APM Project Autumn 2020

Cover VERSION

ISSUE 304 AUTUMN 2020 £14.50

PROJECT

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TH E VO I C E O F TH E PROJ EC T M A N AG E M E NT CO M M U N IT Y INSIDE

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DIGGING DEEP: ARCHAEOLOGY AT ITS BEST HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT MANAGER

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The voice of the project management community

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PLUS AUTUMN 2020 / ISSUE 304

DIVERSITY SPECIAL

WHY IT’S TIME TO THINK DIFFERENTLY MEET DEBBIE LEWIS, APM’S NEW CHAIR HMRC’S JOANNA ROWLAND ON THE FURLOUGH SCHEME’S SUCCESS

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Welcome, 1

WELCOME VERSION

FROM THE EDITOR

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Let’s make lemonade

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“Only new thinking can lead to a new dawn. We know that,” writes Zadie Smith in her speedily published reflections on the pandemic, Intimations. But it doesn’t stop us wanting our old lives back, she admits.

Perhaps it’s too early to start mapping what the post-COVID world will look like, yet the zeitgeist is insisting that when it comes to rebuilding society, business, everything, we should take the chance to do it better.

It’s the subject of our cover story, which takes a look at how infrastructure projects have been earmarked by the UK government as a way to get the economy back on its feet. But, according to wise project managers out there, it needs to be done with the sustainable long-term in mind, not as a knee-jerk political reaction to the crisis.

“My rule on infrastructure is to underpromise and over-deliver – which might not make me a very good politician,” Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission and project management sage, told Project. “People do need to be motivated, but delivery to a clear plan is critical. You need a credible strategy that the private sector can buy into for the next 15 years.”

The concept of a ‘Great Reset’, as coined by the World Economic Forum, is an attractive one. Perhaps we can create a sense of hope that our ingenuity, creativity and determination could turn the lemons we have been handed into lemonade. But we need the people squeezing the lemons to be a collectively intelligent, cognitively

ART PRODUCTION BEN WRIGHT; COVER ILLUSTRATION/ANDY SMITH

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As a journalist who has written about women in business for 15 years, it’s always inspiring to find someone who has enthusiastically climbed to the top of their profession

diverse bunch to give us the fresh thinking that is needed.

2020 should be the year when inclusion is taken to the top of the project management agenda. Project success will increasingly depend on diverse minds, and a backslide must be avoided, so please read my take on why diversity matters more than ever.

I also had the opportunity this issue to interview Debbie Lewis, APM’s new chair. As a journalist who has written about women in business for 15 years, it’s always inspiring to find someone who has enthusiastically climbed to the top of their profession driven by a genuine love for what they do. In Lewis’s case, this seems to mean taking impossibly complex corporate visions and turning them into simply explained masterplans.

‘Ruthlessly simple’ was the mantra that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs followed when it came to delivering Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme in under a month. Joanna Rowland, the woman in charge of the COVID-19 Response Unit, gives us an exclusive blowby-blow account of how she did it (as well as finding the time to be the star interview for our final ‘Crisis Talks’ episode of The APM Podcast while masterminding the golive of Eat Out to Help Out).

Some people just don’t have anything to do.

● EMMA DE VITA IS EDITOR OF PROJECT

Editor Emma De Vita emma.devita @thinkpublishing.co.uk Managing editor Mike Hine Group art director Jes Stanfield Sales director Michael Coulsey 020 3771 7232 michael.coulsey@ thinkpublishing.co.uk Account director Kieran Paul

The views expressed in Project are not necessarily those of APM, the publisher or its agents, and they do not accept responsibility for any solicited material, or for the views of contributors, or for actions arising from any claims made in any advertisements or inserts appearing in this journal. This publication (or any part thereof) may not be reproduced in any form without express and written permission from the editor. © APM 2020 APM, Ibis House, Regent Park, Summerleys Road, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire HP27 9LE, United Kingdom apm.org.uk Tel (UK): 0845 458 1944 Tel (Int): +44 1844 271 640 Cover price: £14.50 Annual subscription fee: £58 (UK); £68.20 (Europe); £79 (international) PROJECT (ISSN 0957-7033) is published by the Association for Project Management in association with Think Publishing, Capital House, 25 Chapel Street, London NW1 5DH Tel: 020 3771 7200 thinkpublishing.co.uk

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CONTENTS

FROM FUSION TO FURLOUGH – THIS ISSUE OF PROJECT AT A GLANCE

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FEATURES

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NEWS ANALYSIS

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COVID-19 sniffer dogs Our canine companions may have a part to play in detecting coronavirus cases

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Rebuilding the economy Infrastructure is back in the headlines – but are comparisons to the 1930s New Deal overwrought?

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The big interview APM’s new chair talks empathetic leadership, collaboration and the joy of green boxes

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Capturing the C-suite Now is the time to be making inroads to the board – but don’t forget to speak their language

Diversity and inclusion We need innovation, ingenuity and an end to groupthink – and that means diverse teams Legal sector How project management is gaining a long-overdue foothold in law firms with the ‘legal project manager’ role

Navigating crises Demand can rise and dip with unprecedented speed now, which brings unique project challenges

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Propping up the economy HMRC’s role in delivering the furlough, self-employment and Eat Out to Help Out schemes

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Nuclear fusion France’s ITER facility has reached a milestone – but what is the future of nuclear fusion?

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Projecting the Future Key insights from APM’s ‘big conversation’

PERSPECTIVES

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Social change projects Philip Goodwin on why complex social change projects need to put people first

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Addressing inequality We need to recognise and understand underlying issues at a societal level, writes Nike Folayan

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Team resilience Four steps to better team resilience outcomes, by David Denyer and Jenny Denyer

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Debbie Dore Why the project profession needs to face the future with courage and determination

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Contents, 1

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“We don’t think we’re going back to the old status quo. People are much more likely to be working online, and collaboratively, and inventiveness will go up”

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PEER TO PEER

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PM meets pop culture In anticipation for series three, what project lessons can we glean from Succession so far?

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Improve your performance The three most important work behaviours to help you build towards career success

PHOTOGRAPHY/CHARLIE BEST; WILL AMLOT. ILLUSTRATION/ANDY SMITH

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HMRC and COVID-19 How the taxman rose in the public’s estimation, as told by furlough project mastermind Joanna Rowland

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Book reviews Business reads and podcasts to enrich your personal career development

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Stakeholder engagement Why you need to view stakeholders as partners, not a resource to be managed

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Project me Project managers give us their top tips for dealing with uncertainty amid ongoing disruption from the pandemic

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Rising star How Simona Stanynaite’s appetite for taking on extra projects has helped her to raise her profile

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Susanne Madsen Q&A: how can I create a closer working relationship with my team?

Archaeology Using Lean principles to unite a diverse team on a major excavation project for HS2

Beyond the job Volunteering as an emergency responder for the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust Chartered The latest entries on the Register of Chartered Project Professionals

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Eddie Obeng

The pandemic presents an opportunity for leaders to ‘shake the box’ and make new ground rules

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IN THIS SECTION:

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Sniffing out COVID-19 8 How HMRC propped up the economy 11 Nuclear fusion: the future of clean energy?

13 The latest Projecting the Future findings 6

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COVID-19 sniffer dogs

A project to train our furry friends to detect coronavirus

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pack of ‘Super Six’ hounds are undergoing a scientific training programme in the hope they will be able to detect whether someone is infected with COVID-19 in one sniff.

Norman, Digby, Storm, Star, Jasper and Asher have been chosen for their extremely sensitive sense of smell that can pick up odours produced by viral infections on humans, thanks to the complex structure of their noses, which contain over 300 million scent receptors (compared to a mere five million in a human). The project,

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which involves the charity Medical Detection Dogs, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Durham University, aims to prove that the dogs can be an effective way to spot who might unwittingly be carrying the virus. The six dogs, comprising two Labradors, three cocker spaniels and a labradoodle, are currently undergoing training in Milton Keynes.

If successful, they would be able to screen up to 250 people an hour in busy places such as airports and railway stations.

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HMRC delivers the chancellor’s COVID-19 schemes

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It’s not often we heap praise on the taxman, but the team who successfully delivered the UK’s economic response to the coronavirus crisis under immense pressure deserves it

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hese have been the most challenging projects of my career, but also by far the most rewarding,” said Joanna Rowland, director of the COVID-19 Response Unit at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), in an exclusive interview with Project (see page 56). Rowland is the senior responsible officer in charge of delivering Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s flagship economic interventions, including the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme and the Job Retention Bonus.

Rowland was given a month at the end of March to create a team that could design

and deliver the CJRS – otherwise known as the furlough scheme – dispatching 10,000 operational HMRC staff. The scheme allowed employers to claim financial support of up to 80 per cent of salaries, up to a maximum of £2,500 per month, per employee, and was launched successfully on 20 April – 10 days ahead of schedule.

According to Rowland, 140,000 employers made a claim on day one, and so far, more than 9.6 million jobs have been furloughed from 1.2 million employers, with the total value of claims standing at £33.8bn. Around 6,000 full-time equivalent hours were spent by HMRC staff working on the coronavirus response at the peak.

“It is project management that turned the ingredients of success into success”

PROJECT PRINCIPLES AT ITS CORE At the heart of her team’s success were some “good old-fashioned project principles: knowing our purpose, creating urgency, deploying the right skills and topping that off with relentless determination”, Rowland explained. She used a hub-and-spoke model of specialists drawn from HMRC who connected to a central core project team. Rowland and digital and chief information officer Mark Denney coined the central guiding principle for the programme – ‘Ruthlessly Simple’. This allowed the team to focus on the core purpose of getting “the money to those who were entitled to it as fast as we could”, she said.

Project management disciplines were a major part of the success of the furlough scheme’s delivery, according to Rowland.

The furlough scheme in numbers TOTAL NUMBER OF JOBS FURLOUGHED:

TOTAL NUMBER OF EMPLOYERS FURLOUGHING:

TOTAL VALUE OF CLAIMS MADE:

9.6m 1.2m £33.8bn 8

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News Analysis, 2

HMRC’s headquarters in Parliament Square, London

“It was project management advice right at the point of conceiving the policies that was part of this success,” she said.

“It is project management that turned the ingredients of success into success.”

UNIQUE COLLABORATION Rowland was also given unprecedented access to Number 11, and her team had buy-in from all areas of Whitehall. “This was key to our ability to make decisions quickly and to our subsequent success,” she explained. “I spent many an exciting evening and weekends on the phone to Chancellor Rishi Sunak and his advisors, discussing policy and design options and their implications,” she explained.

“One of the reasons why we’ve been able to implement them [the schemes] so fast is that implementation was

built into the design of the policy – and for these schemes to achieve their objectives, they had to be delivered fast, otherwise they wouldn’t have worked,” HMRC’s chief executive Jim Harra told Civil Service World.

That meant “getting the people with expertise about how you put this thing in place working alongside the policymakers, who are thinking about what sort of detailed rules and conditions they want to have. The other thing was making it the department’s number-one operational priority. So we really sunk our whole

effort and attention into getting these schemes over the line on time or early, if at all possible. So, it was both working well together in integrated teams and just sheer organisational focus,” said Harra.

Also critical to the furlough scheme’s success was the adoption of a “truly agile” approach to the project, according to Rowland, which was necessary to deliver the scheme in time, and to continue with improvements until its scheduled winddown in October.

DELIVERING IN A CRISIS “It is quite impressive that HMRC was able to implement the schemes so quickly,” Alexander Budzier, director of Oxford Global Projects and fellow in management practice at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, told Project.

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Stephen Carver and (inset) Alexander Budzier

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“We know that often their projects take a very long time to implement. However, we also see this in other areas of major projects – the extreme urgency of responding to the health and economic crises that COVID-19 caused has created a single focus. Many projects have been successful at delivering crisis solutions where normally all sorts of conflicts stand in the way of changes,” explained Budzier.

He believes that it will be difficult for any organisation to hold onto the gains from a successful crisis response. While some process innovations will simply become business-as-usual, the urgency and single focus that is so beneficial at the moment will be near impossible to recreate, he believes. “Even so, projects and their organisations should learn from the crisis. What has worked? What did not work? What should we continue, stop

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“My fear is that this wonderful unleashing of potential will be smothered and extinguished” or start doing in the future? Who were the experts and essential people that got us through the crisis? How has it changed the relationship between every team member and the project? How have our values as an organisation changed?”

Budzier’s advice to programme managers tasked with delivering project benefits fast is, first, to know your benefits – perhaps not all of them, but at least the five key benefits in a core 10

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process that is changed by the project.

“Demonstrate small, then scale up,” he said. “Make sure that your narrative fits the audience. Throughout COVID-19 we managed to move things to ensure the health and safety of employees, but if you then talk about cost-cutting, the project’s benefits realisation will run into trouble. In short, focus, be clear about the purpose of what you are doing and always be able to tell ‘what’s in it for me’.”

FAST MOVERS Stephen Carver, senior lecturer in change project and programme management at Cranfield University School of Management, said of HMRC’s handling of the government’s programme that: “Bearing in mind the rapidity, huge and ongoing unknowns and conflicting expert advice, I was pleasantly surprised that so much happened so quickly. It is very easy in hindsight for people to criticise, mock and find fault, but I would say to those people: ‘I’d like to have seen how you would have done better’.”

What’s critical to get right when leading a complex programme under pressure, he said, is not to think that it is “a complicated problem that requires a planned right answer. It is in fact a complex situation that requires leadership, communication and a ‘fast fail’ culture. You can’t control your way out of a complex problem – you have to dance with it,” Carver said.

The momentum and focus created in response to the crisis must not be lost. “Over the last 10 years I have seen over-governance and over-compliance lead to a state of learned helplessness in many organisations. One positive side of this crisis is that many teams have

Tips for dealing with projects under pressure ● It’s critical to decentralise decision-making and authority. ● Hold teams accountable to deliver solutions. ● Experiment with new solutions. ● Ensure that good governance balances the need for crisis response with technical debt (that is, the stuff that in the future needs to be cleaned up because the crisis response took some short-cuts). ● Unleash and trust your team, fail fast, be bold and ask for forgiveness, rather than permission. ● Communicate, communicate and communicate some more. ● Enjoy! Complex times demand creative thinking.

empowered themselves and have been amazed at how well they have actually got things done. My fear is that this wonderful unleashing of potential will be smothered and extinguished by those who prefer process over outcomes,” he added.

● Joanna Rowland spoke to Project editor Emma De Vita about her work throughout the pandemic for The APM Podcast’s ‘Crisis Talks’ series, available now at apm.org.uk/ resources/the-apm-podcast

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NEWS ANALYSIS

The potential of nuclear fusion

Assembly of the world’s largest nuclear fusion project has started in France. What does this mean for the future of clean energy and the project professionals working in the nuclear industry?

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he ITER nuclear fusion project in France reached a milestone in July when its five-year assembly began in Provence. Ultra-hot plasma is expected to start being generated in late 2025 by the world’s largest experimental fusion facility, which is a global collaboration between Europe, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the US. Fusion research, which began in the 1920s, is aimed at developing a safe, abundant and environmentally responsible energy source that replicates the process that powers the sun and stars. It involves heavy hydrogen atoms

fusing together and releasing a vast amount of energy. The process requires a temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius, 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. The plasma it produces is contained within a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber called a tokamak, which was pioneered in the 1950s by Russian scientists.

A 3D PUZZLE The €20bn (£18.2bn) project is the most complex engineering endeavour in history, involving 3,000 tonnes of superconducting magnets and 200km of

superconducting cables among billions of components that will be used to assemble the giant reactor, which will weigh 23,000 tonnes. All the assembly parts must be kept at –269°C by the world’s largest cryogenic plant.

“Enabling the exclusive use of clean energy will be a miracle for our planet,” said ITER director-general Bernard Bigot at the launch of the assembly phase. But, he said, “Constructing the machine piece by piece will be like assembling a three-dimensional puzzle on an intricate timeline [and] with the precision of a Swiss watch.” The project was originally conceived in 1985 and is intended to be a proof-of-concept of large-scale fusion, not a design for a future commercial reactor.

ITER’s development is being built on the foundation of work created by the Joint European Torus (JET) project, based at the Culham Centre for PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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“Constructing the machine piece by piece will be like assembling a three-dimensional puzzle on an intricate timeline and with the precision of a Swiss watch”

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Fusion Energy in the UK, which will switch on for the first time in 2021. In operation since 1983, JET was explicitly designed to study plasma behaviour in conditions and dimensions approaching those required in a fusion reactor. Today, its primary task is to prepare for the construction and operation of ITER, acting as a test-bed for ITER technologies and plasma operating scenarios.

REVOLUTIONISING ENERGY Tom Eastup, practice lead for P3M consulting at independent consultancy DAS, has spent a year working on the ITER project at the Cadarache research centre (he also helped establish the new Nuclear Project Management SIG, a joint initiative between APM and the Nuclear Institute). He told Project that: “Nuclear fusion has the potential to change the energy landscape completely.

If it can be brought into the mainstream energy mix at scale, we will have a plentiful supply of low-carbon and stable energy and invigorate the nuclear industry considerably.

“Having spent more than a year working on the ITER site, I am genuinely in awe of not just the complexity [of the project], but also of the successful collaboration between a plethora of nations and international organisations, all behind a common purpose.” If nuclear fusion is to become a reality 12

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in the UK or Europe, the international community will need to continue this crossborder cooperation, not least in the wake of the UK fully leaving the EU at the end of this year.

Nuclear fusion projects indicate a renewed interest in the role that nuclear power could play in achieving the UK government’s target to be a net-zero carbon emitter by 2050. A combination of new power stations being constructed and the decommissioning of EDF Energy’s fleet of Advanced Gascooled Reactors within the next decade also points to an exciting time within the nuclear industry, particularly for project managers seeking a unique challenge, according to Eastup.

Private companies are also pursuing fusion technology, including two private laboratories in Oxfordshire: Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion, both of which have set the ambitious goal of delivering a working reactor ready for commercialisation by 2030, according to the Financial Times.

PROJECT MANAGERS NEEDED! “I believe we will see an expansion of the sector as decommissioning grows, new-build projects advance and projects related to new technologies, such as Small Modular Reactors, Advanced Modular Reactors and fusion, all find the investments they require to progress. For project managers, working in an industry that is on the cusp of an exciting growth phase presents an opportunity for stable, challenging and stimulating work for many years to come,” Eastup said.

There are unique challenges that come with the job. “Managers of nuclear projects must deal with rigorous safety standards, complex hazards, funding cycles and limitations, advanced – or sometimes completely new – technology and finally an intricate and often politically charged stakeholder landscape. All these make managing projects within the nuclear industry a stimulating and rewarding experience,” Eastup added.

THE INCONSISTENCY CHALLENGE However, while the UK might have one of the safest nuclear sectors in the world, its reputation suffers from a perception of inconsistent delivery performance, according to Eastup. “Most nuclear projects are high profile, so when things are late or over budget, they make the national media, whilst on-time and on-budget projects go unnoticed.

Nevertheless, there is a perception among government and public stakeholders that we could do better, and we need to address this,” he warned.

This inconsistency challenge can be addressed in part by the profession being quicker to adopt innovation, whether in digital technologies to support efficient delivery or new collaborative delivery models and organisational constructs that change the classical balance of risk and incentivisation. Furthermore, Eastup believes that the project management profession needs to be better at “learning from each other and from outside the industry – especially related sectors such as construction, where the pace of innovation is perhaps quicker, as it is driven by a different type of commercial pressure.”

“Nuclear fusion has the potential to change the energy landscape completely”

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What’s next for the project profession?

APM has revealed the findings from its Projecting the Future ‘big conversation’. The core message? Thriving over the next decade means becoming adaptive

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n June 2019, APM launched its Projecting the Future campaign as a ‘big conversation’ about the future of the profession. Its latest report reveals the key findings, explores the impact of COVID-19 and sets out eight key ideas to shape the future of the profession (see box) with selected action steps.

AT THE HEART OF CHANGE The first of these key ideas is that the project profession must be adaptive if it is to be at the heart of creating and delivering change. Adaptive project professionals are characterised as responsive to the shifting contexts in which they work, continually learning and able to implement new technology. They are also highly proficient as leaders and managers of their project teams and in engaging stakeholders.

Also key is strengthening project management’s talent pipeline by embedding new routes into the profession for young entrants and pathways for more mature, mid-career switchers. As well as building on project apprenticeships (including at degree level), the report finds, efforts must be made to increase awareness of the profession as a desirable career, with an emphasis on the transformational, inspirational benefits of projects.

It also emphasises that the COVID-19 pandemic, if anything, has reinforced and accelerated the need for professionals to be adaptive and anticipate the pace of the change in projects during times of high uncertainty.

A SEAT AT THE TOP TABLE The Projecting the Future debate has demonstrated the desire of project professionals to have a more influential role in shaping the strategy of projects, and the strategy of organisations where projects are launched and developed.

APM advocates that, in organisations with significant portfolios of projects, there

should be a seat at the top table for those responsible for projects – perhaps building on the concept of the chief project officer or by bringing more project management experience into the boardroom (see our feature on page 30).

Turning these ideas into reality and ensuring that the project profession thrives over the next decade demands action today from individuals, organisations, policymakers and influencers. APM provides a starting point for individual and collective responses with a list of suggested actions. For individual project professionals, cultivating an adaptive

Eight ideas to shape the future 1 Project management’s future: the adaptive profession.

2 Building the profession’s pipeline.

3 Strengthening the culture of professionalism through life.

4 A seat at the table – shaping the underlying strategy, not just the delivery of projects.

5 Collaboration with other organisations.

6 Promoting the profession and building its impact.

7 Building the evidence base for what works.

8 Embedding sustainability in projects.

mindset is critical. For many professionals, CPD and learning should focus on developing an understanding of, and ability to use, new technology, as well honing leadership and people skills.

