Project X Improving Project Delivery

Projects are the key organisational structures delivering transformational change and the underlying infrastructures and systems that underpin the UK economy and the provision of government services (often having impacts that last for many decades). However, project delivery performance is often dire and projects often over-run, under-deliver and go substantially over budget.

This research aims to improve the delivery of government projects 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. 

The project is a collaboration between academia, industry and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), the non-ministerial department responsible for the oversight and effective delivery of major projects and programmes in government. We aim to address fundamental social science questions about the role of society in the achievement of transformational change and long-term benefits under conditions of risk, uncertainty and complexity. The asynchronous nature of policy development and project delivery introduces a number of challenges to improving performance in government.

Project timeframe

This project commenced in 2016 funded by the universities themselves with piece-meal support from the IPA and the ESRC’s Impact Accelerator Account funding. The current bid for support with the ESRC will fund the project for three years if successful.  Further support will be sought from other funding bodies which may extend the scope and length of the project deep into the 2020s.

Project aims

The overarching research aim is to deepen the academic and policy makers' understanding of the delivery of major government projects and programmes which should result in improving the delivery of government projects (efficiency) which in turn should enable them to meet their benefit targets (effectiveness).

Project findings and impact

By working with the IPA our research addresses a huge portfolio of projects (currently valued at approximately half a trillion pounds) and feeds directly into mandated procedures for their delivery. Halting just one failing project could save billions of pounds. If new procedures reduced costs by 1% in just 5% of the projects in the GMPP we would help save £250m. If the research helps the IPA reduce costs by 20% (which has been achieved using ‘intelligent client’ methods in the private sector) we would potentially help save £100bn – enough to fund ESRC responsive mode research at £100m a year for 1000 years. The impacts are so large that even reducing the time to deliver one major project by one day might easily cover the costs of this research many times over.

Research team

Dr Nick Marshall

Dicle Kortanamer (PhD student but written into the proposal as a 50% FTE ECR on the project)

Akinyo Ola (University of Brighton PhD studentship based on a case study of project capability in the UK public sector).

Output

Conference papers have already been produced by Dicle Kortanamer which will soon be submitted to academic journals for publication, and others will be produced during the course of the project. Professor Brady is currently joint-editing a Special Issue of the Project Management Journal on project delivery models which should appear at the end of the year.

Partners

The project is a collaboration involving 9 universities, 10 government departments of which the most important is the Infrastructure and Project Authority (IPA), and major professional bodies such as the PMI and the APM.

Professor Mike Lewis, Bath University, UK 

Professor Terry Williams at Risk Institute, University of Hull, UK

Professor Paulo Quattrone, Edinburgh University, UK 

Professor Mike Bourne Director of the Centre for Business Performance, Director of the Government’s Project Leadership Programme, UK 

Dr Richard Kirkham: The University of Manchester, UK  

Dr Alex Budzier, Saïd Business School, Oxford University, UK 

Professor Andrew Davies, UCL, UK

Professor Andrew Atkins, UCL, UK

Professor Paul Nightingale, Sussex University, UK

Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), UK

 Project Management Institute (PMI) , UK

 Association for Project Management (APM), UK