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ISS09 : Staking a lot on Program and Project Management
Speaker:
Alan B Harpham
Monday, 12 October
10:00 AM–11:15 AM
1 hour, 15 minutes
This session looks back at nearly 10 years of effort, by the British Government, to improve delivery of public services through better program and project management. It considers what steps were taken and whether or not they achieved their objective. It outlines some wider benefits and looks to the future.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the scale of effort required to make large-scale improvements in program and project management.
- Recognize the many and various ways that improvements in program and project management may be achieved.
- Discuss some of the reasons that cause major culture change projects to continue to fail.
Successful delivery—across the public sector—has been at the top of the U.K. government's agenda for nearly a decade and it has turned to improved program and project management to achieve it. This presentation describes the efforts undertaken by the U.K. government to improve the track record of its programs and projects, in order to save costs and to enhance public service delivery. It provides a backdrop to this effort by outlining the significant failures of the late 1990s which led to the establishment of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) in 2000. The variety of initiatives that OGC has undertaken in partnership with other government departments are covered as endeavors—inspired by the British Prime Minister, Mr. Tony Blair—were made to counter what was seen as endemic weaknesses in project management among the civil service.
A cross-department project called “Improving Program and Project Delivery” (IPPD) was given the go-ahead in September 2001. This led to a succession of steps that included changes and improvements in structure and culture, and processes and tools as well as people and their skills. Centers of excellence in program and project management were set up in each government department to monitor the success of projects and the OGC had a highly ambitious target to achieve a two- to threefold improvement in the success of central government projects by June 2006.
However, despite all these efforts, projects still continued to fail and have done so to the present day. The presentation looks at the lessons that may be learned from this and considers whether a switch in OGC's objectives away from project and service delivery to cost saving through public sector procurement may have some responsibility to bear.
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