LOOKING UP Project professionals need to go beyond classic technical project management skills and be able to engage with and provide leadership to stakeholders. Aspiring project leaders must cultivate an ability to develop creative ‘out of the box’ thinking and a broader perspective on project and organisational aims and how they can be achieved, with a view to shaping strategy, not just delivery.

Organisations meanwhile must start to bring project expertise into strategic discussions, with a stronger voice for projects among the C-suite. This may mean developing the notion of a chief project officer. Project professionals within an organisation must be properly supported, trained and developed. APM’s Conditions for Project Success research (which identified 12 key factors for project success) should be embedded in organisations to maximise success rates. The benefits of projects, including social impact and change, must be better communicated and shared.

Finally, policymakers and influencers must support employers in creating more opportunities for new entrants into the project profession, as well as giving project professionals the chance to access training throughout their career. Specifically, the government’s ability to act as a smart client for major infrastructure must be supported if it is to deliver on its ambitious agenda for national infrastructure. ● Read more about Projecting the Future and download the latest report at www.apm.org.uk/projectingthe-future/ PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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The strength of a project lies in its human relationships

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Philip Goodwin, CEO at international development organisation VSO, argues that the success of complex social change projects relies on putting people first

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n international development, planning for complex risks is par for the course, and so building resilience into projects is essential. Our goal is to deliver profound social change and to improve the lives of people living in poverty. This brings project management challenges: accounting for the complex reality of people’s lives, engaging a tangled web of stakeholders and mitigating disruptions from drought to conflict. The lesson I’d like to share is this: the resilience of a project lies in the relationships of its people.

One of our recent projects aims to transform the quality of teaching in Rwanda’s 4,000 schools. Engaging nearly 42,000 teachers and more than four million children, Building Learning Foundations, funded by the UK government, is a partnership between the Rwandan education authorities and three delivery NGOs, including VSO. As well as rolling out improved learning materials for pupils and building the competency of teachers, we’ve focused on overhauling school leadership and strengthening management systems.

This is a programme entailing significant cultural change, as well as a massive logistical operation.

Relationships of trust and confidence are critical at all levels, from those on the front line through to high-level relationships with our funders. This has meant a significant investment in the large networks of people delivering the project, promoting excellent communication

between them and a ‘people first’ approach to project management.

What does this mean in practice? To give one example, rather than relying on ‘cascade’ training models to deliver quick fixes at scale, we deploy a network of around 250 expert volunteers who visit each school monthly to ensure continual review and adaptation of the project, with additional technical support from a central team. We work very deliberately to instil values such as reflection, collaboration,

It’s the personal relationships at all levels of the project that have allowed us to rapidly adapt in the face of school shutdowns accountability and a willingness to learn.

It’s an approach to project management that emphasises the relationships that deliver change above all else.

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his way of working also builds buy-in and pride at all levels.

People feel valued, listened to and personally committed. You may think such engagement and motivation come naturally in the charity sector. It’s true that charities attract passionate people, but translating that into a highly effective

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project management team delivering complex social change is another matter.

Fostering a people-centred approach is what, in my experience, leads to sustainable, resilient success.

In Rwanda, putting relationships first has paid dividends. Our data shows significant jumps in teaching quality and confidence in school management. The proportion of English teachers meeting our standards has jumped from 12 per cent to 63 per cent, while in mathematics it has grown from 22 per cent to 89 per cent.

These are changes that will tackle Rwanda’s high drop-out rate between primary and secondary education. The project has overcome significant challenges, such as supporting teachers through a switch to English-language teaching (from French).

To return to resilience, it’s the personal relationships at all levels of the project that have allowed us to rapidly adapt in the face of school shutdowns. As we’ve all learnt through the COVID-19 pandemic, effective remote working relies on human rapport; in this case, the project would have been significantly held up had those relationships not been strong going into the crisis. More significantly, our volunteer network is used to working with teachers and school leaders to innovate, test, review and learn, and our funders have the confidence to let us do that. We’ve now pivoted to support remote and home learning – a real achievement in Rwanda.

When delivering any complex change, leaders should remember that successful, sustainable and resilient projects are those that put strong relationships at their heart. ● Learn more about volunteering with VSO at vsointernational.org/ volunteering/professional PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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NIKE FOLAYAN

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We need to look closer to home for a fairer society

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To build a more equal society, we must recognise, understand and address underlying issues, says Nike Folayan, chair of the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers UK

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his has been a challenging year for many reasons. Industry has had to acclimatise to a new system of working, due to the global pandemic, and as a result is facing its own share of project challenges, including the introduction of furlough schemes and looming job losses.

Social justice challenges of structural discrimination and racism, highlighted by the murder of George Floyd in the US, have left many feeling even more exhausted, anxious and fearful for the future. Industry has responded in many cases positively by issuing statements and making social media gestures to show solidarity in support of anti-racism. However, as commendable as these statements are, a fairer society can only be built if we actively recognise, participate in and understand the underlying issues that need to be addressed.

The UK is made up of 14 per cent ethnic minority communities, of which three per cent are black. In April, the Institute of Fiscal Studies showed that the death rate among British Black Africans and British Asians is more than 2.5 times that of the white population in English hospitals. The fact that this is due in part to structural inequalities in our society should make us all pause for thought. Statistically, ethnic minority communities represent a large portion of communities considered to be socio-economically disadvantaged.

Where ethnic minority individuals are not impacted by socio-economic challenges, they still face other challenges, including microaggressions and representation.

The 2020 Parker review found 59 per cent of the 256 firms it reviewed did not meet the target to have at least one

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director of an ethnically diverse background on their board. Only 14 per cent of FTSE 100 companies set measurable objectives for board ethnic diversity, while for FTSE 250 companies the figure was two per cent.

Public sector organisations are not much different. In AFBE-UK’s survey of the top 100 UK engineering companies, we found that less than 0.5 per cent of board-level positions are held by people from ethnic minority backgrounds.

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iversity and inclusion in industry has for a long time been viewed as a somewhat uncomfortable subject. Only recently has industry begun to embrace the idea that we must look at diversity holistically and not only in terms of gender (see feature on page 36). Recent world events have emphasised the need to look a little closer to home for a fairer society.

But where do we go from here? How do we change the status quo and make our industry more inclusive? In 2010, the UK government published an equality strategy, Building a Fairer Britain, to tackle the barriers that discrimination laws over 40 years had not overcome. Some of the key areas of the strategy focused on:

Only recently has industry begun to embrace the idea that we must look at diversity holistically and not only in terms of gender

● Creating equal opportunities for all:

treating everyone as an individual, recognising both their needs and their talents, and giving them an equal chance to progress. ● Transparency: shining a light on inequalities and giving individuals and local communities the tools and information they need to challenge organisations that are not offering fair opportunities and public services that are not delivering effectively. ● Embedding equality: integrating equality considerations into government policies and programmes.

However, over the past decade, although there has been some progress, it has been slow. Industry has a duty of care to ensure the health and wellbeing of all employees, regardless of background.

No longer should employers make indemonstrable assertions about diversity and inclusion within their organisations without seeking the views from underrepresented groups. This does not mean giving under-represented groups special treatment. It does, however, mean giving them a voice and a safe environment to air their concerns regarding the workplace.

At AFBE-UK, over the past 13 years we have actively documented the challenges faced by ethnic minority communities and proffered solutions to communities interested in a career in engineering.

We have also engaged with government, policymakers and industry on the importance of representation, transparency and progression for ethnic minority communities. Over the past few months many of our members have reported

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ompanies need to implement the necessary policies to promote leaders from within by actively developing a pipeline of BAME talent, not only in terms of recruitment, but for also progression by providing enabling environments where all can thrive and aspire to attain leadership positions. A step in the right direction would be for organisations to report on the demographics of their company up to board level and ethnicity pay gaps, among other things. It is quite often the case that ethnic minority groups are left out of conversations involving their challenges and lived experience, so this is the time for companies to listen to the views of their employees and take action where required to address valid concerns.

AFBE-UK has created an action plan titled ACCESS.A to provide a guide on

A step in the right direction would be for organisations to report on the demographics of their company up to board level various actions companies can take to start to engage with the challenges ahead. The plan asks organisations to accept that they can do better on racial equality, educate themselves on the reasons for these inequalities, provide safe spaces for these groups to discuss their challenges, develop clear strategies and be accountable. Research from leading organisations, notably from McKinsey & Co, demonstrates that diversity increases productivity and revenue, with diverse companies performing up to 35 per cent better, with 20 per cent revenue improvements. More than ever, the impact of world events means that revenue generation and performance will be critical to progress. Diversity and inclusion will be an important aspect in delivering economic growth. ● Nike Folayan is a technical director at WSP and co-founder and chair of the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers, which campaigns for greater ethnic diversity in UK engineering

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experiencing discrimination not only due to their ethnicity, but also for coinciding gender, disability and age identities. These experiences are often marked by issues such as negative stereotypes, unequal access to resources and barriers to participation and career progression.

DAVID DENYER AND JENNY DENYER

Putting resilience on every team’s agenda This means listening to dissident voices and encouraging divergent perspectives

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eams often focus on resilience only during or immediately following a crisis. But a proactive approach is becoming ever more urgent to build the capability to anticipate and prepare for challenges and disruption.

All too often, teams believe ‘it won’t happen here’. This optimism bias can create a dangerous blind spot. Resilient teams have an uneasiness about what might go wrong that enables them to remain sensitive to all possible threats.

Teams may fall into the trap of groupthink. To what extent does your team have an atmosphere of ‘productive tension’ that involves observing problems from multiple viewpoints and listening to dissident voices? Many teams are too siloed and don’t think beyond their function.

We argue that the work of resilience in this era of unpredictability involves the achievement of four team outcomes through a ‘4 Sight’ approach: Foresight: knowing what to expect. This means building shared attention on what might happen. When a team has foresight, people heed the warning signs, watch for weak signals of impending problems, take ‘what if?’ scenarios seriously and foresee multiple hazards.

Insight: knowing what to look for. This means going beyond compiling statistics about events, because metrics rarely promote intelligence by themselves. It involves systematically gathering information and evidence from diverse sources, looking for trends and patterns, and continually refining and updating the status of ongoing operations and the business environment. It is about achieving real-time situational awareness.

Oversight: knowing what works. This means building widespread agreement about responsibilities and accountability for performance and operations, together with risk appetite and tolerance of failure. Resilient teams monitor their performance and track how things are going, put in place plans for recoverability and build in slack and spare capacity.

Hindsight: knowing what happened. This means learning the right lessons from past events and understanding that future performance can only be enhanced if the organisation is willing and able to change behaviour as a result of experience.

Team development should involve participative stress-testing using severe, plausible and useful scenarios combined with systemic team coaching. An external adviser can help to scrutinise the process and create a safe place to explore the tensions, difficult experiences and emotions involved in working with uncertainty and unpredictability.

Such an approach helps teams to pause, step back and see the big picture, allowing them to consider the interactions between the various parts of the organisation and wider system. It is most effective when people reframe or disrupt conventional thinking about solutions by challenging the commonly accepted understanding of underlying problems.

Achieving team resilience is an art that requires development and practice.

The hope for the 4 Sight approach is that it will raise new questions for development and advance the understanding and everyday work of teams.

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● David Denyer is professor of leadership and organisational change at Cranfield School of Management, and Jenny Denyer is director at Woburn Management Group

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We should applaud our achievements, but now is the time to plan for the future, says Debbie Dore, APM’s chief executive

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s we look back on those first few months of adapting to working in a world with COVID-19, there is much we should feel proud of. Let’s acknowledge our achievements, but now move away from crisis management and set out a plan for the remainder of the year that our organisations and people can focus on to ready us for the future.

Since the pandemic took hold, APM has changed in many ways. We have all now worked productively from home for longer than perhaps anyone imagined was possible, moved all our exam and assessment processes online, managed the pressure of delivering content and events digitally, been supported by our members and volunteers to provide ongoing value to members, and delivered regular financial scenario planning through a time of continuing uncertainty.

Never have we put more effort into communicating with our stakeholders and staff, and we have learnt that there are some things we never want to go back to doing and some things we truly miss in our current world.

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KEEPING THINGS GOING Our three immediate priorities were all met as we maintained the standards and availability of our qualifications and training, supported members in accessing the services you needed, and delivered digitally at pace. All this was set against the backdrop of the challenges faced across the profession and the economy. Some sectors were significantly damaged and many people were furloughed or made redundant, with others receiving more investment and attention to help in the fight against the pandemic.

We have learnt that digital delivery enables us to be more inclusive, reach new audiences and be far more flexible than we ever imagined. Many people previously excluded from attending conferences and events have been able to enjoy and take part in our digital events and webinars, and many more to listen to the recordings and gain knowledge previously not available to them.

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CREATING THE NEW NORMAL None of us are missing commuting, and we have been able to support individuals in many different situations where they have dependants or have had the joys of homeschooling or childcare. We have, however, missed our colleagues, the informal chats and the creativity you get in an open conversation, and we are pretty tired of staring at a screen for hours at a time. But it is only now that the real challenge begins in creating the ‘new normal’ and combining the best of what we have learnt with the best of the past, giving people value from engaging with APM by delivering the best possible experience.

So, a heartfelt thank you for the support you have given us over the past few months. The autumn sees a new impetus and a determination to get on the front foot – both as APM and as a profession.

Uncertainty remains and recovery looks likely to be slow and uneven. It will be difficult to sustain the energy and pace of the initial pandemic response, but we are determined to deliver what people are missing and ensure we are as creative and resourceful as possible.

WELCOMING DEBBIE LEWIS AND THANKING JOHN McGLYNN In September, we see the departure of John McGlynn as chair of APM, handing over to Debbie Lewis. We owe a great debt of gratitude to John, whose time in office saw APM getting its Royal Charter, the creation and launch of the chartered standard and, latterly, the COVID-19 crisis. I would like to pay tribute to John and the rest of the APM board – all of whom have spent much more time than they envisaged supporting APM while facing major work and life challenges of their own.

Looking ahead, I’m excited by the prospect of working with Debbie Lewis, who, having worked on multiple complex projects, including the current 5G network roll-out, is perfectly placed to help guide APM as we embark on the next chapter.

Debbie has a number of unique qualities,

but one of her most valuable gifts, she readily admits (see her interview on page 26), is to turn “big, complicated, messy things” into “smaller, simpler things”. It’s a gift most good project managers would recognise, I’m sure.

I believe with people and skill sets like these the project profession is particularly well placed to help organisations, both large and small, adapt and ultimately thrive. Let’s face the future with courage and determination, and ensure we play our part in supporting economic recovery and helping society get through this extraordinary time in our history.

IN MEMORIAM: GEOFF REISS Project is sad to report that Geoff Reiss, Honorary Fellow of APM, and highly regarded author, speaker, software designer and mentor, has passed away aged 75. He was among the first to embrace programme management in the early 1990s, established the APM Programme Management Specific Interest Group (APM ProgM SIG) and wrote two definitive books on the subject. In recognition, the ProgM SIG made him its Honorary President.

Geoff’s background was in construction, but in the late 1970s he also learned how to programme his Apple II microcomputer from a selfhelp book. He wrote a program for rescheduling a project plan. Apple heard about it and the program became one of the first third-party products sold by the computer giant. Geoff also helped launch the magazine Project Manager Today in 1989. He wrote several best-selling project management books, including the Gower Handbook of Programme Management, the Demystified trilogy for project, programme and portfolio management and One Project Too Many. l Read our full tribute to Geoff online at bit.ly/3hMhHzP

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Economy, 1 ILLUSTRATIONS/ANDY SMITH

When you’re in a hole, they say, stop digging.

But to get out of one, you need to build.

As we recover from COVID-19, there’s hope infrastructure projects will boost the economy. But many project managers counsel caution. To find out why, Richard Young listened in to a government briefing on pandemic-era major projects and spoke to the experts responsible for delivering them PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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uild back better” is the kind of slogan that is catnip to politicians. It’s three words, it’s alliterative and it’s relentlessly positive. No wonder it’s been adopted so widely – from US presidential candidate Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to the UN and the London School of Economics. More than anything, its allure lies in the promise of an enhanced future – not just returning to old ways. And that makes it the perfect clarion call for getting infrastructure projects going in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re not just going to get people working, the slogan says, we’re going to address a whole clutch of long-standing issues to boot.

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PLAYING CATCH-UP That’s important, because many existing programmes were put on hold during lockdown. “We had to pause work on sites in March to reflect on how safe working practices could be implemented,” says Amy Morley, PMO director at HS2. Even for more established projects, such as 5G roll-out, the period has proved challenging. “It has at times been impossible to deliver infrastructure in a safe way to some locations,” says Pete Newth, portfolio director, consumer and enterprise, at EE. “But our operation has been constantly thinking out of the box and always looking for alternatives.”

The problem has also been acute for the government – the client behind many big infrastructure projects. Not only have individual programmes been affected, but also the broader strategic push for renewal. The National Infrastructure Strategy (NIS) was due to launch with the March budget, but was delayed as attention focused on pandemic response. In June, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) sought to maintain momentum in major projects by publishing its procurement pipeline report. “In response to COVID-19 and subsequent requests from industry to provide short- to medium-term certainty, this pipeline [sets] out contracts planned to be brought to market throughout 2020/21,” explained IPA CEO Nick Smallwood. The 340 contracts, worth up to £37bn, are designed to steady nerves and boost activity.

It’s good news for an economy that saw GDP drop a staggering 20 per cent in April alone. The bad news?

The NIS was delayed again in the summer – “although I’m optimistic that with the support of the prime minister and chancellor, we will see it published in the autumn”, says Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC). So what’s

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Boris Johnson during a visit to Hereford County Hospital, where a three-storey modular building, providing 72 new beds over three wards, is currently under construction, due to open in 2021

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happening on major projects in the meantime? And what’s their role in the recovery of jobs, the economy and the nation’s capabilities?

JUMP-START EXISTING PROJECTS The most obvious opportunity lies in getting existing programmes back on track. Take HS2: Phase 1, the Birmingham-to-London route, secured ‘notice to proceed’ at the start of the pandemic. For Morley, that meant getting into gear even under the strictures of lockdown. “We were quick to get clarity on working safely from Public Health England and the Construction Leadership Council – and in some cases the pause lasted less than a week,” she says. “By the end of June, we were back open on 92 per cent of the main works civils for Phase 1. So while we had a window of impact, and put various measures in place to restart safely, we’re carrying on.”

Ditto the 5G roll-out, where maintaining momentum isn’t just about safeguarding jobs, but also developing foundations for enhanced economic activity. “Working and schooling from home has obviously driven changes to society’s needs,” says Newth. “And who can predict what the new normal will be when we return?” (The recent political decision to remove Huawei equipment from the 5G network by 2027 adds further work for skilled technicians in the telecoms sector.)

Even the government’s new £900m Getting Building Fund is being pumped into “shovel-ready

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projects” – code for infrastructure that was about to happen anyway before the pandemic kicked in. For example, the biggest project mentioned at the fund’s launch in August was £23m for Phase 1 of Mayfield Park in Greater Manchester, “expected to deliver 3,200 jobs and attract over one million visitors a year”. But the site got final planning consent in February, and the £1.4bn project will take up to 15 years to hit those impressive economic indicators.

And where a project wasn’t already primed? “If you go too quickly, without the necessary up-front work, you’ll have gaps in design that need revisiting,” says Smallwood. “The better job you do at front-loading a project, the more likely you are to deliver to time scale.” Even if planning is expedited, just securing materials for new works will take time.

A FLEXIBLE APPROACH “There are also challenges around the workforce – not just in terms of location, but also prioritisation for different programmes and projects,” says Stella Okeahialam, deputy director at the Department for International Trade (a role she previously held at the IPA). But she’s a little more optimistic about the possibilities, too. “There are a lot of unknowns right now, so we need to keep on learning,” she adds. “But as a civil service – and a project profession – we can learn to be more creative, looking at how projects can adapt, taking a more flexible approach, rather than a fixed and rigid view.”

Even if you embrace flexibility, it’s still important to set expectations on big projects. “Develop a range of cost and schedule projections,” says Morley.

“When you’re working across a 10-year programme, you simply can’t give precise numbers. A range helps build understanding with stakeholders and, in our case, the public. Specific dates and budgets are a hostage to fortune.” You can’t bank on short-term job creation in 2020 to win your project brownie points in five or 10 years.

Smallwood agrees. As major projects get back into their groove, he says, the principles of good project leadership must not be forgotten. These include consistent cost estimation, quality in the origination and development phases and a better understanding of risk.

“My rule on infrastructure is to under-promise and over-deliver, which might not make me a very good politician,” says Armitt. “People do need to be motivated, but delivery to a clear plan is critical. You need a credible strategy that the private sector can buy into for the next 15 years.” That way, you’re more likely to see them invest in skills and planning that will help today’s economy.

MORE HASTE, LESS SPEED? That more considered view might seem at odds with Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm for ‘Project Speed,’ a new infrastructure delivery task force, helmed by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, put together to “bring forward proposals to deliver government’s public investment projects”. (A figure of £250bn was bandied about at launch; it’s looking more like £5.6bn of planned infrastructure spending being accelerated.)

New Deal or no deal?

It’s natural to reach for the history books during an era-defining crisis. How did people cope during wars or depressions? What projects can we emulate in support of our own recovery? That’s why Franklin D Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal has been getting so much airtime. But comparisons are only partly justified. For example, FDR’s programme cost about $42bn in 1930s money – around 40 per cent of pre-crash GDP. That would be £800bn for the UK in the 2020s, rather than “up to £30bn” in the Plan for Jobs and £5.6bn in infrastructure spending.

