research, but that policy and research are too disconnected. Project practitioners cannot always access research, and when they do sometimes find it doesn't address their problems or uses categories that don't apply to their practice (Nightingale and Scott, 2007). Our impact plan therefore proposes to close the loop between research and practice through close interaction with the government network responsible for training project managers, and a co-produced research design that proactively targets "bridgers and brokers" within existing governance training networks.

The short term impacts relate to the direct provision of research support for the IPA to provide high quality research on topics that are both practically important to improve project delivery, and also address fundamental social science questions. We will also provide synthesis reports, summaries, models and frameworks, tools and techniques (i.e. new MCM methods to map the early stages of politically contentious projects).

In the medium term the research will deepen research networks and train a cohort of researchers to work across academic and non-academic organisational boundaries. We will increase the social robustness of research by forcing engagement with practice from an early stage, which will subject theories to brutal tests much earlier.

In the longer term, we aim to fundamentally change how projects are understood and managed.

To support engagement our research builds attention to users' needs and dissemination from the start. Researchers have ring-fenced time to work with the policy community and industry to build engagement capabilities on both sides. ECRs will be trained to produce targeted communications materials, (briefing papers, "glossies", reports, workshops, web-based materials and academic books and articles). This engagement will be undertaken as part of a research strategy for ensuring that research is independent, high quality, and high impact, because we have built 'epistemological virtues' into the research process.