One similarity is that the UK’s £5.6bn is mainly accelerating previously planned investments, not fresh projects. Back in the 1930s, most banner New Deal projects, such as the Boulder (later Hoover) Dam, had been in development for a decade or more, too. In both cases, jobs and welfare are the key to economic recovery, not infrastructure. The New Deal’s Public Works Administration only spent around $6bn of that $42bn.

Social care, welfare and structural reforms were a bigger part of the budget. In the UK, the construction industry has already bounced back rapidly compared to, say, hospitality.

One big difference today is that we’re enhancing – not establishing – infrastructure, which means less economic benefit. For example, the New Deal built a network of small airports in the US for the first time. The World Economic Forum says low- and middle-income countries, “could see a net benefit of $4.2trn from investing in infrastructure – a $4 return for every $1 spent”. But today’s upgrade projects in the UK have a more modest economic impact. As Armitt puts it: “Adding capacity on trains into London improves the performance of the economy to a degree – but it’s not a radical change.” So while the New Deal is an inspiration, it’s far from being a blueprint for rebuilding a mature 21st-century economy.

“The prime minster wants to do things faster – changing methods where necessary, looking for opportunities to lift the regulatory burden or finding other ways to accelerate projects” “There is a real interest in projects that have an immediate economic impact – and we’ve seen a couple like that brought forward,” says Alex Chisholm, chief operating officer for the civil service, and permanent secretary for the Cabinet Office. “The prime minster wants to do things faster – changing methods where necessary, looking for opportunities to lift the regulatory burden or finding other ways to accelerate projects.”

And while rushing major infrastructure is not advisable, chief secretary to the Treasury Steve Barclay said about Project Speed: “Our maxim should be measure twice and cut once.” On smaller projects, it could be ideal. “In some cases, the objective is creating jobs as well as infrastructure,” says Armitt. “Improving all the walkways in National Parks, for example, would be labour intensive; it could get going quickly and it gets money into the PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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community across the country. Without jobs, money doesn’t flow in the economy, and whole sectors can’t get going.”

But some remain nervous about acting too quickly.

“I was once asked what percentage of the design should be complete before you go to the field,” says Smallwood. “A wise old project manager told me, ‘Wait until people are screaming – at about 75 per cent ready, they’ll want you to go to the field.’ ‘And then what do you do?’ I asked. ‘Wait another month.’”

If you can feed a construction project with all the design deliverables and materials it needs to build, it will be productive. If crews wait around for design tweaks or equipment, it won’t. And given that skills and labour are critical bottlenecks in the short term, the productivity gains from properly considered planning might be vital to economic recovery.

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“If you want acceleration and certainty of delivery, you’ve got to use existing technology”

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LOOK TO THE FUTURE Infrastructure is a long game. “So, in the medium term, we need to grow the project profession across the UK and invest in all those involved in bringing projects to life,” says Smallwood. “There’s a huge opportunity in the younger generation. By 2025, we need to have a bigger population involved in major projects.” Armitt agrees: “The really big challenge is getting a steady workflow of projects that the industry can see coming for 10 or 15 years, not stop-start every three years. That requires clear policy direction and allocation of funds – and hopefully we’ll see more of that in the NIS in the autumn.”

And if ‘build back better’ is to be meaningful, its focus perhaps shouldn’t be a bounce-back in GDP at all. Infrastructure investments need to target the other, pre-existing priorities. The NIC has been very clear on these: building a digital society, addressing the ‘net zero’ climate change target, revolutionising road transport and reinvigorating the regions. If anything, ‘levelling up’ becomes more important in the wake of COVID-19, not less.

RECALIBRATE TO THE NEW REALITY Equally, a new spirit of project creativity doesn’t mean adopting methodologies and new technology without careful consideration. “On major projects, it’s very dangerous – it’s a great way to introduce uncertainty into your final accounts or programme schedule,” says Armitt. “If you want acceleration and certainty of delivery, you’ve got to use existing technology.”

True, modern construction methods using off-site production and other innovations will be essential for increased productivity (another long-standing goal). The tactical use of new technology also helped get HS2 back on track. “One of our people on the ground developed headsets that beep when you get close to other individuals, so we can ensure social distancing on-site,” says Morley. “The bigger strategic piece, however, is about continuous improvement and innovation.”

And even if we need to be cautious about innovation, we should all be ready to recalibrate projects and methodologies to the post-COVID-19 reality. “We don’t think we’re going back to the old status quo,” says Chisholm. “People are much more likely to be working online, and collaboratively, and inventiveness will go up. Working in big offices turns out to have been largely habit. So look for examples of where people can work more productively and creatively on projects.”

No wonder EE’s Newth sees the 5G programme as a no-brainer for the recovery: “The build of this network is critical to the digital future of the UK,” he says. “It will enable us all to bounce back from the

What are other countries doing?

Every country is weighing up options to invest for a recovery. The EU’s COVID-19 recovery fund, often compared to the Marshall Plan after the Second World War, is a €750bn boost to EU spending agreed in the summer. While there’s a requirement to focus on digitisation and environmental projects, the bulk of funds seem destined for softer areas, such as health, skills and ‘social cohesion’, rather than infrastructure. Sustainability hurdles might also bar, for example, fresh investment in nuclear capacity.

And it’s not clear what’s new money. The InvestEU programme, for example, devotes €20bn to post-COVID ‘sustainable infrastructure’ (against €55bn on projects in skills and support). But the COVID-19 response and recovery plan itself commits only around €15bn to InvestEU overall.

What about individual countries? France, for example, might get around €39bn from the fund. In July, French Prime Minister Jean Castex also announced a domestic €100bn recovery plan. But even the €20bn earmarked for investment in tackling climate change includes renovating older buildings and electric bikes – hardly major infrastructure projects.

The picture in the US is mixed.

In Missouri, for example, several infrastructure projects have been mothballed thanks to lower tax revenues. The parlous state of US infrastructure means President Donald Trump’s $1trn investment plan seems sensible with or without the requirement to recover from COVID-19; and June’s Executive Order on COVID-19 recovery lists transport infrastructure projects and civil works as priorities. But by July, Congress had passed three separate COVID-19 relief packages worth $2trn with no funding designated for capital projects.

In Singapore, authorities took the collapse in air travel as an opportunity to accelerate the rebuild of Changi Airport’s Terminal 2 – another project scheduled before the pandemic. But in four stimulus packages worth S$100bn (around 20 per cent of the country’s GDP) to shore up wages, smaller businesses and R&D to bolster the state’s longterm position, infrastructure doesn’t feature prominently. Big projects there and elsewhere might need to wait until public finances become more stable and reliable projects with the right skilled workers are on the table.

lockdown – and if we take the opportunities it offers, we will truly accelerate our progress in so many new technologies across the entire UK economy.

“The capacity, low latency and reliability of our 5G network will underpin the realisation of almost every exciting future technology in the UK,” he continues.

“There’s a vast array of opportunities for connected cities in areas such as traffic management, tourism, energy management, drones and driverless cars. The list is endless – we have trials working today in a number of these areas.”

Building back better, as fast as possible, can salve a dented economy. But it’s important we never sacrifice professionalism, precision and productivity in projects – nor lose focus on the fact that infrastructure investment is all about delivering a better future, not just a boost to investment today.

Above: Terminal 2 at Singapore’s Changi Airport is benefiting from a rebuild thanks to the lull in air travel

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THE BIG INTERVIEW

DEBBIE LEWIS

APM’s new chair, whose day job is director of strategic programmes in the technology business at BT Group, talks to Emma De Vita about why project management is necessary for corporate success, how empathetic leadership is the way forward and why a special type of BT green cabinet on the street makes her break out in a smile

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PM’s new chair, Debbie Lewis, busts many stereotypes. She is a physics graduate and director of strategic programmes in the technology business of BT, flying high in the upper echelons of technology and project management. She enjoys textile art in her spare time (not that she has any) and is happy to laugh about lockdown hairstyles. She’s a friendly corporate head honcho who gets her kicks from turning strategic visions into reality. Lewis loves her job as a project management alchemist, and it shows.

Lewis’s election to APM chair comes at a time when APM is focusing on diversity and inclusion of all kinds, asking the profession to interrogate itself about what can be done to make change happen faster. “We haven’t yet cracked the nut of gender diversity,” says Lewis, “but if having a female chair presents a role model to others then that’s fantastic because I’m

very aware that diversity in all its forms is still very much an issue.”

Lewis wants to embed her predecessor John McGlynn’s work to further strengthen the association into one fit for the exciting future that beckons, while making sure that it stays true to its charitable aim of generating public good.

She’ll also be focusing on bolstering APM’s membership proposition and reinforcing its position as the preferred body of the project profession internationally.

It’s mid-July when we speak on Zoom, and Lewis is working from her home in the Suffolk countryside instead of her desk at BT’s tech campus at Adastral Park in Martlesham, where she first walked through the doors as a new graduate from Durham University in 1987. An accidental project manager, Lewis now manages a portfolio of major programmes delivering transformational change in networks, internal business change, and risk and

assurance process evolution. She has leapt up from submarine systems engineer to sales director at BT Exact to programme director for the design of BT’s 5G programme. While she jokes that it might be a little old-fashioned to be a corporate lifer, it has given her the diversity of roles and strong connections to allow her to fulfil her intellectual and career ambitions.

But more on that later.

First, I wanted to understand from Lewis how the pandemic has affected a business like BT, which is so critical to the UK’s infrastructure. BT’s services have been instrumental in keeping life going for ordinary families faced with home working, home schooling, home everything.

“Despite the very significant new demands on it in terms of bandwidth and traffic patterns throughout the week, the UK network has performed amazingly well,” says Lewis. “It didn’t happen by accident.

There’s been an awful lot of our engineers out there.”

The galvanising of the business around the shared problem of COVID-19 has impressed Lewis deeply. Generally, she says, her projects have not been impacted by the pandemic as greatly as BT had anticipated. Initially, she explains, there were alarm bells about suppliers being unable to operate, third parties unable to deliver services or physical infrastructure equipment not being available – but everyone has rallied.

Many of her project managers felt little immediate impact because they were early on in the project life cycle. The major strategic programmes she oversees have continued to be managed effectively in a virtual environment. Some projects have obviously felt the impact more, so teams have been forced to employ greater risk mitigation or adjust the pace of network roll-out activities as they’ve found mechanisms for field engineers and suppliers to work safely.

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with a side pod bolted on, then I look at it and think: ‘I helped make that happen,’” she laughs. “It’s hugely gratifying to take a vision and turn it into something that I can walk past in the street and physically touch. It’s providing ultra-fast broadband to customers who would never otherwise be able to have it. That’s very satisfying.”

It’s obvious that Lewis derives a huge amount of satisfaction from her work. She describes her sideways move into project management halfway through her career, when she shifted from a technical role to programme management, as an alignment between her true self and her profession.

“I came across project management by accident. I was asked to join a team where a small centre of excellence was being established and I very quickly found myself energised and motivated by it in ways I hadn’t necessarily been by previous roles.”

She found the role was a very good match with her personal values and behaviour. It needed her to be analytical

T

The average passerby may be oblivious, but these green boxes spark great joy for Lewis

asked with finding a way to deliver an ambitious vision, the BT team took G.fast technology, with the idea of using the existing copper-wire network to deliver ultra-fast broadband of 300 megabits per second. It was unproven technology, without international standards, and never tried before on longer distances of copper. “We didn’t have suppliers and a number of critical path elements, and we worked for 18 months or so to build the case and prove the capability. Then we designed the programme that could actually deliver it out there in the network,” she explains.

It’s one of the highlights of her career, she confides.

“Now, if I walk past one of the green BT cabinets of a particular shape and size

and structured, and to work hard. “It required me to try to figure out really big, complicated, messy things [and turn them] into smaller, simpler things. It was all the things that were ‘me’ naturally – that’s what made me happy doing it.

Being happy in the work that you do because it’s naturally ‘you’ is a special gift, because it’s what underpins good mental health,” she says.

Lewis has always found herself seeking out difficult work to sink her teeth into.

“Even as a small child I was interested in solving problems,” she explains. Growing up on the North Yorkshire coast, her parents imbued her with a practical, can-do attitude that she found gratifying.

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“I was quite an analytical child. I like to understand things and get underneath things.” So, naturally, she gravitated towards science, particularly physics, which she saw as a good foundation subject and one that would present a challenge. “I make myself smile when I say this – but I had a tendency, even at that age, to think: ‘What’s going to be difficult? What’s going to really challenge me? And what am I going to be dead proud of if I come out the other side of it?’”

S

he pins down her career success to consistent focus and hard work. “I’ve generated a reputation that, given something to deliver, given a problem to solve, I can be trusted to work with the appropriate people to be successful in delivering what needs to be delivered,” she says. While it is less common these days to be a company lifer, Lewis says having had the time to create a huge network holds a programme manager in good stead.

“It’s a network that enables you to ensure that the stakeholders and sponsors of the projects and programmes you are working on are well informed – and you can be proactive in that.” She says this means making sure you know who the decision-makers are in that stakeholder community, and being able to view your project through their eyes and provide them with what they need. “It’s about being attuned to different stakeholders needing different things and being able to deliver against that,” she explains. Do that on an ongoing basis and you will be successful, she advises.

“One of the differentiators between good and not-so-good project managers is their ability to flex their leadership style – to be different things to different people in their project and programme management. The best way to do that is to be aware of yourself first.” Lewis sets aside time for self-reflection (and advises all project managers to do so) and places great importance on this as a way to cultivate greater emotional intelligence and empathy.

The tide is turning, she believes, towards a more empathetic, strengthsbased approach to leadership, one where you can be more open and transparent about yourself as an individual, which helps you play to your strengths and build your resilience. And project managers grappling with big, complex programmes and stakeholder management challenges need to be able to draw on a lot of selfreliance and self-confidence. “Personal resilience should be part of your toolkit,” she says.

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REPRO OP

on risk management will hold BT in good stead for Brexit. A short time ago, a pandemic, a no-deal Brexit or US trade sanctions against Chinese suppliers like Huawei (whose technology is used by UK telecoms companies) would have been viewed as black swans or lowprobability events.

“Now the reality is that we’ve got this perfect storm of those risks converging.

We need to take an awful lot of learning from the pandemic and understand how we better manage risk moving forward in terms of our ability to sense it, and proactively put mitigation in place on an ongoing basis in our projects and programmes.

“The pandemic and Brexit both happening at the same time is a big risk.

We’re considering the impact of any increase in infection rates again, and potentially more lockdown measures. With Brexit, in the event of a disorderly exit at the end of the year, we’ve got one source of uncertainty stacked up against another.”

But solving complex, challenging, visionary problems is what makes Lewis light up. Her 30-year career at the telecoms group has proven her to be particularly successful in rapidly structuring and establishing large-scale programmes. She loves to turn the visionary into the visceral – and nothing sums this up better than the ultra-fast broadband design programme that she started in the UK in 2015.

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THE BIG INTERVIEW

“I’m a strong advocate of the tangible difference that successful, wellexecuted project and programme management can bring to business, the economy and society. It can make things happen that otherwise would not happen, or make them happen a lot earlier”

Debbie was photographed at her home in Suffolk

by Charlie Best

Debbie Lewis 1966 Born, Yorkshire 1987 BSc (Hons) in Physics, Durham University 1987–1993 Joins BT as submarine systems engineer 1990 MSc in Telecommunications and Information Systems, Essex University 1993–1999 Technical area leader, Broadband Business Services 1999–2001 Executive

assistant to CEO, BT Exact Technologies 2001–2003 Sales director, BT Exact 2003–2004 Programme manager, BT Exact 2004–2007 Programme director, 21C portfolio rationalisation programme 2007–2016 Programme director of BT’s Next Generation Network programmes

Lewis gets some of her kicks from helping others to collaborate and achieve joint success. She confesses that she doesn’t like to see her own name in lights (and warns me not to mention this, but genuinely humble leadership needs to be praised wherever it is spotted). “I know the part I played, and I give myself a pat on the back,” she says. Collaboration energises her.

“It’s just a beautiful thing to see happen, and it is fundamental for the practice of project management, because what are you doing? You’re herding cats on a daily basis.

If you get your motivation and energy when you see other people collaborate, you’re going to be a good project manager.”

Criticised early on in her career by some senior people for not being

2013 Major Programme Management (distinction), Saïd Business School, Oxford University 2014 Registered Project Professional, APM 2015–2018 Programme director for establishing BT’s Ultrafast and 5G programmes 2018 Director, strategic programmes, technology business, BT Group 2020 Chair, APM

aggressive enough in her management style, the fact that an empathetic style of leadership is finally being applauded is recognition that the path she chose to walk is an effective one.

“I don’t think it was sexist,” she says, picking her words very carefully. “I think it was cultural, and you know, where do those two things meet in a large and complicated organisation? But there was a cultural environment that better supported a more aggressive, command-and-control approach.” It’s gratifying for her to now see organisations explore the idea of a strong leader as being one who steps back and facilitates others. By opening a little window onto the real lives of colleagues, lockdown, Lewis believes, has led to “a new

empathy that we didn’t have and didn’t realise the power of before”.

But back to the day job, which Lewis describes as leading a team who bridge the gap between a business vision or ambition, like 5G, and a designed programme, ready for deployment. Lewis spins many plates, from Brexit mitigation to “closing old technology in an exchange building somewhere”. She has watched project management at the telecoms group emerge from the periphery to spread across the entire business, achieving a commensurate elevation in professionalism along the way and becoming a critical contributor to business success.

I’m a strong advocate of the tangible difference that successful, well-executed project and programme management can bring to business, the economy and society. It can make things happen that otherwise would not happen, or make them happen a lot earlier than they might otherwise. That’s one of the huge sources of motivation and energy in my day-to-day practice,” she says.

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o, lockdown has brought its own personal challenges to Lewis. As someone who loves her work, it has been too easy to fill every waking hour working at her desk (in what – on Zoom – looks like a small, sparse, white cupboard).

Lewis still enjoys making stuff – her love of craft and sewing goes back to spending time with her mother creating things at her sewing machine. A few years ago, she even took a part-time course in textile art through the Women’s Institute, learning about embroidery techniques from around the world, dyeing and printing. “I’m trying to carve out some time to develop again my ability in some of those things,” she says hopefully, “to stretch my creative tendencies in a different direction.”

But with all those plates she loves to spin, I think this might be one of those rare challenges in which she might struggle.

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CAPTURING THE C-SUITE

CAN PROJECT MANAGERS BREAK THROUGH TO THE BOARDROOM? Andrew Saunders investigates whether the C-suite is ready to add a chief project officer to its ranks.

He finds that the executive board is still a little out of reach, but a nudge in the right direction to bring CEOs and project managers closer together is all that it might take...

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long with all the undoubted trials, tribulations and tragedies that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, there have also been a few notable triumphs. It’s presented a tremendous opportunity for organisations to step up and really show what they can do, managing huge amounts of change against very tight time scales and with stakes that in some cases could hardly be higher.

Nightingale hospitals constructed from scratch in weeks. Supermarkets maintaining vital food and grocery supplies through a lockdown demand spike equivalent to Christmas that materialised overnight. Companies up and down the country having to pivot in days towards new and untried products and services – garment manufacturers sewing PPE, distillers bottling hand sanitiser rather than gin, SMEs without even a website switching to e-commerce – simply to stay afloat.

All these and more have been making headlines since lockdown began in March, and none of them could have been achieved as quickly or effectively without project managers in the vanguard, helping to impose at least a semblance of order on what might otherwise have been chaos, and saving lives, jobs and businesses into the bargain.

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NO LONGER THE TECHIE GEEKS “I think people have tended to see project managers as techie geeks in the basement who were great with a Gantt chart, but that’s all,” says Tim Banfield, consultant at the Nichols Group and former director of portfolio oversight at the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority. “Now [thanks to COVID-19] what we’re seeing is that, if you want to do something radically different in a short space of time, you have to use those project techniques.

It’s not just about ‘A leads to B leads to C’, because when you get to B suddenly you are diverted to D and you need to be able to respond.”

Darren Dalcher, professor of strategic project management at Lancaster University, adds that the urgency of the crisis has created a rare chance for project managers to make their presence

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felt in boardroom decision-making – to demonstrate to a sometimes-sceptical C-suite audience that they can master not only the traditional ‘whats’ of budget, scope and time scale, but also the ‘whys’ of strategy and vision. “If you’re asked to deliver the pizza, that’s all you can do. But the bigger conversation is about redesigning the entire restaurant. I think that’s the opportunity here – there has been much less time than there usually is, so the traditional way of thinking about projects has had to be upended. It’s about recognising the constraints that are not necessary and responding in a more adaptive way.”

So, is the traditional, rigid distinction between strategy and execution – the former a board-level priority, the latter less so – finally being superseded by a new golden age of project manager and C-suite collaboration? Perhaps, says Dalcher, but there is still a long way to go. “The problem is that there is a serious disconnect between strategic management and project management. A lot of projects fail because the execution people don’t understand the strategic needs. And a lot of strategies fail because there is no understanding of the implementation issues.”

IT’S STRATEGIC, NOT TACTICAL The view that the C-suite regards project management as tactical rather than strategic is a common one. It’s an entrenched position that harks back to the very beginnings of the profession, first in the military and then in the space and nuclear industries – typically high-stakes games where project managers became the people tasked with making sure things were done right first time, but only after the higher ranks had decided what the right thing to do was.

“It was all very process-focused – here is the manual, we’ll deliver it just like it says in chapter three,” says Sue Kershaw, managing director of transportation at Costain Group and president of APM. But – rather like the pre-internet days where the IT director was often viewed as a computer geek, a kind of glorified plumber who simply made things work properly – it’s a dangerously old-fashioned view of project managers that no longer stands up to scrutiny.

“It comes from a place of deep ignorance. We do major projects really well in this country, because we’ve added a vital intellectual layer – why are we doing this? What’s the business case? What are the socio-economic benefits? Look at all the analysis that has been done around HS2, for example. You can’t do that kind of analysis without thinkers,” says Kershaw.

How to speak board BE A LEADER, NOT JUST AN EXPERT

Your technical skills got you into the room, but they won’t get you much further on their own. Show them that you understand how to contribute to strategic priorities, and give them confidence that you have the leadership ability to see that contribution through.

She may have a point – even the prime minister’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings appreciates that project skills these days are about more than the old trinity of budget, scope and schedule.

In his famous blog post at the beginning of the year, Cummings included project managers alongside data scientists, policy experts and other “assorted weirdos and misfits” whom he wants in Downing Street to help him think the unthinkable.

BUSINESS AS A SUITE OF PROJECTS But the image formed by those early process-led days still hampers efforts by the most business-minded of project people to be taken seriously at board

You might think that citing loads of portfolio facts and figures shows you are really on top of your game. But the board is much more interested in actionable insight derived from data than in the raw data itself. So choose carefully – data by the teaspoon, insight by the bucket-load.

PMs and the board, 2

LESS RAW DATA, MORE DERIVED INSIGHT

LOOK FORWARD, NOT BACK

BE STRATEGIC NOT TACTICAL Focus more on outcomes, business value and behavioural changes and less on budgets, scope and schedule.

“I think people have tended to see project managers as techie geeks in the basement who were great with a Gantt chart, but that’s all” level, says Kershaw. “We need to educate CEOs and CFOs in particular. They think, ‘We’re on the board, so we only think about corporate things – and projects aren’t corporate’. I’m sorry, but your whole business is a suite of projects that

AVOID THE ‘P’ WORDS

That means process and project. Rightly or wrongly, most boards consider these topics well beneath their pay grade. Talk about either and you will not only lose the room, but also your chance of a return visit.

between them bring in your revenue. Why aren’t you looking after them like you look after HR or legal? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Small businesses, too, often make the mistake of assuming that project management – and project managers in particular – are a luxury they cannot afford. But it doesn’t have to be a major overhead: even the simple project disciplines of documenting what they want to achieve, by when and at what cost can be hugely beneficial, says Tony Mulvahil of SME specialist Planning for the Best, who contributed to APM’s recent Golden Thread research. “Many SMEs take the view that red tape is

The board wants proof that you have a strong vision for the future, one that is complementary to their own. They are much less interested in your ability to cleverly rationalise the past – so talk to tomorrow not yesterday, and avoid justifying past actions or mistakes.

bad, and that anything to do with documentation is red tape and also bad. They don’t always think about the structure they need to support their staff.

But you don’t have to write a 60-page thesis – it could just be three paragraphs, thinking about things that could affect you and how you might react to them, so you aren’t just making things up as you go along.”

SPEAK THE RIGHT LANGUAGE It’s too easy just to blame the bosses, however. Boardroom access is jealously guarded and project people have to earn their place by confounding the stereotype, proving they can take a wider and PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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more balanced view of business priorities and express themselves in board-friendly terms. “Project managers don’t always do themselves many favours – my view is that when they do get a chance to engage with the board, they mostly get it wrong, because they immediately start talking in project delivery language, which turns the C-suite off straight away,” says Martin Samphire, managing director of consultancy 3pmxl and chairman of the APM Governance SIG. “There is a language issue between project people and the board in general – they fail to understand each other’s context and a lot is lost in translation.

There is too much focus from the project team on what a project is trying to deliver as a product, and not enough on what it is trying to achieve as a business outcome, its contribution to meeting strategic objectives and the impact of any changes to the business benefits,” he adds.

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THE BIG I AM Kershaw agrees, adding that project managers also need to get better at marketing themselves to senior management if the profession is to stand a chance of becoming a recognised route to the top, alongside old favourites like sales and finance, and more recent additions like technology. “Project managers tend to hide themselves under a bushel – I had to go looking for mine. There was a community of 350 of them ferreting away, but they wouldn’t step forward. Doing the ‘big I am’ just isn’t in their DNA.” One positive indicator that the profession might be able to make the most of its current hour in the spotlight is the gradual emergence of the CPO – chief portfolio officer. High-profile appointments such as Caroline Botwood at the Department for Transport are beginning to spread the good news about project skills to boardrooms across the wider industry. It’s a trend that the challenges of the post-COVID-19 environment may help to accelerate, says Banfield. “We’ve got some amazing people doing phenomenal things, but as a relatively young profession it takes a while to get a grip. It [the appointment

“There is a language issue between project people and the board in general – they fail to understand each other’s context and a lot is lost in translation”

of CPOs] sends a sign that they are being valued at board level.

“The best people in the profession are all people who don’t just have technical skills; they have empathy and leadership ability, they are comfortable with ambiguity and they can deliver huge change. As a profession we will be achieving our maximum potential value when project and programme people come to be seen as natural CEOs.” If that ambition still seems a good way off, perhaps the achievements of the past few months across the commercial, public and government sectors have managed to bring it closer than it would otherwise have been. After all, as every good project manager knows, where there is a will there is a way.

Why it pays to have a good relationship with the boss As Kevin Parry discovered back in 2014, there is nothing like having built a strong relationship with the CEO when an unexpected crisis hits.

An experienced project director – he had previously been a programme director for BT’s multi-billion pound 21st Century Network upgrade project – Parry had been called in by a major airline’s cargo division to project manage the operational testing of a new automated international cargo hub that would handle all its lucrative air freight business.

He worked unusually closely with the division’s CEO on a key report to justify the full operational readiness of the complex, high-tech facility, and was rewarded by being asked to present it himself. “Considering that I was reporting to someone who reported to him, we built a pretty strong relationship.

I worked very much one-to-one with the CEO on the report, and I was then asked to come along with him and present it to the board.”

However, within a couple of weeks of opening, it quickly became apparent that things were not as they should have been. The terminal had developed a significant cargo backlog – instead of being processed within 24 hours, cargo and paperwork were piling up all over the terminal. Costs and delays were mounting fast. “It was a real crisis,” Parry says.

Parry, fearing his neck was on the line, was instead given another chance. “The CEO called me back and said: ‘You had

better write a briefing for the board on why we were right to open in the first place.’ It’s not the way some CEOs would have reacted – I could have been fired on the spot.”

He soon discovered that the terminal was not being run according to plan.

Rather than trusting the computer to ‘fly’ the terminal like an autopilot flies a plane, the operators were constantly making manual adjustments, trying to second guess its decisions. “They were over-riding the computer and becoming overwhelmed as a result. That terminal was a three-dimensional chess game and no one could comprehend all its moving parts.”

His 10-stage plan to fix the problems worked. But it could all have ended very differently. “Although my knowledge of that terminal was pretty good, the CEO showed a phenomenal amount of trust in me by putting me in front of the board and backing me as his man. But I think he had confidence in my ability, and I had confidence that he would support me too.”

The incident stands out in Parry’s mind as a great example of the value that can – but rarely does – accrue to a business when senior project people and the C-suite work closely together. “It’s still the exception rather than the rule that we are treated as professionals by the board,” he says. “The CEO gave me guidance and access and helped me to present my report at a sufficiently high level so the board could comprehend it.

It was a great relationship.”

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Surviving and thriving in 2020 means designing and delivering projects in ingenious and productive ways. This means seeking out and welcoming many different perspectives. Now is not the time for complacency when it comes to diversity and inclusion, writes Emma De Vita 36

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Diversity, 1

B

ack in June, the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, coined the term ‘The Great Reset’, urging us to rebuild societies, work, education and the economy in a better way. “One silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles,” he wrote. “Almost instantly, the crisis forced businesses and individuals to abandon practices long claimed to be essential, from frequent air travel to working in an office.”

The appetite to rebuild business, work and projects in a better way must not be allowed to ebb away. It’s too easy to fall back into comfortable ways of doing things when uncertainty, fear and stress continue to wear away at us. The first half of 2020 has demonstrated that project professionals are adaptable and determined to succeed. The second

half of this year should be dedicated to cementing new, better ways of working, and then building on this innovation.

This means capitalising on the best minds. But finding the best minds means casting your talent net more broadly. Cognitive diversity, as explained

by Matthew Syed in his book Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking, pays. It gives you the creative solutions and finds the blindspots that groupthink never will. This is essential for any project.

STOP A BACKWARD SLIDE Stephen Frost, CEO of Frost Included, is a diversity and inclusion (D&I) expert who was D&I lead for the Cabinet Office and the 2012 London Olympics. He is co-author of Building an Inclusive Organisation. Now is a dangerous time for D&I progress, he says. Not only does fear lead us to hunker down and seek out the familiar, but home-working means that biases

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38

that might be challenged in the office go unchecked.

Hard-won progress can slide backwards.

What’s more, Frost says that many project managers wrongly see D&I as a cost rather than an opportunity to shake things up to improve productivity, efficiency and service quality. “If you just stick to what you know, you are not going to have higher productivity,” he says. “The evidence suggests that if you have more diversity on your team, you will make more money.”

But you need to have strong, inclusive leadership, he argues – someone who understands that a diversity of perspectives will de-risk situations, give new insights and uncover blindspots on projects.

“Team leaders and project managers are in a very powerful position to empower individuals,” says Frost.

This is because they have more freedom than managers trapped in a corporate hierarchy. The way to embed D&I on a project is by viewing it as a method with a set of processes, he advises. For example, hiring a whole team in one go rather than individual by individual. If, as a white woman, you hire one person at a time, you’re likely to hire 10 white women. If you hire 10 people in one go, then you’ll be aware of what you’re doing.

Tips on how to affect change right now,

by Roianne Nedd

PMs IN A POWERFUL POSITION “Project management gives you the opportunity to truly flex your resourcing model around the skills that you need for every stage of the project,” says Roianne Nedd, global inclusion and diversity lead at consultancy Oliver Wyman, whose career has spanned the public and private sectors, including working as a project manager for the Ministry of Justice. (She was a panellist on APM’s ‘Coming Back from COVID-19: How to accelerate recovery with diverse project teams’ webinar in May.) “So you’re more able to bring in diversity of thought, different skills and different people,” she says, although many project teams still fall into comfortable ways, hiring jacks of all trades and succumbing to bias, what they’ve historically done and the natural draw of working with people they like. “I think there is still a challenge of people not putting the needs of the project ahead of their comfort,” she says.

What’s really beneficial, she says, is to get to know your team members individually and understand what their strengths are and how they will fit into a project.

If you manage a programme, you can create a diverse pool of talent to share across projects – something that Nedd has done and found to be an effective way of introducing more diversity. “We were still able to run a traditional payroll for an individual, but their time was split between different projects. Greater diversity was possible with a bit of thinking outside the box, collaboration across lines and leadership who are willing to take risks on something new.”

The pandemic has brought positives, like opening up our homes through video calls and forcing more oneto-one conversations that enable people to shine, Nedd believes. But it has also brought negatives. “We’ve seen gender progress dial back during the pandemic because of the return to more traditional gender roles, although women have always done that,” she says. “Some women are having to rethink their careers and even resign, because if having children at home becomes a long-term issue, it is just not a sustainable model.”

The hope is that, with home-working, companies

3 REALISE YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW THE ANSWERS

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1 WORK OUT YOUR BLINDSPOTS You need to build your self-awareness. Look at the past five projects you worked on. Who were the people you tended to bring on, or not, on your teams? Challenge yourself as to why that might be. An easy way is to ask your family – often, the people who are closest to you will know what your biases are.

2 MAKE YOURSELF VULNERABLE In order to attract different people towards you, you have to make yourself vulnerable to make them connect. It gives other people permission to be themselves as well. Project managers need to buy into you as their project leader. Project teams need to build connections fast, so you have to articulate your story as to what makes you a great project manager and leader.

The value of a project manager is knowing the strengths of each of their team members and using everyone’s capabilities to the fullest capacity.

Top: Stephen Frost Above: Roianne Nedd

will move away from often excessive and exhausting presenteeism to a more outcomes-driven approach, which is characteristic of project work anyway.

What’s more, says Nedd, “We also have to think about where we are with race equity. The horrifying death of George Floyd has created more momentum around racial equity, how we think about that, and how we step back and make systematic change to confront the lack of visible ethnic diversity in many organisations. We are at a turning point.” What will D&I 2.0 look like? “It’s about accountability,” says Nedd, “enabling people to look at diversity as a business issue not just as a social issue. We need to apply our business frames to this challenge.”

In practical terms, explains Nedd, this means looking at your talent pipeline, rooting out bias in your recruitment, holding people accountable for their actions, doing analysis around decision-making and identifying when recruits are being left behind. “How do we now accelerate learning rather than making the same mistakes every time we reprioritise a different diversity issue? How do we use intersectionality to drive change as well?” ‘Women’, for example, are not just a homogenous group of white middle-class people.

The benefits of diversity to projects are highly desirable. “The biggest place where I believe diversity gives you an edge in project management is in your

Diversity, 2

“You need different ways of thinking and looking at the world and different experiences to help you identify the things that could destroy your project” talking heads from employees about why they were out and proud for Pride 2020.

“The reason why cognitive diversity is so important is because we have big problems that we have to solve now. What we want to do is bring people with different frames of reference into the problem-solving arena. It could be that the person who is the least experienced in project management might have the solution,” says Tamlin. “Every single person on the project team needs a voice, because it could be risk management that you are doing, and that small voice could be the voice that tells you that you are about to hit a massive risk and that might turn into a project issue.” As the project manager, you need to have ears wide open. “I have recruited 25 legal project managers over the past two years. When a new recruit starts, they are told that we want to set them up for success,” she explains.

What about calling out bad behaviour? “Whatever minority group you might be in, allies are absolutely critical. Our female network group has men. Our LGBT network group has many straight people. As a gay woman I’m not always going to be around or always call out something to do with LGBT things, but hopefully our allies will stand by us,” she says.

risk management phase,” Nedd explains. “It’s about identifying the random risk that might torpedo the whole project. You need different ways of thinking and looking at the world and different experiences to help you identify the things that could destroy your project or put it off track. And if you have people with the same background, who are trained in exactly the same way and have only ever worked on the same types of projects – while they might bring speed to some of that work, they are unlikely to identify that almost unquantifiable risk.”

STILL ON THE AGENDA Dee Tamlin is head of client and legal project management at global law firm Pinsent Masons, and was the founding co-chair of its LGBT network. “There was fear at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak that D&I would be forgotten about, and with some organisations it probably has gone down to the bottom of the agenda,” she says. Firms should act fast to deal with this. Tamlin says that she very quickly opened up team chats after the murder of George Floyd to talk about Black Lives Matter. “Let’s make it important to us. It’s about senior leaders reminding people that this is still on our agenda,” she says. This could be done via a weekly newsletter from leaders that includes talking heads from employees from minority groups. Pinsent Masons, for example, ran a comms campaign with

Top: Anita Phagura Above: Dee Tamlin

INEQUALITY NEEDS TO BE FIXED Anita Phagura is an experienced project manager, having worked in transport for eight years. A year ago, she set up Fierce Project Management, a community and consultancy which supports women in project management, and she is a committee member for APM’s Women in Project Management SIG. Phagura has been in a minority on project teams either by gender or ethnicity and has experienced subtle and not-so-subtle encounters with sexism and racism. She was also concerned that the higher she climbed in the project hierarchy, the fewer women she could see.

Phagura found her desire to continue to progress her project management career and have the flexibility to look after her young son very difficult, and things have only got worse during lockdown. The community of female project managers with whom she connects have reported an even more pressurised expectation for project teams to be ever-present for virtual meetings.

“Men want flexibility too,” she says. “It opens up the talent pool to a whole wealth of people – disabled people, those with caring responsibilities or semiretired people who want flexibility.”

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heard, be taken seriously and access opportunities so projects are delivered better”, explains Phagura. “It’s not about changing the women – it’s the workplaces that need to be fixed. We need to rebuild the culture,” she says. She is optimistic. “As a project manager, there is no one way to be. The beauty of project management is that we can all shine and deliver our projects in different ways.

“I really feel that now is the biggest opportunity for change [on diversity] that we’ve ever had… we’ve been forced to do things in a different way. Forced into our own bubbles, we have been questioning our own values and seeing that we don’t all matter equally.

Inequality is really being magnified. It’s even more apparent that inequality needs to be addressed.”

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HOW TO DO D&I WELL Jenny McLaughlin is a project manager at Heathrow, and lead for its disability network.

Diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD, McLaughlin feels supported by a work culture that is at pains to foster inclusivity for those whose disabilities are visible or hidden.

For project managers working for organisations that are lagging behind in attitude but want to take action, she advises, “It’s about asking, ‘How can we incorporate D&I into Top: Jenny McLaughlin project design principles?’”

Above: James Lea The best place to start, she says, is to understand the diversity you already have on your team, to treat people with respect and kindness and to make the team a psychologically safe place to be. “Unless everyone’s voice has equal value, then you won’t be able to improve the project.”

James Lea, a consulting project and programme manager and Fellow of APM, has a personal involvement with D&I. “I have always made it clear that I have a hearing loss, and have educated and informed those around me as to how we can adapt to what this means together,” he says by email.

Is now the right time for a greater diversity push?

“Absolutely, we must keep pushing the boundaries, and a crisis is an opportunity. The pandemic has driven change further and faster than any coordinated business transformation programme. We must seize this initiative,” says Lea. “Technology is rising to the challenge but we’ve yet to understand what the new ways of working will look like. The more we can push, the stronger we’ll be when things settle down again.”

According to Lea, stubborn obstacles remain – the fear of failure in front of a client, for one. “Diverse teams have to experiment to achieve their best performance but are under pressure not to do so in front of the client, for fear of reputational damage,” he says. But the pandemic has given us the permission to change, he argues. Let’s push for that change right now. After all, why wouldn’t you?

APM’s Salary and Market Trends Survey 2020: diversity and inclusion The project profession, like many other others, faces a challenge to increase the diversity of representation at all levels. There are encouraging signs though. APM’s latest Salary and Market Trends Survey reveals that over three-quarters of black, Asian and minority ethic (BAME) respondents feel positive about the future, while over a fifth of young professionals entering the profession are from a BAME background.

This year’s survey revealed that the profession broadly aligns with the UK’s overall ethnic makeup. Eighty-six per cent of project professionals are white – reflecting the broader national picture – with 12 per cent identifying as BAME. Of that group, Asian/Asian British – Indian respondents were the most numerous, at 27 per cent of the BAME total, followed by Black/African/Caribbean/Black British – African (19 per cent).

And as further evidence that the profession’s mix is changing, almost one in three project professionals from a BAME background (31 per cent) have joined the profession in the past two years, versus 19 per cent of their white counterparts. Nearly half of the profession’s BAME cohort are young: 15 per cent are aged 18 to 24, and 32 per cent are 25 to 34 (compared with 16 per cent aged between 45 and 54).

The way in which some project professionals of a BAME background perceive their own prospects for advancement makes for sobering reading. Most concerning is the fact that 28 per cent of BAME project professionals believe that their ethnicity has had a negative impact on their professional development (compared with 18 per cent who believe it has had a positive impact). Within the BAME cohort, Black/African/ Caribbean/Black British respondents feel the most frustrated: they were the group most likely to say that their ethnicity has had a negative impact on their professional development (39 per cent). And it’s a concern to others: 26 per cent of British Asians felt the same way.

Seventy-six per cent of BAME respondents feel positive about the prospects for the profession, compared to 67 per cent of white respondents, yet the survey data suggests a difference of opinion on the ways to make the profession more diverse and inclusive.

Mentoring is the most widely suggested solution to improving D&I, with 43 per cent of both white and BAME respondents saying the use of an advice and guidance programme can effect real change. However, beyond that, the splits appear: 28 per cent of BAME respondents feel employers should consider changing their recruitment practices, while only 18 per cent of white respondents see that as a solution.

Significantly, a big discrepancy centres around the importance of diversity-related networks, with a growing number (35 per cent) of BAME respondents suggesting their use within organisations, and only 18 per cent of their white colleagues agreeing. ● Read the full results of the research into D&I at bit.ly/2CrxYuy

Join the conversation Sign up for ‘Think Differently’, APM’s five-day virtual event (21–25 September) featuring the Women in Project Management Conference, at www.apm.org.uk/think-differently/

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Alexander Garrett investigates how project management is gaining a foothold in law firms, where legal project managers are becoming a necessary part of the behind-the-scenes action

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ast year, two decades after being admitted to the Law Society as a qualified solicitor, Neil Franklin added a somewhat different string to his bow. For the Bristol-based partner in law firm TLT, who is also a practitioner in alternative dispute resolution, adding APM’s Project Management Qualification to his credentials was a natural next step. On the face of it, these are two starkly contrasting worlds – one rich with symbolism of ermine and wigs, the other associated with technology and spreadsheets. But Franklin sees it differently: “I view myself as a project manager and as a lawyer. I don’t think the two are inconsistent. I’m probably unusual in doing both, but I feel – and the firm feels – that it’s a really positive contribution to the work we do for clients.”

Legal project management (LPM) is a discipline attracting growing interest among corporate law firms, part of a

On the face of it, these are two starkly contrasting worlds – one rich with symbolism of ermine and wigs, the other associated with technology and spreadsheets race to make the delivery of services more transparent, predictable and cost-effective. LPM emerged around a decade ago, notably in the US, and has been steadily gaining traction since.

Franklin’s interest was piqued in his early days at TLT, when he found himself running thousands of related cases for financial services clients. “I developed processes for dealing with those matters, and I didn’t have any formal project management skills, so I started to read about it and develop my own. As I moved on to larger-scale projects in our financial services practice, including remediations and regulatory investigations, I decided I needed to become properly qualified.”

ACCIDENTAL PROJECT MANAGERS In the legal sector, early forays into project management were internally focused, revolving around the introduction of networked IT systems or change programmes such as mergers or relocations. LPM marks the introduction of project methods on the client-facing side of law firms, but it also explicitly PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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An innovative approach at Simmons & Simmons

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For the international firm of Simmons & Simmons, founded in London more than 120 years ago, project management has been introduced through an innovative approach designed to involve all the firm’s lawyers and focus on the level of service delivered to clients. “About two years ago, we looked at market research and found that all law firms were falling short on a number of things,” says Aman Sharma, a Chartered Project Professional and Fellow of APM, and head of the firm’s Service Excellence team. “They were all technically giving great legal advice to clients, but were falling short on meeting clients’ expectations, for example on value for money, cost certainty and quality.”

Sharma set up the Service Excellence team with two clear objectives: “To make sure we were consistently exceeding our clients’ expectations in the delivery of legal services, and to optimise the way our lawyers were working.”

Caroline Hunter-Yeats, a partner on the firm’s International Executive Committee was brought in to sponsor the initiative; she had personal experience of using a project management approach after being asked to do so by a major client. “We felt very strongly that this had to be a change at grassroots level,” she explains.

“I’d seen a number of firms who had hired a legal project manager then dropped them into a group and expected miracles to happen. I didn’t think that, in a law firm, that’s how you create change.

We had to give our lawyers a framework

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to do what they were doing, but more efficiently and visible to our clients. We created a global Service Excellence Standard based on the foundations and principles of project management.”

Service Excellence aimed to look fundamentally at a different way of lawyers doing their job. Sharma says: “We consulted a number of senior lawyers and business heads, who said: ‘If this is going to work, you need to see the whites of our eyes in all the countries and it mustn’t be UK-centric.’”

Her team – Francesco Della Rotonda, a specialist in business diagnostics, and Michael Dada, an experienced legal project manager – organised a series of 80 workshops over a year, reaching out to all of the firm’s 1,000-plus fee-earning lawyers, as well as support staff across 22 international offices. Workshops were tailored for the 49 individual practices within each office.

“I was told I would be lucky if I got 20 per cent attendance because lawyers are so busy,” says Sharma. But with the backing of active sponsors in Hunter-Yeats, managing partner Jeremy Hoyland, managing director of solutions Ben McGuire and 49 national leaders, they achieved 80 per cent attendance.

The workshops introduced lawyers to a structured project management approach – doing what they did before, but in an optimal and efficient way.

This provided them with skills and tools that are now mandated for use by all the firm’s lawyers. For smaller legal matters, they run the project management themselves, but for larger, more complex matters, Sharma has built a team of legal project managers, led by Dada. “I wanted to create a chartered, platinum set of legal project professionals from a wealth of different backgrounds,” she explains.

The benefits, says Hunter-Yeats, include “winning work I don’t think we otherwise would have won. We are getting plaudits on the quality of our pitches and the transparency within them, and the quality of the team that we bring.” She adds that: “The bit that always bugged me was the waste of resource where, effectively, someone was being asked internally to do something that the client didn’t actually want and was never going to pay for.

Now that happens far less often.”

recognises something that lawyers have always done.

Dee Tamlin, head of client and legal project management at Pinsent Masons, says: “When I train our lawyers, I always acknowledge with them that they are accidental project managers. Just because we haven’t called it project management before now doesn’t mean they haven’t been doing that in some form for the past 100 years or more. A lawyer gets instructed, works out the scope of what needs to be done, then estimates the time and costs.” LPM puts that on a professional, more consistent and methodical basis, she explains. “Instead of reinventing the wheel every time we get a new instruction, we can have templates for different work types, and ensure that if our UK office produces a status report, it looks the same as one produced by our Australian office.”

Some think the initial impetus for LPM was the increasing complexity of big legal cases; others say it was borne out of a desire by banks to cut legal costs post-financial crisis. It’s clear that clients

Legal project management is a discipline attracting growing interest among corporate law firms, part of a race to make the delivery of services more transparent, predictable and cost-effective are driving much of the adoption of LPM, not least because they are used to deploying project management and the clear reporting benefits it brings. But while most of the bigger law firms have at least dipped their toe in the water, LPM is still at a fledgling stage across the profession as a whole.

NATURAL ADVANTAGES Global law firm Baker McKenzie was one of the early adopters and claims the largest LPM team worldwide, with a mandate to grow further. Its Londonbased associate director of LPM, Kevin O’Sullivan, says: “Some clients are much more open to this than others, and there’s a lot more to uncover. At the more mature end, we are playing a leadership role: communicating directly with clients,

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leading teams, managing the throughput of tasks and recording some of the highest numbers of hours on a project.”

A ‘SECOND PROFESSION’?

The range of ‘matters’ – the legal term for an assignment – where LPM has been found to be most valuable includes those where there is complexity, but also where there is a high level of technology or a significant amount of process involved, O’Sullivan explains. “The most natural landing place, where we should most definitely be considered, is the transactional space, often involving loans, M&A, private equity, banking, tax or real estate.” At the other end of the spectrum, few would attempt to use LPM where a client is simply asking for advice.

Key benefits for the client include efficiency, control and risk management, resulting in a better overall experience and increased satisfaction. Tamlin says that it is a more collaborative way for lawyers and clients to work together. “Traditionally we would have got the instruction and the lawyers would have gone into ‘doing’ mode pretty quickly, not always fully understanding what the objectives of the project were,” she explains. “Now we’re saying: let’s hold a planning meeting with the client. I’ve done one recently, and the client was so responsive. No legal work has been done yet, but we’ve planned exactly what we need to do and the client is fully engaged.”

On the other side of the coin, says Tamlin, “we no longer have to expect our lawyers who are highly qualified and extremely versatile in legal advice to take on a second profession. Just as we don’t say to a plumber that they have got to be an electrician.” That said, many firms try to introduce the main body of their legal professionals to the benefits of LPM through some form of training. “Once they understand what it is, we’ll ask them: what is the thing that you most want to get off your desk because it is the most

“We no longer have to expect our lawyers who are highly qualified and extremely versatile in legal advice to take on a second profession.

Just as we don’t say to a plumber that they have got to be an electrician” time-consuming? It could be weekly cost reporting, and once they see us do that, they wonder what else we can do. And once they engage, they don’t want to run projects without us.”

In any case, most legal project managers realise they can’t hard-sell their approach to colleagues and a more subtle approach is required. Simon Muller, head of LPM at Addleshaw Goddard, says: “The trick is very much to find those people who have an existing interest in this approach, or a potential challenge that they need help with, and a client who is keen on a better way of working. If you get the timing right, they are very interested in working with you. But it can’t be a solution looking for a problem.”

ACCELERATING FROM AN ORGANIC START How the LPM offer is structured will vary from firm to firm. At TLT, Franklin says: “It started organically, and I was one of the advocates of a central LPM function, which we have introduced over the past two years. Before that, there were individual legal project managers across the firm, dealing with matters in an ad hoc way, and we wanted to create more uniformity and consistency in how it was done at TLT.” At Baker McKenzie, there is a hybrid model, O’Sullivan explains: “We see this

as a change programme, so we need to get hearts and minds aligned, and on that basis we need to be on the ground with our lawyers to help them understand LPM and talk to their clients about the experience. But we also have service centres that are our bench strength to make sure we have enough people to fulfil the needs of clients and internal teams.”

With a shortage of those with extensive experience of LPM, recruits tend to range from those who entered the law profession and now want to branch out, to people from completely different backgrounds such as consulting. O’Sullivan says: “One thing we look for is what we call ‘humble confidence’. It’s a mixture of being humble enough to accept that a legal project manager can’t really bring an ego to the table – there’s enough lawyer ego there already – and having confidence to challenge and be bold in offering new ways of doing things.”

LESS CLOAK AND DAGGER Project management is already fundamentally changing the way law is managed and it is set to make further inroads. Muller says that use of more advanced technology and automation will be a key development in the next few years. “Many lawyers and legal project managers still do things in a very manual way,” he remarks. “But if you could organise your data so that you hit one button and the right report falls out, that kind of tool would be really helpful.”

Systems already record lawyers’ hours, and one challenge is to integrate that data into project management, says Muller.

The next step, he adds, would be to use the data for benchmarking, to scope future projects and to generate insights for future matters.

For some, LPM is a catalyst in changing the nature of the law firm itself. At Pinsent Masons, Tamlin says: “Our firm’s strategy is now to be a professional services firm with law at its core. Think of the different elements involved in delivering legal services; we have people like forensic accountants and data scientists, and there might be one of those in the project team alongside the lawyers.”

And at Baker McKenzie, O’Sullivan says LPM is part of a shift towards a more transparent profession. “Law still has this aura: throw it into the black box and we’ll get it done and you don’t need to worry,” he says. “The reality is that clients need to be more involved these days. They need it to be done in a more visible, more approachable way, less cloak and dagger.

People aren’t just worried about the result, they want a better journey.”

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The early days of the pandemic saw shelves stripped bare of essential everyday items

A CRISIS OF CONTRASTS Project managers are having to deal with the extreme rises and dips in demand for products and services that the pandemic continues to throw at them. As companies boom and bust, they are the resolute navigators on hand to charter these choppy waters safely, finds Dave Waller

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Demand for bikes surged once the pandemic took hold

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hen Aaron Abrams boarded a flight from San Francisco to Taipei on 18 March, it was his last chance to get home to Taiwan before the country shut its borders. And it gave him an early taste of the disorientation that would follow. Abrams landed to an unpleasant surprise: mandatory quarantine for 14 days. After being herded into long queues at the airport, he was given a government-issue trackable SIM card for his phone and then ushered to the plastic-coated back seat of a taxi, which ferried him to a shuttle bus. Here the driver sprayed him with alcohol and sent him to the back, before spraying himself, pulling a second mask over his first, and lurching the bus off into the sticky Taipei night.

Two hours later Abrams was back at his apartment in Taichung, holed up in his own guest room, isolated from his girlfriend, with only a cold bowl of beef noodle soup for company. It was here that Abrams resumed his role as director of product at Marin, the global bike manufacturer. Living in Taiwan, close to the epicentre of the global bike industry, he’s responsible for Marin’s model line, much of the sourcing of parts and vendor relationships, and liaising with assembly factories and others in the bike manufacturing chain. Demand for those bikes would soon prove as turbulent as his trip home.

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THE YO-YO EFFECT “The supply chain completely shuts for two weeks for Chinese New Year,” Abrams says, “and there’s always a big push to get into production as quickly as possible afterwards. But this year nothing came back – China went into lockdown and the lights stayed off for an additional month. So, as the country began gradually opening stuff up, there was a lot of push on them to get back to production as fast as possible and catch up.

“Then the really crazy part happened: the rest of the world started to go into lockdown. The first impression was that all economies were going to crumble, so the big brands pulled the plug on their orders. But a month later, the demand for bikes exploded internationally. Now

Aaron Abrams

those brands came back, asking for as much production as they could get, as fast as they could get it. And that’s the situation for the rest of 2020: the people making bikes just can’t make them fast enough. That swirling, stop-start yo-yo effect has been really hard to manage.”

Abrams’ personal perspective on demand will surely resonate with project managers the world over. And bikes aren’t the only sector to enjoy high demand in the crisis. Online grocer Ocado saw revenue leap 27 per cent in the first half of the year. Zoom was suddenly hosting 300 million video calls a day back in April. According to the Financial Times, Amazon’s market cap rose a staggering $401bn during lockdown (despite it shelling out $4bn to keep its logistics running through the pandemic).

Yet the vast majority of businesses are, of course, struggling. The UK economy contracted by a record 20.4 per cent in Q2, having fallen by 2.2 per cent in Q1, as restaurants sat empty, hairdressers closed and the arts sector fell to its knees, with the ONS reporting a £9.5bn drop in consumer spending.

In the wake of the pandemic, demand may form a trickle. It may be a flood. But for the thousands of project managers around the world charged with paddling the raft, it can mean challenging work either way.

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THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS Andrea Cappi is a senior brand manager at Unilever, managing global innovation and communications projects for Dove deodorant. He understands that when offices and restaurants close and people stop going out, their underarm aspirations tend to lie fallow too. So he knew deodorant sales would see demand drop in the pandemic.

His team was already facing enough issues: how to test sample products remotely when touch and smell are such key factors; how to source basic ingredients when key supply centres such as India had gone into lockdown; and how to advertise the power of scent when you can no longer show people within two metres of each other.

To counter the issue of demand, Unilever put a laser focus on to its core products, which for Cappi meant Dove Original, at the expense of experimentation. “We know that consumers will look for better value, but that doesn’t necessarily mean cheaper,” says Cappi. “They need to feel that they’re investing their money in a savvy way. So we had to review a lot of the work we were doing to make sure our performance, our innovations and our claims were still relevant for consumers’ changing priorities. It meant some sudden changes of plans, and that made project management quite challenging.”

One of those changes lay in adjusting for increased demand through

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e-commerce, which had previously not been a typical channel to shop for deodorant. “All of a sudden we had to shift the content, the preparation, the availability of the product on a channel we perhaps weren’t fully exploiting before,” says Cappi. “Prior to the pandemic, only around five to 10 per cent of deodorant sales were made online.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s gone up two or three times.”

MANAGING COSTS: PLANNING FOR GREEN SHOOTS Those escalating numbers may well seem a very desirable problem to have, certainly for project management consultants.

When whole industries are struck by the need to tighten belts, spending on external services is often one of the first things to go.

CPC provides project management services to a range of public- and privatesector clients across education, property and rail. As projects slowed and closed in the wake of the pandemic, demand for much of its project management expertise, notably in London, duly took a dive. CPC’s work at Transport for London, one of its biggest clients, fell by 70 per cent. And that’s not the only demand to drop: CPC’s overall revenue has been hit since late April.

“We were looking to grow the business from £25m to £30m over the next two years,” says Steve Mole, CPC’s managing director. “We now believe we’ll hit that in 2023.”

So how does a project management consultancy project manage its way out of that? The process has involved deleting all prospects it was bidding on, refining the business continuity plan and examining the various potential outcomes.

There is, of course, a stark limit on what they can predict, so cost-cutting has also been critical. “As soon as lockdown came in, we reduced the partners’ drawings by 40–50 per cent on a monthly basis,” says Mole. “We then introduced a salary reduction scheme of 20 per cent for all members of staff. And we placed a fifth of our staff – 39 people – on furlough with immediate effect.

Those three measures saved considerable money, and outweighed the reductions in revenues. It gave us false profit for April, May, June and July, building up a little reserve for what we don’t know is coming in the future.”

But it’s not all doom and gloom.

Another factor in riding out a drop in demand is maintaining a keen awareness of where the green shoots will spring up again. While the recent success of

Steve Mole

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Another factor in riding out a drop in demand is maintaining a keen awareness of where the green shoots will spring up again remote working suggests demand for commercial construction may dip, Mole is confident that the success of out-of-town retail parks and the need for regional distribution centres for e-commerce will keep his consultants busy. Not to mention the government’s need to pay for its furlough provision by investing in transport, infrastructure and major residential schemes.

AGILITY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME Over at Unilever, the team showed similar opportunism. In July, CEO Alan Jope boasted of unlocking “new levels of agility in responding to unprecedented fluctuations in demand”. The company moved fast to shift people working on struggling areas to those, such as ready meals, where business was booming.

Cappi recounts how his regular supply chain manager suddenly stopped working on their projects at the start of the pandemic and asked someone from his team to step in, so he could focus the next three months repurposing part of Unilever’s deodorant factory in Leeds to produce hand sanitisers, which were by that time in huge demand.

“That was a massive change, at a huge scale, in just a few weeks,” says Cappi.

“It was very quick, but done properly, without taking production from products that required it, and they showed impressive agility in the supply chain, repurposing packs from other products.

The team took it in the right spirit and made the new person’s job as easy as possible too. Hand sanitiser was a tiny

part of Unilever before the crisis. It’s now a very sizeable business.”

Project managers need to embody this sort of adaptability in periods of unpredictable demand. As the need to find ways to do things faster gives way to finding efficiencies, this is not the time for simply checking how things are progressing against a pre-set project plan. This is about stepping back, seeing the bigger picture and being able to steer a team towards it as it unfolds.

“For project managers to be resilient to the crisis, they need an agile approach,” says consultancy PCubed’s Ben Whitlock, who has worked as a project management consultant in the aerospace sector – where the lack of international flights sent the supply chain, used to planning many years ahead, into a critical tailspin. PCubed has been supporting a major global aerospace manufacturer through the management of business improvement and transformation programmes. “They have to be good at getting a team together and going: ‘These are the things that need to be done, and between us how do we do it?’ Even as they have to keep changing, they’re able to tie threads across different functions in the organisation, talking across departments to get things mobilised.”

ADAPTABILITY: A NEW PARADIGM “COVID has shown that the adaptability of the project manager is one of the strengths we have in the UK. And it’s something we’ll probably see more of as this unfolds: more and more project managers will need to develop this adaptability as a strength,” says Whitlock.

It’s certainly proven a strength over in Taiwan. As Abrams slipped into his quarantine rhythm of work emails, video calls and imagining lives for the people walking by his apartment window, bikes were experiencing their biggest sales boom since the oil crisis of the early 1970s.

“The new bike market is completely sold through at this point, almost everywhere,” says Abrams. “All through the chain – our suppliers, the assemblers making the bikes, the bike companies and the dealers – everyone’s having record sales. We’re getting calls from all over the world, from dealers and distributors asking what we have. They want our obsolete models. They’ll take anything that’s available, right now.”

It helps that Marin made some smart decisions – like not to delay any of its production. “We got in a good situation with a lot of our suppliers because we

Crisis contrast, 3

The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 was one of the more unusual manifestations of VUCA

kept paying our bills and we never asked for anything but more,” says Abrams.

“We never asked for a grace period on paying, and we didn’t cancel orders like a lot of brands did in that first panic window. Then the demand turned around on us and spiked.”

This fervent demand does come with its problems. The bike supply chain is complex, and certain parts that are indispensable for high-end models are in short supply. The challenge for Abrams lies in “trying to creatively figure out how to manage that situation, and duck and weave in this new paradigm”. Realising that all those cancelled orders must mean a surfeit of certain bike parts, he Ben Whitlock

was canny enough to seek out what was available and buy up any excess.

“We used our bike frames and changed some of the specs to incorporate the parts that were available, to create new special edition bikes,” he says. “We’re making new models at similar price points – to supply to demand.”

On his fifteenth day back in Taiwan, Abrams stepped out of his apartment for the first time in two weeks and went to the new Marin office he was building, feeling good that work had been able to keep going without him there. And he went to his favourite restaurants, and drank “a lot of nice beer” at his favourite brewery.

“COVID has shown that the adaptability of the project manager is one of the strengths we have in the UK. And it’s something we’ll probably see more of as this unfolds: more and more project managers will need to develop this adaptability as a strength” PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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Podcast and ad

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NOW STREAMING…

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THE APM PODCAST

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With new episodes appearing twice monthly, our podcast features in-depth interviews with project professionals to find out how they tackle everyday challenges, from digital transformation to people management

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Our latest two episodes are: n ‘The Golden Thread: recognising the contribution of project management’, exploring why the project profession has been hidden and undervalued for too long n ‘Crisis Talks’ with HMRC’s Joanna Rowland, who explains how the department delivered the chancellor’s flagship economic interventions to prop up the economy during the pandemic

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Subscribe and listen on all major streaming platforms, including Apple and Spotify, or at apmpodcast.podbean.com

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In this section: 53 Steps to success 56 HMRC 60 Stakeholder engagement 63 Project me 64 Rising star 67 Q&A 68 An archaeological dig 72 Beyond the job 74 ChPPs

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HOW TO BE A HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PROJECT MANAGER

The right work behaviours can help you to improve your performance and get ahead in your career.

Wendy Shooter identifies the three most important ones and how you can make them work for you

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he more senior you become, the more your role is about how you work with others to make things happen – and it is your behaviours that largely dictate how successfully you do this.

Most people behave in the way they think is most helpful and appropriate in that situation or context (although it might not always appear this way to others). Our behaviours begin to develop as soon as we are born, and we quickly learn that certain behaviours will bring certain results.

When our behaviours bring us the results we want, we will reuse them. If not, we quickly discard them.

As we are very young when this first starts to happen, we tend not to have conscious recollection of why we chose the behavioural approaches we did. If a behaviour is used over many years it will become deeply ingrained, and if it is then deemed unhelpful by colleagues or

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organisational needs, trying to unlearn and change it can be tricky. Part of the problem can be that we don’t know how to get the outcomes we want by another means, even if we recognise that our current approach is not helpful.

If an individual has been using bullying behaviours to get their needs met since they were very young, and this has gone largely unchallenged, they are less likely to have developed other ways to get their needs met. This is part of the reason it is hard for them to change. They may have the intention, but they don’t know how to

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USING BOTH DIVERGENT AND CONVERGENT THINKING STYLES Are you good at opening things up, asking great questions and going wide with your scope definition and problem analysis?

How about closing down options, limiting discussion and analysis, and making the decision? These two thinking styles are called divergent thinking (widening) and convergent thinking (narrowing). Both are equally important if you are to be a high-performing project manager, so it is important to hone skills in both areas and develop judgement about when to use each. Some people are naturally good at both styles, but you are much more likely to have a stronger inclination toward one over another. If you don’t know which is your default style, ask anyone who has worked with you a lot, and the chances are they will give you a very quick answer.

Do you let discussions go on for longer than others consider necessary, believe there is more information needed when team members say you have enough and like to take time over-decision making?

If it is a ‘yes’ to most of these, you are probably more of a divergent thinker.

Do you take action quickly, think most of the information you need is already in your head, believe most meetings could be done and dusted in 10 minutes and sometimes get accused of being too quick to solutions? You are probably more of a convergent thinker if it is a ‘yes’ to this list.

do it in a different way and be confident to get the outcomes they need.

It is possible to change our behaviour, but it does require effort and dedication to make it stick. Intent alone will not deliver this for you. A key element in this is self-awareness and having an honest conversation with yourself about how effective your work behaviours really are.

When we have good self-awareness, we can watch out for our own behaviours and make constructive adjustments as we go.

Here are three behaviours of highperforming project professionals.

To be a high performer: ● Determine your preference and watch out for it. ● Identify when it would be beneficial for you to use different behaviours and commit to giving them a try. ● Think through which behaviours you will use more and less of, and ask a colleague to give you feedback. ● Build a reputation for being able to do both! This will get you that promotion.

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TRULY BEING ABLE TO COLLABORATE There seems to be a broad misconception that anything that involves engagement with another human counts as collaboration. To define exactly what collaboration is, let’s first examine what it is not: ● Instructing and sharing information:

telling project colleagues what they need to do and defining your expectations, as well as allowing questions of clarification. ● Gathering information: asking project colleagues to supply you with information, ideas and recommendations so you can review and make decisions. ● Consultation: sharing your plans and ideas and inviting comment. You still get to make the decision.

A key feature of collaboration is shared decision-making where the needs of all

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involved are considered in the process.

What does real collaboration look like?

When you are working in collaboration with your project colleagues, you have awareness of the other projects they are working on and associated deliverables.

You will be thinking about priorities in terms of what is best for the whole organisation or programme overall, not just the needs of your project. You will create the plan with project members and get their genuine buy-in to deliverables and the schedule. This means allowing them to be part of the process from early on and influence the creation of the plan.

So, what is getting in the way of collaboration? On the surface, collaboration can seem like it takes longer, but in actuality it means outcomes are achieved faster as you engender genuine commitment to deliverables when you take this approach. This means you don’t waste time and energy chasing people up,

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There seems to be a broad misconception that anything that involves engagement with another human counts as collaboration and threats to the schedule, but this information then needs to be acted on.

Project managers can fall into the trap of having endless conversations about the problem and possible approaches without actually putting plans in place.

● Enable delivery with a sense of pace:

stay focused on outputs and timely progression. The conversational focus for an effective project manager will be around outcomes and the outputs that enable them. They will convey a sense of forward motion and pace without needing to create an emergency scenario daily.

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which is a huge waste of organisational resource as it adds no value.

When we work collaboratively, it means we allow others power and influence, and this can go against the grain for many of us. It takes a confident manager to invite others in and loosen their level of control, as they are being asked to hold back on the behaviours that have previously gained them recognition, such as problem-solving and having the answers. You need to be courageous to push through this.

To be a high performer: ● Be inclusive and involving from the beginning. ● Have adult-adult conversations and relationships rather than parent-child. ● Understand the qualities and strengths of your team members. ● Build a reputation for involving others, sharing power and driving value in the project.

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THE PM SHOULD DRIVE THE SCHEDULE This sounds obvious to a project professional, but actually it is not always in your DNA. It could be because you have come from another discipline or your early organisational experience was, for example, to prioritise technical excellence over delivering on time. The behaviours that will support you to drive the schedule, and therefore your performance, are: ● Focus on the present: always know where you are. A high-performing project manager will know exactly where their project is against schedule and be continuously reviewing progress.

This equips them with information about where to invest their energies to ensure the schedule is maintained. ● Focus on the future: know what is on the horizon and anticipate impact. A successful project manager will have awareness of potential opportunities

To be a high performer: ● Build schedule review time into your day. ● Keep a conversation diary for a week – review how many of your conversations are about technical detail versus how to achieve outputs and make progress.

Were there actions? Or, as you walk away from each conversation, ask yourself how that has helped the project move forward ( just having a better understanding doesn’t count) and how confident you are that they are going to meet commitments. ● In your conversations, ask: what is getting or could get in the way of you delivering on time? What could you do?

How can I help? ● Build a reputation for being the one that delivers.

The key to being a high performer is to regularly reflect on and find out how your approaches are impacting on others and the outcomes you want. You need to invest energy in trying out different behaviours and improving your ability at those that seem helpful. The world is ever changing, and no two situations or people are the same. All behaviours are helpful in some situation and less helpful in others.

The more behavioural options you have available to you, the greater the chance of you using the one which is beneficial to the situation in front of you.

Wendy Shooter is a business psychologist and MD of Unicorn Consulting

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HOW HMRC DELIVERED THE UK’S VITAL CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE

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Joanna Rowland, the project architect behind the government’s landmark economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lifts the lid on how the civil service delivered the UK’s furlough scheme so successfully that even the world wide web’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee was impressed

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s director of the COVID-19 Response Unit at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Joanna Rowland is currently responsible for the delivery of the department’s flagship COVID-19 economic interventions, the Coronavirus Job Retention and Self-Employment Income Support schemes. These have helped over 10 million UK citizens since their launch in spring.

Rowland is also head of the Project Delivery Profession within HMRC and, before being seconded to work on the COVID-19 response, was responsible for HMRC’s transformation portfolio, which has been described as the largest change agenda in Europe.

Having joined HMRC in September 2016 as programme director for the Making Tax Digital for Individuals programme, Rowland has already delivered several successful projects, including achieving growth of the Personal Tax Account to over 14 million customers. Before joining HMRC, Rowland delivered several major projects in government, including the Criminal Justice System Efficiency Programme, which transformed the criminal justice agenda.

In this article, Rowland shares her experiences as the senior responsible officer for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS).

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MAKING THE FURLOUGH SCHEME HAPPEN On 20 March 2020, in response to the unprecedented challenge presented by a global pandemic and a national lockdown, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the CJRS. The scheme would allow employers to claim financial support of up to 80 per cent of salaries, up to a maximum of £2,500 per month, per employee. This soon became known as the ‘furlough scheme’ and was pitched as the cornerstone of the government’s economic response.

The Friday before the announcement, I had been asked to lead the project as senior responsible officer. I had four weeks to create a team capable of designing and delivering the service, readying employers, and training and dispatching over 10,000 operational staff. Given the urgency of the task and government’s mixed reputation for delivering large-scale digital projects, this was a daunting proposition. However, we launched the service ahead of schedule, supporting over 140,000 employers to make a claim on day one, protecting millions of jobs.

So how did we do it? At the heart were some good old-fashioned project principles: knowing our purpose, creating urgency, deploying the right skills and relentless determination.

Knowing how essential robust project management is to delivery, I formed a small core team stacked with experience.

I used a hub-and-spoke model to create a wider team of specialists including IT, digital, legal, policy, compliance, finance and operational colleagues. The key to success was binding this team to a single compelling purpose – to get the money to those who were entitled to it as fast as we could. A clear purpose helped us keep our focus, allowing us to make fast and pragmatic decisions, with work areas balancing risk and reward.

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KEEPING IT RUTHLESSLY SIMPLE On day one, the chief information officer and I established a central guiding principle of keeping things ‘ruthlessly simple’ and then set about making design choices based on this. This balanced the need to ensure economic stability for the maximum number of employees with what we could deliver in the time scales, and the degree of risk we were willing to accept. Government schemes can be attractive to fraudsters and criminals, so we would normally take months, if not years, to design and deliver a service like this.

With time against us, we needed controls like never before. So, we applied full rigour to the control frameworks process but in a way that did not slow us down or become overly bureaucratic. The central project team quickly established a governance framework, decisions log and project plan – all closely monitored via daily calls and complemented by a weekly project board that acted as the decisionmaking body. Risk, issues and milestones were reviewed daily to track progress, and in the real heat of the delivery, we moved

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to hour-by-hour plans. Everything was about pace and control.

Due to the mission-criticality of successful delivery, the team had buyin from all areas of Whitehall and phenomenal levels of senior leadership support, right up to the chancellor himself. This was key to our ability to make decisions quickly and our subsequent success. I spent many an exciting evening and weekend on the phone to the chancellor and his advisors, discussing policy and design options and their implications. On some days, our developers had finished coding the results of his decisions before the meeting in which they were made was over.

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BREAKNECK DELIVERY DEMANDED AGILITY From the very early stages of the discussions, the time scales meant that HMRC’s traditional way of delivering this level of change was not viable. Instead we took a truly agile approach in which policy worked with delivery to establish the art of the possible in the limited time available. This real-time design was

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THE CORONAVIRUS JOB RETENTION SCHEME WAS LAUNCHED ON 20 APRIL 2020

Total number of jobs furloughed:

Total number of employers furloughing:

9.6m 1.2m £33.8bn Total value of claims made:

CLAIMS FOR THE SELF-EMPLOYMENT INCOME SUPPORT SCHEME BEGAN ON 13 MAY 2020

Total number of claims made:

Total value of claims made:

2.7m £7.8bn SOURCE: GOV.UK, 2 AUGUST 2020

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done with that core focus on keeping it simple and sticking to purpose. Where possible, our technology solution made use of existing patterns, providing a level of certainty and enabling speedy delivery.

For example, the existing ‘front door’ of Government Gateway was used as the entry to the service.

Although the delivery of the policy, guidance and solution was important, it was also essential that we were able to support customers. This meant clear and concise guidance and providing a range of support tools, including webinars and step-by-step guides. We also had to move staff around internally and develop and deliver training to our fantastic operational colleagues supporting the scheme, all while adjusting to the brave new world of lockdown, with many staff working from home for the first time.

When we had the detailed policy in place, we realised that the claim calculation could be quite complex depending on employers’ circumstances, so we took the late decision to work up a CJRS claim calculator. Pulling in another very talented tech team and policy experts, we set about it just one week from go-live. To be honest, we didn’t expect to have this for launch, but actually delivered it early as a result of some amazing collaborative work between the policy and technical teams.

In advance of the launch, communications became vital. Our communications, developed by our superb in-house team, had two aims: informing the customer so they could adequately prepare and claim their grant, and mitigating contact to HMRC from concerned citizens. The reach they achieved in such a short time was incredible.

WAITING WITH BAITED BREATH We also ran a small public beta before go-live, testing the system with small and large employers. This gave us some confidence that we had tested with real customers. So, we were ready. We had scaled up our capacity so that our platform could handle large volumes, we had our calculator, and we knew our system was easy for customers, but I still had a sleepless night before we launched the service on 20 April. A mere four weeks on from the chancellor’s announcement, never had we done anything this big or this important at such speed. The risk was enormous. One newspaper even told us they were keeping a page free to be ready

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On some days, our developers had finished coding the results of the chancellor’s decisions before the meeting in which they were made was over

to print how wrong it had all gone – so sure were they that this was a stretch too far for a government project.

The whole team held their breath as the first claims started to come in, but we needn’t have worried. At the end of day one, the system had performed brilliantly, we more than met customer demand for support, and we received unprecedented praise from customers, stakeholders and commentators across the spectrum. The IT delivery team were particularly excited to see a tweet praising their work from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. However, the launch of the service was not the end.

We were simultaneously delivering the Self-Employment Income Support

Risk, issues and milestones were reviewed daily to track progress, and in the real heat of the delivery, we moved to hour-by-hour plans. Everything was about pace and control

Scheme (SEISS), which, with 3.4 million eligible customers and only three weeks to go-live, was every bit as challenging and risky. Plus the chancellor was determined to keep his support for business high, so we were soon tasked with delivering an extension to the scheme, allowing businesses to furlough staff on a more flexible basis from July, bringing them back part-time where required. Employers were required to contribute towards the scheme from August, initially paying the National Insurance and pension costs in that month, plus 10 per cent of the wages in September, increasing to 20 per cent in October. This announcement meant moving back into the design phase and in some ways starting from scratch, although with the benefit of having the project team in place.

UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGES Although the schemes have been a success, the delivery was not without challenges.

We were delivering this as the wider world also moved at pace. As part of my wider COVID-19 response role, we were also overseeing the urgent changes needed in HMRC’s wider operations, including getting 60,000 people working from home, establishing a series of steering groups operating across all COVID-19related measures to help lock together all

the departments’ activity, and ensuring the department had a plan for the summer.

Time is said to be the enemy of perfection, but we did not allow it to reduce our standards. We continue to iterate the service even now, with the benefit of user feedback. Delivering this type of service would usually take between nine and 18 months in government. If we had that time, it is likely that the service would have looked different. However, what we did have was a great team and a set-up that really harnessed expertise from across HMRC. From our brilliant internal digital teams and knowledgeable technical architects to our fantastically resilient front-line staff and experts, once everyone got to know each other, the magic really happened.

The role of projects is to make change happen, but it’s the experts who deliver the change. We drive, coordinate, control and corral, while harnessing the talent all around us.

The creation and delivery of CJRS and SEISS have been the most challenging projects of my career, but also by far the most rewarding. We have delivered a service we can be proud of and that has been vital in keeping businesses afloat and providing employees with a safety net. I have seen that first-hand with family members who were furloughed. I also believe that this success has improved the standing of HMRC in the eyes of the public, and I am honoured to have been involved.

This has proved that we, as project professionals, deserve our seat at the top tables of government and have the skills needed to deliver for our country in a crisis. After all, policy and strategy are just words on a page without great delivery turning it into something real, and this was very real.

Joanna Rowland spoke to Project editor Emma De Vita about her work throughout the pandemic for The APM Podcast’s ‘Crisis Talks’ series, available now at apm.org.uk/resources/the-apm-podcast/

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WHY YOU NEED TO ENGAGE STAKEHOLDERS (AND HOW TO DO IT WELL)

If you fail to give everyone affected by a project the opportunity to take part in it or be listened to, then expect trouble ahead, warns Elizabeth Harrin, who gives a fail-safe guide to viewing your stakeholders as your partners, and not people to be controlled 60

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arly in my career, I had a call from the post-room manager. She was confused – and angry. Bags of extra mail had arrived, she didn’t have the staff in to sort it and she had heard that it might be something to do with me. It was. I was happy that my project to in-source a service had completed as expected. All the redirections were working – including the post. The only problem was that the postroom staff had never been on my radar. I’d never considered the impact on them.

That was my first ‘real life’ lesson about the importance of stakeholder engagement.

But what is stakeholder engagement?

Engagement helps drive action on projects.

As it is people who do the work, it is critical to getting tasks done on time, to the required scope and at a level of quality that results in stakeholder satisfaction.

It can be defined as: the systematic identification, analysis, planning and implementation of actions designed to influence stakeholders. Essentially, it’s about working with people to build support to achieve the intended outcomes.

HELPING PEOPLE TAKE PART IN THE PROJECT Why do we bother with stakeholder engagement? With a strong business case, people will do their jobs and contribute because it’s the right thing to do – right?

It doesn’t work like that. People are busy and your project probably isn’t a priority for them. When you engage a stakeholder, you are helping them take part in the project and encouraging action-taking.

Engagement serves two aims.

First, it creates, uses and sustains positive interest in the work. Where stakeholders feel positively about projects and changes, engagement makes it easier for them to take part. Second, it minimises or removes negative interest.

Where stakeholders feel negatively about projects and changes, engagement helps understand their position and influence their perception.

Engagement is hard work. There is a lot of discussion and talking to do. It’s time-consuming, but it’s worth it because people’s actions contribute to project

failure, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. You probably don’t need to be told of the risks of not engaging stakeholders. You might have even lived through a couple of tricky situations where lack of support from stakeholders caused things like these: ● People don’t pay attention to the

change, resulting in rework or benefits that fail to be realised. ● People don’t do what you need of them, so projects are constantly delayed. ● People don’t complete their tasks on time, to the required level of quality, to the approved budget or perhaps at all. ● People aren’t committed to delivery, so projects drift on and on without ever achieving anything the business considers valuable.

These issues can often be addressed by spending more time on stakeholder engagement.

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BEYOND THE INTEREST AND INFLUENCE GRID For a long time, project management theory and practice focused on stakeholder management. There was a process to follow: filling in a stakeholder register and plotting someone’s interest and influence over the project on a matrix. Stakeholder management implies that a stakeholder’s behaviours and actions can indeed be managed – predicted, planned, organised and controlled – which is both arrogant and inaccurate. Anyone who has ever tried to get anything done with a group of people will realise that, when humans are part of the equation, you can’t expect things to go as per the documented plan.

The profession has been challenging the terminology of management as it relates to stakeholder behaviour for some time now. The vocabulary and sentiment have gravitated towards engagement as a preferable model for building relationships and partnerships with the people who help you deliver the project. Stakeholder engagement presents a significant change in how managers and teams think about the people involved in the project.

When stakeholders are to be managed, there’s the risk that they are considered resources to be moved, used, shaped and controlled to our will. When you seek to manage and control behaviour, you don’t let people have a say. They aren’t partners in the change. Rather, they are someone to whom the change is done. Successful projects are the ones where stakeholders want to take part, are supportive and listened to, and actively contribute. Project professionals want stakeholders on board – championing, understanding and living the changes, not simply tolerating our projects.

When managers talk about engaging people, they elevate stakeholders to the role of valued partner. Engagement forces us to think about people as individuals with agency, preferences, interests and needs.

It elevates our own behaviour so that we demonstrate leadership, motivation, coaching, influencing and teaching.

Switching ‘management’ for ‘engagement’ might seem like swapping one business jargon term for another, but if you reflect on what engagement means, you’ll see it is a richer term to express the relationship project teams want to have with stakeholders. If you don’t currently use the language of engagement, your challenge begins today: stop talking about stakeholder management activities and switch to talking about engagement. Give it a week and see what difference you’ve managed to create in your stakeholder communities and project teams.

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Five easy engagement ideas 1 SAY THANK YOU People appreciate being acknowledged for their work.

2 EXPECTATION MAPPING Review each stakeholder’s expectations for the project and check they can be achieved and don’t conflict with anyone else’s expectations.

3 INVITE FEEDBACK Change your email signature to include a link to a project email inbox or ‘contact us’ form.

4 BE SEEN Drop in to working sessions like system testing and find out how things are going, getting feedback from people doing the work.

5 LEARNING STYLES Flex your communication approach to suit the learning preferences of stakeholders.

HOW TO DO ENGAGEMENT Beyond shifting your language, what else can you do to demonstrate engagement?

The core aspects of engagement are: ● understanding stakeholder

perspectives;

● building trusted relationships; and ● taking action and influencing

stakeholder perspectives to shape the work in the direction of the intended outcomes.

The formula looks like this: Understanding + action + influence = engagement

● Understanding

Once you’ve completed stakeholder identification, look at how stakeholders feel about the project and the effect it will have on them.

This is emotional appeal (winning hearts). Consider how confident stakeholders feel that the work being done is the right work. This is rational appeal (winning minds).

● Action

Be reliable, trustworthy, respectful, consistent, helpful and professional – and show gratitude.

● Influence

Work with your manager and sponsor to influence up, with your team and peers to influence the project, and with people beyond your team to influence out across the business.

We also need to consider what we are engaging stakeholders in and how much effort we need to put into working with each individual or group. You will no doubt work with people who are motivated and whom you trust to get on with the work. You know they’ll follow through

and deliver. You can choose to let those areas propel themselves forward with minimal check-ins. You might leave other individuals or teams to get on with things because you have no choice. Their work isn’t high priority and your time is scarce, or you aren’t empowered to engage with them. Another group might need more coaching, support or oversight.

Set aside time regularly to take stock of how engagement is going. Ask yourself: What did I do this week that engaged our key stakeholders? Did it work? How do I know? Why do I think that? If you feel confident that your engagement activities are having the desired effect, do more of what’s working. If you tried something and it didn’t work, stop doing it – there’s no point investing more energy in it.

Projects, programmes, portfolios and change are all easier when stakeholders are engaged, but sometimes it will feel like you can’t plan the engagement, or it feels unnatural to try to engineer a relationship with someone for the good of the project.

When we work with people it can feel iterative, messy, uncoordinated, rushed and stressful. Don’t worry. Even if it feels awkward for you, your stakeholders will see someone who cares about their views, wants the best for the organisation and the project, and is trying hard to make a positive difference.

Finally, remember that you and the stakeholders are people first, and project resources second (or third, fourth, fifth or more). We all have good days and bad days; be kind to each other.

ELIZABETH HARRIN is director of Otobos Consultants, a project communications consultancy, and a Fellow of APM, as well as an award-winning blogger behind GirlsGuideToPM.com.

Her new book, Engaging stakeholders on projects: How to harness people power, will be published in September by APM. Visit apm.org.uk/book-shop/ to find out more.

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Dealing with a high level of uncertainty has become the only certain thing about the new normal. We asked project managers to give us their tips on how to do it in a way that benefits you and your career My five top tips

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George Bratt, risk manager, AECOM 1 Approach peers. If you can take the focus away from your situation and direct it toward someone else’s, it may help you cope. Helping others helps you to deal with stress and adapt to change.

2 Welcome new opportunities. Change often translates to possibility.

Reorganisations/mergers can create new positions, departments or job titles.

3 Preserve connections. Stay connected to past co-workers and continue to broaden your network. You never know when you might need each other.

4 Accept rather than escape. Escape-coping is where you alter your behaviour to avoid confronting troublesome things. Active-coping is where you tackle a problem head-on. This is better as you are addressing the stress, not avoiding it.

5 Over-communicate. When things are changing, communication is crucial.

Communication gaps lead to speculation, which creates more fear. If you can effectively communicate concerns, your anxieties can be better alleviated.

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KEEP CALM AND DO WHAT YOU DO BEST Roberta Epps, associate director, RSK Biocensus Project managers tend to crave order that are achievable today, and that will and design, but we also need enough keep your project moving in the right imagination and creativity to adapt and direction tomorrow. Keep your projects not get too hung up on the ‘perfect’ close: talk to your clients, a lot. Listen to project plan we had mapped out. If recent who is saying what in your team and ask months have taught us anything, it’s that them what it’s really like on the ground. If we are unlikely to be able to predict every you understand those things, you’re more eventuality, and depending on a single likely to pick up on any changes early pathway to success leaves us vulnerable. and can adapt more quickly. Now is not Mindset is key. Change your focus from the time to stand back and wait for our the end result to those mini-milestones situation to become familiar again.

Adapt and be content

Sobitha Sashikumar, PMO UK, UBS The main things that have helped me are adaptability and contentment. I have had to adjust to staying at home almost all of the time. I have found that my choices were almost non-existent, but on the positive side I came to realise that I didn’t really need much.

This was the perfect opportunity to be content with what we had – to appreciate it and turn it into an opportunity to help others. This was both rewarding and timely.

Flip it on its head Georgia Shaw, junior project manager, Atos What if we replaced the word ‘change’ with a more positive word like ‘innovation’? It suddenly seems easier to embrace. It’s always easy to find reasons not to embrace change – perhaps this means learning how to use complicated new software, and perhaps it will cost you time and money. What if we flip this and list the associated benefits? You will learn a new skill and save time and money in the long run. But let’s acknowledge that it’s OK to be anxious about change. Try writing a list of anxieties and uncertainties and look at the best-case scenarios for each. Train your mind to always see the positives, even if there are also some negatives to contend with.

FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL Abdul Wahab Ghumra, principal project manager, Mott MacDonald Change is a given; what we need to develop and master within ourselves is our attitude to change and how we respond to it. If we embrace it as an opportunity, rather than seeing it as an obstacle, we will be able to successfully navigate past it to continue to deliver successfully. Change also allows us to develop new skills and techniques that will put us in good stead for the next change. Only by stretching ourselves can we truly realise our full potential. When dealing with change, break the activity down into components – those in your control and those outside of your control.

You can then focus on the key activities.

ESTABLISH EFFECTIVE TEAM COMMUNICATION Sarah Connolly, assistant project manager, EDF Energy One tool that has proven invaluable during this pandemic is effective communication, which has been vital to ensure our team has remained focused while feeling connected and remaining safe. Managing uncertainty starts with understanding the team and their needs through regular data collection points. The data then helps form a strategy for casting the right information in the right way.

Understanding what level of information is required, and the frequency, method and output, has resulted in a supported, well-informed team. Remember to ask the team what they need to fulfil their roles; create a safe space for questions, feedback and suggestions; introduce live interactive collaboration platforms, such as Teams, to support flexible working; and upskill your teams. Also remember to have fun.

Arrange socially distanced activities such as quizzes and escape room challenges.

While change can bring uncertainty, it can also present us with opportunities.

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HOW TO GET AHEAD BY GETTING NOTICED

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(NOT FORGETTING THE HARD GRAFT)

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Meet Simona Stanynaite, a project manager at Transport for London whose appetite for taking on extra projects has helped her to raise her profile. She has worked on a diverse portfolio, from the £1bn Silvertown Tunnel to the Central Line Improvement Programme, and still found time to train as a triathlete

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ames Marriott of The Times recently wrote a piece on the triumph of hard workers. “The most misleading idea I picked up over the course of my education was that success is the result of intelligence,” he wrote. “It’s not: success is the result of doing things.” Just look at Winston Churchill, he argued, a man who churned out 2,000 words a day as a journalist, worked furiously as a politician, dictated notes in bed and even rehearsed his facial expressions in a mirror. Poet Philip Larkin cranked out his fourth novel aged 18. Hard workers earn more and even live longer.

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THE POWER OF AMBITION AND INDEFATIGABLE ENERGY The virtue of combining talent with graft is personified by Simona Stanynaite, a project manager at Transport for London (TfL). A modest character, she nevertheless gave away the secret of her success many times over the course of our interview. A decade ago, she arrived in England from her native Lithuania to attend the University of York, bursting with ambition but also a bit short of cash. “It was my decision to come to the UK,” says Stanynaite. “I really love the

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UK education system, how it focuses on critical thinking. But my parents are not rich, so could not afford my housing. So, on my first Thursday here I started work at Pret a Manger. In my second year I worked a 32-hour week at Pret. I ran the front of house. It was not the easiest time,” she says.

Just three days a week were left for university. Still, she managed to be fully involved, including participation in numerous societies – and she achieved a 2:1 in politics and international relations.

One wonders if her fully funded university friends at York had the faintest notion of her double life.

MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN BEYOND YOUR DAY JOB After York she soon joined TfL’s graduate scheme, and again her sheer capacity to outwork her peers shone through.

“I started as a project coordinator. At first, I focused on my job, which was getting development consent orders for the Silvertown vehicle tunnel under the Thames to the Greenwich peninsula. I needed to make myself known outside my team, so I made the effort to volunteer on other teams and projects outside my role.

This really helped my career. Today I talk to as many people as I can, so I’m known as widely as possible,” she explains.

Her day job is in the renewals and enhancement division of TfL, finding commercial space for retailers such as coffee shops: “It brings in additional revenue, but also makes the customer journey more wholesome if they can buy something lovely for lunch.” But her personal portfolio is broad. She’s involved in improving safety. “We launched an app last year to make it easier to report incidents. The greater the number of colleagues who report events, the bigger the improvement in safety,” she says. Mental health is being addressed: “We organise events such as resilience sessions, a walking club and coffee roulette to bring people together.”

Stanynaite is also part of a project to improve the status of her division within TfL. In an organisation as huge as TfL, there’s a danger of being forgotten by the panjandrums at the top. So Stanynaite and her colleagues are working on a plan to fix that. “We are creating our own brand at renewals and enhancements,” she says.

“It is important for us to have a clear

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“I needed to make myself known outside my team, so I made the effort to volunteer on other teams and projects outside my role.

This really helped my career”

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image. We are branding everything on our projects and sites. We are putting up posters and asking people to share their success stories on the Yammer social media network we use at TfL. We’ll put their stories on TV screens in our office.

This way everyone at TfL will know who we are and what we do.”

She’s not finished yet. She’s also involved in the Great Place to Work scheme. “We try to improve how we are as a place to work. We look at concerns in our offices, at upskilling staff and recognition. We nominate people for industry awards. Line managers are encouraged to put their staff forward.”

And finally, there’s one more item on her CV: “I am involved in the Optimum Delivery Model campaign. We want to see if there are ways to improve project management at TfL. The idea is to use data on past projects to find lessons. We will look at what kind of contracts were used to build a project, our composition of teams and if we are using the right internal and external consultants.”

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VOLUNTEER, VOLUNTEER AND VOLUNTEER SOME MORE Her philosophy of hard work is to do more than the basic job description. “I take my own advice!” she says. “You need to volunteer for things to get noticed.”

The ideal formula, she says, is to seek out challenges, then let the results speak for you. “When you are on the younger side you can feel insecure,” she says. “When you walk into a room and it’s full of male people older than you, you can feel out of place. Slightly intimidating! The best way to get them on your side is to deliver on your promises. It will build your credibility. Over time your achievements build your name.”

Now aged 28, she’s in a job she loves and has been recognised as a high achiever. The campaign group We are the City profiled her as a star of the sector. Her next role at TfL is helping to set up and run the new renewals and enhancements 2021 portfolio of projects.

Does she get a moment off? “Last year I completed two Olympic triathlons, and did two marathons and half-marathons.

I fell in love with swimming, which is much more difficult than I thought. I love endurance!” She adds, as though it’s just occurred to her: “It must say something about my character.”

Simona Stanynaite was speaking to Charles Orton-Jones

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SIMONA STANYNAITE CURRENT JOB: Project manager at Transport for London EDUCATION: University of York, 2:1 politics with international relations; Jeronimas Ralys school, Jonava, Lithuania HOBBIES: Swimming, triathlon, book club. “I read a lot. We recently read Anna Karenina, and the last book was The Master and Margarita

by Bulgakov. It’s... different. You need to read it a few times to get the gist,” she says.

Simona’s top five tips for project managers Go for difficult jobs Early in your career don’t shy away from difficult projects or bad placements.

You learn far more working on a project with issues. When you deal with difficult stakeholders you learn how to communicate and negotiate. In time you’ll move on, and you’ll have learned so much more. When you face problems next time, you’ll use that experience.

Networking is optional There’s nothing more loved and hated than networking. Clearly it can bring benefits, but I believe there is no better way to network than doing your job well.

People will recognise a job well done and remember you. That increases your network, and does it with people you are likely to see again and work with.

So if, like me, you don’t enjoy traditional networking, bear this in mind!

Don’t dwell on failures We all make mistakes. It is natural and inevitable. My advice is to take the lesson, work out how you will prevent it happening again and move on. As your

career progresses, you’ll realise the mistakes you thought were so big were in fact quite trivial. And the same applies to colleagues. If they make mistakes, work out what to do but don’t dwell on them unnecessarily. Learn and move on.

Face-to-face is irreplaceable Lockdown was a rollercoaster. It taught us a lot. For some jobs a video call is quick and does what you need. But you still need face-to-face meetings to keep relationships going. I’m a fan of having a quick chat in person, even over a coffee.

It’s a time to keep in touch and identify when someone is under pressure.

Avoid burnout Would I recommend other young people do what I did, and work two jobs at university? And keep pushing yourself? Actually it isn’t something I’d recommend to everyone. The truth is we all have our limits. You can go too far.

So even though I am a hard worker I am trying to be smarter with my time and appreciate life outside work. You need to find a balance.

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Dear Susanne HOW CAN I CREATE A CLOSER WORKING RELATIONSHIP WITH MY TEAM?

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I’ve been working with the same team for a number of years. We get on well but don’t always seem like a cohesive unit. Could you share a few insights on how to create a team with a higher level of connection and performance?

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ow great that you are interested in creating a team that works well together. The team is the engine of the project and it takes conscious effort to create a real team, let alone one that’s high performing. Let me share with you what two studies from MIT and Google revealed about high performance (see ‘The New Science of Building Great Teams’, Harvard Business Review, 2012; and ‘What Google Learned From its Quest to Build the Perfect Team’, New York Times Magazine, 2016).

In these studies, researchers found that the biggest indicator of a team’s performance is its communication patterns. In high-performing teams, everybody on the team communicates actively with other team members – and, at the end of the day, every team member has spoken in roughly similar amounts.

The studies also show that equal communication and contribution happens when the project manager or leader is able to create an environment where team members feel safe enough to contribute.

In teams where a few team members are allowed to dominate discussions, or where the team leader is too controlling or judging, many members simply don’t come forward with their views and ideas out of fear of being dismissed.

LEADERS NEED LOTS OF SOCIAL SENSITIVITY In practical terms, this means that, if you are leading a team where only three of five members are interacting frequently with each other, you must activate the last two team members in order to

improve performance. You must take on the role of a facilitator and moderate the team’s discussions in such a way that the members feel that it’s OK – and safe – to come forward and share what’s on their mind. You can do that by explicitly asking the more reserved team members what their views are and by acknowledging

When time is essential on a project, it may be tempting for you to jump in, force a decision and ignore the quieter team members.

But this is exactly the moment when you need to show patience their contributions during meetings. You will need to make use of your emotional intelligence to do this, because moderating a conversation and making people feel safe is all about listening, empathising and knowing how to make people feel that they belong in the group.

SHOW YOUR VULNERABILITY When time is essential on a project, it may be tempting for you to jump in, force a decision and ignore the quieter team members. But this is exactly the moment when you need to show patience. Be sensitive to individual team members and encourage them to be sensitive to each other. What you want to avoid is a group of

SUSANNE MADSEN

is an internationally recognised project leadership coach, trainer and consultant. She is the author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook and The Power of Project Leadership (second edition now available). For more information, visit www.susannemadsen.com Do you have a question for Susanne? Email mail@susannemadsen.com

Q&A

bright individualists who are only thinking about themselves. Instead, help your team members to be mindful of each other and share personal stories and emotions.

BEGIN BY SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE YOURSELF Become an advocate for trust and respect by sharing something personal that has some weight and that shows your vulnerability. This could be a time in the past when you made a wrong decision, failed at implementing a project or made a faux pas with a client. What you will find is that you begin to create what psychologists refer to as psychological safety – a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up or for sharing something sensitive.

When psychological safety is present, team members feel free to share what’s on their mind – whether it’s a bright new idea or a tough personal challenge. They are able to talk about what is messy and have difficult conversations with colleagues who have different opinions. And this is when high performance has a chance to emerge – when team members can contribute with all that they have without fear that they will be judged or criticised.

READER OFFER

Enjoy a 25 per cent discount on The Power of Project Leadership, second edition, when you order the book from Kogan Page (www.koganpage.com).

Quote code: PROJ25

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AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG LIKE NO OTHER

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As Costain-Skanska JV’s lead archaeologist and project manager for HS2’s St James’s Gardens excavation in Euston, Caroline Raynor explains how she united a diverse project team using borrowed Lean principles with great success

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reat Britain is a small island with a long history and a lot of stories to tell. People have been walking, settling and adapting the landscape to meet their needs for a very long time, and in doing so have left a plethora of evidence about what they were doing and what they did it with. If you work within the construction sector in the UK, it is highly likely that you will have to deal with the management of the archaeological ‘known unknown’ and, by proxy, large teams of archaeologists. The larger the project, the greater the potential there is for uncovering an archaeological site along the way.

The relationship between archaeology and construction has often been a challenging one. This is in part because archaeology is the ‘known unknown’, and the fact that it is not easy to quantify, measure, programme or package up can present difficulties, particularly where there is no shared common language between project managers, construction site teams and archaeological contractors and their specialist staff.

Archaeological project management is often delivered in line with guidance produced by Historic England.

The guidance, known as MoRPHE (Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment) was published in 2015 and deals with the project life cycle, planning techniques and documentation associated with historic environment research projects (download it for free at www.historicengland.org.uk).

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DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES BUT COMMON GOALS Despite differing approaches, the goals of project delivery are one and the same for archaeology, heritage and construction: to deliver a high-quality product safely, on time and to budget; to delight your clients; and to leave a lasting legacy. Achieving these goals has been key for the way archaeology and heritage activities are managed on HS2 enabling works.

HS2 is the largest, and arguably most complex, infrastructure project currently underway in Europe. A huge amount of work has already been completed to facilitate the construction of the new high-speed route, which will provide an additional link between Birmingham and

London. A key focus of the enabling works activity has been archaeological excavation, built heritage, research and engagement.

HS2 project requirements for managing and delivering historic environment works are set out in a series of technical standards and the Historic Environment Research Delivery Strategy.

Placing archaeology and archaeological practice at the front and centre of early works is shaping a new generation of project managers and archaeologists, encouraging new and innovative approaches, and opening new pathways for dialogue between construction teams, historic environment specialists and governing bodies such as Historic England and the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists.

Working for Costain-Skanska JV on the enabling works in Area South, our archaeology and heritage work takes on myriad forms. From the recording, dismantling and relocation of Grade II funerary monuments and famous public art and sculpture, to the archaeological excavation of sites dating from the Mesolithic to the post-medieval period, we are working to understand a time scale that spans more than 11,000 years.

Geographically, our remit spans from Euston station to the Colne Valley, northwest of London – approximately 25km of route under archaeological investigation, with hundreds of experts busily recording, measuring, 3D-modelling, excavating and conserving everything that we find.

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One of the truly incredible things about managing an archaeological site full of experts is the way that it changes daily as progress is made and the history of the site gradually reveals itself UNCOVERING ST JAMES’S BURIAL GROUND… Directly to the west of Euston station, within the proposed development footprint, lies the former site of St James’s Gardens, a post-medieval burial ground whose register indicates it was the resting place of around 60,000 individuals, interred between 1789 and 1853, when the Metropolitan Burials Act was implemented and the site was closed for burials.

Deadly diseases, including a number of cholera epidemics, in the early to mid19th century generated a drive towards public health led by Sir Edwin Chadwick, which resulted in the passing of the Public Health Act in 1848. This awarded powers to local councils, which were then able Careful, sensitive treatment of human remains was part of the archaeology team’s remit on this excavation

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St James’s burial ground has been subject to archaeological excavation and investigation on a scale that is quite unparalleled, with over 200 engineers, archaeologists, surveyors, drone pilots, construction operatives and specialist services coming together to work as a team

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to regulate urban areas, providing services such as street cleaning and management of night soil (open middens in courts and alleys), and ensure a clean water supply.

Epidemics (and pandemics), as we are well aware today, take their toll on public services, not least of all on burial grounds.

Sir Edwin was undertaking a portfolio of national projects on a whole new scale.

As a result of this work, burial grounds were flagged as a problematic area and, in 1853, the Metropolitan Burials Act was passed, prohibiting burials in built-up inner-city areas.

St James’s burial ground has been subject to archaeological excavation and investigation on a scale that is quite unparalleled, with over 200 engineers, archaeologists, surveyors, drone pilots, construction operatives and specialist services coming together to work as a team. Unusually, the methods, efficiencies and innovations have been led by the construction team. The team were united around the core values of care, dignity and respect for those interred within the burial ground.

This has been one of the main focal points of work and will form a major part of a BBC television documentary this autumn. To us, this is our ‘biggest dig’ and is arguably part of the largest programme of archaeological works currently being undertaken in Europe.

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… THEN COVERING IT BACK UP AGAIN Archaeological excavation of the burial ground has proven to be one of the most exceptionally challenging and rewarding activities. Working on a site that exceeds

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all known parallels in terms of scope and size provides the opportunity to look at archaeological processes and project management in an entirely new light, including applying new methods, digital techniques and Lean practices to help make changes in the industry.

One of the first opportunities we identified was the potential to enclose the whole site of the archaeological dig. By enclosing the site (effectively building a very big tent), we were able to discharge our requirements to our stakeholders (the historic environment works have 52 of them) by protecting and ensuring the care, dignity and respect of all those interred within the site, as well as weather-proofing the works and providing a safe working environment for the 200-strong team.

The encapsulation structure was built using system scaffold and the twin-apex roof was supported on 15 bespoke prefabricated steel towers. The structure spanned 110m x 90m and, with additional outriggers, enclosed an area of over 11,000m2. Constructing the tower foundations and footings required 15 separate mini-archaeological excavations.

Volumetric calculations indicated that burial horizon (depth of the burial ground) might exceed 6.2m below ground level, and we determined that the foundations of the structure needed to sit below the formation level of the dig to ensure we were never going to undermine our own temporary tent.

GOING UNDERGROUND During the sinking of shafts and excavation of the burials to install the footings, we were amazed to find that burials exceeded depths of 7.3m, making the site one of the most deeply dug post-medieval burial grounds in London and posing additional engineering challenges. Even the archaeological team had to be specially trained for working in confined spaces in order to complete this activity. This part of the work also gave us pause to consider the Georgian and Victorian grave-diggers who would have originally dug these graves into the stiff London clay. Hand-digging vertical shafts over 7m through consolidated London clay is no mean feat.

This early part of the project provided us with our first real detailed view into the cemetery and the difference in levels of preservation in the upper, middle, lower and pauper’s ground. It very quickly became apparent that perched water in the ground, combined with the London clays, had created a perfect storm of anaerobic

Archaeology is process-driven, with activities like finds-processing post-excavation being governed by rigid methodologies

conditions. This has led to unprecedented levels of preservation of artefacts, including personal objects associated with burials ( jewellery, coins, floral tributes and even a pair of beautifully decorated hand-made Indian slippers), and decorative metals known as ‘coffin furniture’.

One of the truly incredible things about managing an archaeological site full of experts is the way that it changes daily as progress is made and the history of the site gradually reveals itself under the careful hands of the archaeologists and osteologists. Every day brings new learning and the shared joy of new discoveries.

Being the first person to see an artefact under excavation is a unique experience that is quite difficult to articulate, but it

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The most common wastes in archaeology are the waste of motion (such as walking across site seeking tools and equipment); the waste of transport (moving samples and finds from site to office without checking labelling, volumes etc); the waste of waiting (delays on-site caused by weather or lack of plant, leading to the inefficient use of time on-site when secondary activities could have been planned); and the waste of talent (not understanding or registering the key skills present among an often transient or temporary archaeological workforce).

High-level analysis indicated that waste of motion, transport and waiting occurred most frequently on other sites, and these were elements we sought to eradicate.

A diverse dig With a 43 per cent female demographic on-site, the St James’s Gardens excavation is a rarity in most construction environments.

A proactive approach was taken to encourage and seek out female engineers, “although, ultimately, I must always select the right person for the right role, regardless of gender”, Raynor reiterates.

The archaeological team is generally quite well balanced in terms of gender, she says, with roughly a 45 per cent female to 55 per cent male split. “However, the win was setting up an environment suitable for women to work in that helped eradicate common issues and eliminate staff attrition, sickness leave and occupational health issues such as musculoskeletal issues and minor injuries,” she says. Female roles on-site in the construction team included project manager, lead archaeologist, apprentice engineer, section engineer and sub agent, while roles on the archaeology team included project officer, supervisor, field archaeologist, surveyor and osteologist. makes managing and delivering the works all the more rewarding.

BORROWING LEAN PRINCIPLES Inside the encapsulation structure, the ‘big dig’ was a highly choreographed hive of activity, with carefully managed interfaces between specialist disciplines.

One of the main challenges was achieving a tight programme, and we turned to Lean principles to provide answers. Lean is a tool traditionally associated with production lines and business management; however, it can have successful applications across a large number of archaeological activities.

Lean originated in the car manufacturing industry and built upon Henry Ford’s moving assembly line for mass production.

Toyota advanced and evolved the concept in the 1960s by seeking to identify waste and eradicate it, whether it be cost, time or effort. Encouraging and supporting people to develop Lean skill sets has been a key part of delivering efficiencies in archaeology and providing a clear set of data that can be interrogated to understand productivity.

Archaeology is not a production line and no two archaeological sites are the same. But archaeology as a discipline is process-driven, and activities such as finds-processing or excavating a feature or burial are governed by rigid methodologies that make archaeology an entirely suitable discipline in which to trial Lean controls and processes.

SOMETHING TO LEAN ON Measures were put in place to help reduce or remove waste, and the improvements were measured using a Lean control board where ‘time on task’ and the metres-cubed of material removed were recorded each day as a productivity measure. Productivity initiatives included the use of small all-electric plant (1.9-tonne mini-diggers and one-tonne tracked barrows), digital recording and the deployment of one site operative per five archaeologists to help with spoil management and muck shift.

The use of a bespoke Lean control-board proved to be a great boon, as it provided a clear way of communicating, collating and interrogating data. Conversations could be open and honest, as they were based around factual data.

The huge volume of finds and artefacts required special treatment, and Lean was applied to this suite of activities too. Finds management activities were also processmapped to identify opportunities for efficiency, and a bespoke laboratory with a factory production line approach was built on-site. This facility considered specific tasks, optimal production (task time) and ergonomics based on a 43 per cent female demographic on-site – a rarity in most construction environments. Additional benefits were also identified where on-site processing provided earlier insight into the assemblage and helped to inform excavation and community-engagement strategy over the duration of the project.

Large archaeological projects of this kind will become more common as the scale of UK infrastructure projects grows. A key piece of learning has been to develop an integrated specialist team with a shared common language and values, who can work together to support and drive innovation.

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BEYOND THE JOB

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In this series, project managers tell us how they’re using their skills outside work. Here, Tyler Skerton of global consultancy Turner & Townsend shares his experience as a volunteer emergency responder for the London Ambulance Service NHS Trust during the COVID-19 crisis

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or the past six years, I have been an emergency responder for the London Ambulance Service. We are trained volunteers who respond to the most serious 999 calls in a blue-light response vehicle, which can vary from road traffic collisions to cardiac arrests. We are treated just like front-line staff, wearing the same uniform and using the same systems. Our clinical level focuses on basic life support, which means providing early CPR and defibrillation to improve the patient’s chance of survival. The scheme is made up of around 150 volunteers based in six stations across London, and we come from all walks of life, from project managers like me to pilots, police officers, doctors, dentists and soldiers.

VITAL TRANSFERABLE SKILLS I started my project management career as an apprentice with Transport for London, where I worked on some of Europe’s largest rail programmes before moving to

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the advertising company JCDecaux where I worked to tight deadlines delivering advertising construction projects at Heathrow Airport. I then moved into my dream job at Turner & Townsend, starting at Heathrow and more recently moving into Network Rail delivering Crossrail stations work.

The beauty of my volunteer work is that I can transfer my skills from the workplace to my volunteering and vice versa. Many project managers will be aware that one of our key traits is the ability to make decisions and step up to become the leader of a team or situation. My volunteer work enables me to build confidence in making decisions based on the information presented to me in the moment. With most of my project experience being on-site and in delivery, the daily review of activities and tasks when running a contract enables me to be comfortable with expediting that contract, particularly relating to instructions, planning, resourcing and site inspections.

Being a project manager definitely helps with being an emergency responder. Much of my work involves building relationships and being able to influence internal and external stakeholders. These may be crossparty organisations such as the police service, or other teams within the London Ambulance Service. Most frequently, I liaise with loved ones or family members about what we are doing when we arrive and what may be the necessary next steps in the process.

Other interchangeable skills include risk assessment and safe working.

Whether this be on a construction site or attending a major incident, my work on industry best practice within the rail environment enables me to better look out for patients and other team members when responding to most events. It is important that safety is at the forefront of our response and is a continued action.

CALLED TO IMMEDIATE ACTION Nothing could have prepared me for the past few months. By mid-March, as COVID-19 began to spread, I could see more strain being placed on the NHS. As the London Ambulance Service was preparing for a dramatic increase in patients, I received the call to volunteer more often. At the time, I was working at Heathrow Airport as a project manager on the security programme. As the aviation industry was grounded, I found myself placed on furlough – the timing could not have been better. Being called to assist on the front line and getting leave (that ended up being for 10 weeks), I felt that this was my time to step up and try to do some good.

As March turned into April, it was clear that the situation was unprecedented.

At the peak of the pandemic, the service was receiving up to 11,000 calls a day – up from 5,000 on a typically busy day.

The public was panicked, and it seemed like the world was ending and our safety

I was staggered to see how ill our patients were, fighting for their lives – and we were their only chance

Beyond the job, 1

and access to emergency healthcare was not there. The ambulance service was gearing up for a battle like nobody had ever seen. Emergency responders like me were upskilled to attend patients on large, double-crewed ambulances, giving us the ability to respond with another front-line, paid member of staff. April was very busy, with hardly any rest on shift as we rushed from patient to patient.

ON THE COVID-19 FRONT LINE “Echo Romeo eight-one, we have a 56-year-old male in cardiac arrest; you are currently the nearest available resource.

Please confirm you have received the job and are PPE fit tested.”

The ambulance service was gearing up for a battle like nobody had ever seen “Yes, all received; we’re en route,” I called back.

On a quiet April night, we raced against the clock to a patient who was not breathing and was in confirmed cardiac arrest. My colleague and I arrived on scene and donned our PPE – a very warm white overall, a respirator, goggles and gloves. We rushed into the house to find the patient’s wife attempting CPR. We took over and attached the defibrillator to the patient’s chest. “No shock advised,” the defibrillator said. We continued our support until our backup crew arrived, discovering the patient had been suffering with a fever and severe respiratory difficulties. I assumed the worst – that he was our first COVID-19 patient. Despite getting a pulse back, on transferring to hospital he sadly passed away.

I was staggered to see how ill our patients were, fighting for their lives – and we were their only chance, as we were able to give oxygen to those who needed it. As COVID-19 is a respiratory disease that hinders the body’s oxygen

saturations, giving oxygen enables us to treat the feeling of breathlessness and helps make our patients comfortable on their way to hospital. One of the key roles of a first responder is to control a scene.

Medical emergencies are highly stressful and emotional situations. Our ability to get there quickly to provide reassurance to patients and family greatly helps.

NOTHING QUITE PREPARES YOU The sheer level of fear felt by the public was intense. The amount of bereavement we had to witness will stay with me for a long time. Nothing quite prepares you for dealing with grief. You can write protocols, and create checklists and cue-sheets, but standing face-to-face with family members after their loved one has not made it is always difficult, and sometimes heartbreaking. The devastating effect of the virus is that the onset it so quick.

I used to write off mental health issues as just a bit of a fad, but boy, I could not be more wrong! Our mental health is so important, and that is why we should look after it as much as our physical health. Living through this experience has most definitely made me think more about mental health. To all the front-line workers and key workers who have had to bear the brunt of work throughout this period: look out for one and other.

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PUBLIC REGISTER OF ChPPs T

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he following individuals make up the latest cohort to achieve Chartered Project Professional status with APM. Congratulations to you all, from those based in the UK and Germany to India and Malaysia! Full details of the criteria for achieving chartered status and the routes to get there can be found at apm.org. uk/chartered-standard, where you can also view the full Register of Chartered Project Professionals.

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Martine

Buckland

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Christopher

Fazey

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Jon

Bumstead

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Clifford

Fisher

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Anna

Byrne

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Paul

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Liliana

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Shaun

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Ian

Callan

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Christopher

Calvert

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Adam

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ChPP, 1 Gavin

Ireland

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Peter

Nazareth

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Alan

Tait

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Johnson

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Jones

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Philip

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Philip

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van de Werff

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Where project management meets popular culture

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LOGAN ROY

Season three of HBO’s hit series about a dysfunctional media dynasty in the throes of collapse has fallen victim to COVID-19. We couldn’t wait any longer for our Succession fix, so Richard Young has taken a look at the family’s fortunes, Project-style…

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CLIENT

Succession

The catch-up: billionaire Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is founder, CEO and chairman of media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo – as well as being a career psychopath and domineering father to four children. Succession begins with Roy’s medical incapacitation, kicking off an unseemly scramble for the throne between his variously unpleasant offspring. His recovery merely adds fuel to the bonfire of their vanities and venalities.

Parallels with today’s power dynasties, from the Murdochs to the Trumps, are inevitable.

But Succession reaches for wider themes than a mere rehashing of cringe-worthy anecdotes about the ugly foibles of

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the over-privileged. It’s an almost Shakespearean voyage through family psychodrama, pitch-perfectly set against the modern (im)moralities of politics, the media and technology. And, of course, it includes several examples of why it’s dangerous to let loose ill-disciplined, unskilled and perversely motivated rich kids on the fine art of project management.

So let us introduce you to the four Roy children and what their projects tell us about them, their failings and the power of project management.

As usual, spoilers ahead…

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KENDALL ROY: FROM VANITY TO INSANITY Logan Roy’s second son is the most committed to his business. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) is a ‘poor little rich boy’ junkie turned new media maven. We meet him as he’s trying to close a deal to buy Vaulter, a hip web gossip outfit.

It’s a pet project, a chance to prove himself a visionary and not just win his father’s approval, but also secure the company’s digital future.

But Vaulter CEO Lawrence Yee (Rob Yang) doesn’t buy into the idea of old media devouring his company.

“You’re a bunch of bloated dinosaurs who didn’t even notice the monkeys swinging by till yesterday,” he tells Kendall as he aborts the deal at the last minute. A good project manager would never allow this kind of late surprise

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to happen. But, with yes-men surrounding him, there’s clearly been no attempt to lock down key stages of the deal or escalate agreements towards a final sign-off.

Kendall commits the cardinal sin: sacrificing two sides of the iron triangle just to meet the deadline to impress his father. (He wants to throw “stupid numbers” at Vaulter’s shareholders, and the rationale for the deal is a bust once Yee becomes an enemy.) Vanity is his project downfall. How often is the sponsor’s ego the fourth side of the iron triangle? No challenge is insurmountable, they say, even as the project team despairs.

So is Kendall a lost cause?

Not quite. Later in the show he’s ordered to “gut” Vaulter by Logan. And he shows a deftness in planning the corporate hit that would have even the most efficiently ruthless asset-stripper drooling. His elite project team of analysts identifies the last cent of value in the firm’s IP. He understands that the project must work in stages: soft soap Yee, charm the staff into not joining a union, set up a shadow server to keep the profitable rump going… and then fire everyone in one fell swoop. The project schedule is as precise as it is devious. But the secret to the project’s success is its clarity of purpose. When your sponsor is your father and he’s utterly ruthless, collateral damage is always secondary to meeting the project goal.

It’s dangerous to let loose illdisciplined, unskilled and perversely motivated rich kids on the fine art of project management

SIOBHAN ROY

ROMAN ROY: DISASTER MAGNET If Kendall is a lesson in the benefits of clear project objectives, his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin) shows what happens when a project manager tries to freestyle.

Agile methodologies are great – but when you play fast and loose with technical specs, someone’s going to get burned.

Playboy Roman is an amoral husk whose connection with other people is scorn, abuse, sarcasm and neglect.

A drifter on the edges of the business, he’s given a project solely to test his potential for staying in the race to succeed his father. But it’s a big one: oversee the launch of a new communications satellite.

We don’t actually learn much about his project style – he’s a hands-off kind of project manager. But we do know all his personality failings affect the project team. And he’s taken it upon himself to change one project parameter regardless of their expert

advice. To coincide the launch with his sister’s wedding, he pressurises the team to accelerate their plans. Sadly for him, on the day of the wedding, no one cares about his project.

He ends up watching the live feed not on a big screen at the reception, but on his phone in the loo.

The rocket explodes on the launchpad. Like so many Teflon project leads, Roman just rejoins the party, telling everyone it went just fine. He has no sense of accountability – dismissing the injured technicians, his main concern is an email trail showing him pressuring the team to bring the launch forward. (A reminder: keep your project emails, and get everything in writing if your project sponsor requests inadvisable changes.)

Roman’s story also warns us that sponsors who court sycophancy (like Logan) have only themselves to blame when their project managers respond to perverse incentives with illadvised decisions.

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ROMAN ROY

SIOBHAN ROY: GOOD GIRL GONE WRONG The best project manager among the Roy children is Siobhan, aka Shiv (Sarah Snook). When we meet her, she’s in the midst of running a political campaign, and clearly has a fearsome reputation for getting stuff done. She’s outside the family business, standing or falling on her own merits. The politician she ends up working for, potential presidential candidate Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian), is an arch opponent of her father – but Logan clearly tolerates a little daughterly rebellion, since he employs her fiancé Tom in the company’s upper echelons.

In fact, she comes to learn politics is no less corrupt(ing) than her own family. And while all the Roy children have designs on the CEO’s chair, only Shiv is capable enough

to define a clear project for her accession. That project is her season-two arc. And it’s another reminder that, when you’re dealing with sponsors like Logan, you need to get everything in writing. Having been told she’s Logan’s choice to succeed, Shiv begins to torpedo her political career – only to find out later that the old man is no longer committed to her as CEO. A good project manager knows to manage expectations – and expects to be in the loop with senior decisionmakers above them. If they’re not, they must adjust their project tolerances to account for uncertainties. Shiv knows Logan loves to play games, not least with people he sees acquiring any power.

She should have factored his scheming into her timeline.

She’s more astute managing her rivals – including Rhea Jarrell (Holly Hunter), the outsider vying for the job.

When she sees the new CEO might not last long, as a scandal threatens the company, she changes her project plan – thrusting Rhea into the doomed job. That’s Shiv’s big tip: those with inside information can expect to steer their own projects more successfully – even if that means biding their time and allowing other people’s projects to fail.

CONNOR ROY: OUT OF HIS COMFORT ZONE Connor (Alan Ruck) is Logan’s eldest child – and the least intelligent, likeable and capable, which is saying a lot. The desert-dwelling libertarian doesn’t have the intellectual muscle to back up his instincts – and when he takes on the project to mount a Broadway play for his girlfriend Willa, we see the full extent of his management weakness. Connor has no discernible skills, much less specific knowledge of theatre,

FINDING SUCCESS IN SUCCESSION

budget or people management.

A project sponsor or senior stakeholder doesn’t always need project skills, and a project manager doesn’t always need sector expertise.

But when you have neither, disaster looms.

He’s also managing emotionally, not rationally.

Superficially, he’s putting on a play. In reality, the project is emotional blackmail to keep his former escort girlfriend happy. Projects that allow the heart to overrule the head are doomed. Budget constraints are non-existent – Connor ends up asking his father for $100m to cover the play’s losses. And every project manager should be able to assess the quality of the work to date before greenlighting the next stage. Not only is Willa’s script only 60 per cent finished on opening night, the sand Connor has shipped in for the staging is full of mites. It’s a flop.

Time, quality, cost – Connor fails across the iron triangle.

But his chief project failing is hubris. Don’t assume you can just do something because you want to – and always cover your own shortcomings with talent elsewhere in the team.

The Roy children are fascinatingly awful project managers.

How about the rest of the characters?

LOGAN ROY might head up the world’s fifth biggest media conglomerate, but his inability to tolerate dissenting views (his boardroom is not an inclusive workspace) makes him a lousy project leader.

GERRI KILLMAN (J Smith-Cameron) is the company general counsel, more business-as-usual manager than project manager. But she listens, reacts and maintains focus on objectives, even when her stakeholders are losing it.

FRANK VERNON (Peter Friedman) is Logan’s long-time consiglieri. Like Gerri, he’s a BAU guy, but after being dumped, he comes back in to run the merger project to save the family.

Project manager style: voice of caution, smoother of problems.

TOM WAMBSGANS (Matthew Macfadyen), Shiv’s husband, has a clear project plan: become CEO. And he knows how to (ab)use other’s talents. As he says to his long-suffering cousin-in-law (see below), “you can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Gregs”.

COUSIN GREG (Nicholas Braun) seems to be the faltering bumpkin. In truth, his project – to become just like them – is by far the most successful in the show. He works hard, takes his knocks, but ensures each stage of his project is a secure foundation for its next phase. And he looks set to be a key player in season three…

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New books, recommended favourites and podcasts to keep you entertained

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APM’s president Sue Kershaw on the exclusion of women from the economy, and advice on how not to make a mistake – plus podcasts to see you through the autumn

THE DOUBLE X ECONOMY: THE EPIC POTENTIAL OF EMPOWERING WOMEN Linda Scott (Faber & Faber) This book is about the exclusion of women from the world’s economy to the severe detriment of that economy (eg a $160 trillion global loss 80

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because of the gender pay gap).

But it is more than that, it is about recognising that economists need to be more diverse in their thinking. I thought construction and engineering were challenged in their diversity, but the world of economists seems to be in the dark ages.

I particularly like the way the subject is brought to life by stories, statistics and humour, but this mix sometimes makes the read a little jerky. I also like the fact that infrastructure is recognised as an opportunity for inclusion of talent, not ‘hard and heavy’ jobs associated with our male colleagues.

Scott is a talented writer on a mission to change how we approach economic issues by releasing the power of the ‘double X economy’. Her work in Africa and Bangladesh is compelling and her moving

anecdotes support the need for the change she has identified.

She cleverly debunks the claim that male dominance is natural or necessary by citing examples of change in history, and in the animal kingdom: “If baboons can change, we can too.” She also reviews the impact of property in wealth. The ‘a woman cannot own property because she is property’ type of approach is explored.

Scott also addresses the impact of motherhood, particularly low birth rates in developed countries; nearly half the countries in the world are producing too few children to sustain their population, and the other half are only just coping with the demands large families have on the economy.

And there is more: brain bigotry, the lack of a proper voice for female economists and the impact of women running their own businesses.

So what is to be done? Scott suggests next steps for the US, the global community and individuals. Focusing on individual actions, there is a call to arms for crowd-funding women’s initiatives, celebrating inclusive employers, building awareness of the double X economy and supporting charities that promote the release of the double X economy.

It’s a bit ‘in your face’, and you will need staying power to read through the detail, so it’s a book for the cooler, darker autumn ahead. As Melinda Gates says: “This is a compelling and actionable case for unleashing women’s economic power.” Light touch paper and retreat!

✶✶✶✶

Review by Sue Kershaw, president of APM and managing director, transportation, at Costain Group

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MY BEDSIDE BOOKS

Mark Reeson, director, M R Project Solutions LEADING CHANGE

MANAGING MY LIFE

This book has allowed me to build upon the knowledge and competence I have developed through P3 management. Its great strength is not just its content, but also the visual attraction and the simplicity of its writing style, which breaks down complex information with such clarity.

With its use of analysis and case studies, it has widened my horizons, offering a new perspective on my career with strategic management.

As a book that is beneficial to everyone from student to experienced manager, it can be picked up to provide nuggets of easily absorbed information around all management strategies.

This book has allowed me to better understand competition in industry and has assisted me with self-awareness and selfimprovement. The examples that Kotter offers have allowed me to identify when my ideas may not be so well thought-out and, by reflecting on the actions of others, see the pitfalls and mistakes that have previously been made. His eight-step process to identify and then navigate the potential hurdles of driving a change into organisations offers great structure, something I believe is essential in every walk of life. Kotter offers support and guidance at the moments when I need them the most.

Finally, I come to the book that has for many years motivated me to become better at what I do. It follows Ferguson’s career as a football manager in Scotland and England, and how his life was impacted by his upbringing and his first career as a footballer. Tracing his life from his challenging upbringing in Govan, Glasgow, he demonstrates that it’s not where you start or where you come from that matters, but instead what you are willing to do and what you make of your opportunities in life. The book crescendoes with the success of the 1999 treble-winning season and his personal achievement of receiving his knighthood.

fundamentally flawed, so are all our decisions.

What’s more, we do not live in a perfect world where decisions can be made in a vacuum with no personal bias, and the implementation is just as important as the decision itself. I wish Malcolm Gladwell had written this book, because then it would be a really good read.

Sections two and three held the promise of delivering potential solutions to the issues identified in the first nine chapters. And they did.

They contain some very useful ideas, but there is almost too much information and the stories were too short to become engaged in. Overall, it read a bit like an academic thesis, with a lot of concepts,

UNDERSTANDING STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Anthony E Henry

YOU’RE ABOUT TO MAKE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE! Olivier Sibony (Little Brown Spark) The title certainly grabbed my attention and I was looking forward to a good read. Instead I found it hard work, but that is not to say this book is not useful. The premise is that organisations, or their decisionmakers, are not very good at making decisions. And the first nine chapters give you all the reasons why people make bad decisions. Having waded my way through them, my main thoughts were that we look for heroes who have made decisions with good outcomes before and expect them to deliver the same results for us – completely ignoring the fact that the terrain is different, and that decisions are made by people and, since we are all

John Kotter

WE’RE ALL EARS – PODCASTS WE RECOMMEND

Send your own recommendations to Project’s editor at emma.devita@thinkpublishing.co.uk EAT, WORK, SLEEP, REPEAT

THE BOTTOM LINE

A podcast about making work better, its insightful and engaging host Bruce Daisley is a best-selling author (see The Joy of Work) and tech leader from the UK who spent 12 years running Twitter in Europe. Episodes include ‘Building Resilience’, ‘Beating Burnout’ and ‘What’s the Value of an Office?’

A familiar BBC face, Evan Davis hosts this business conversation show with people at the top about the things that matter right now.

Recent topics include how to build a racially diverse business, obstacles to diversity in the workplace and the effect of the pandemic on our transport and working habits.

Bruce Daisley

Evan Davis

THE APM PODCAST We couldn’t not mention our own series of talks with APM’s experts, and the ‘Crisis Talks’ season of interviews with project managers, who share their personal experience of working through the pandemic, including contributions from project head honchos at HMRC, Channel 4, Hotel Chocolat and more. Not to be missed.

Sir Alex Ferguson

references and anecdotes to support the arguments.

However, if instead of reading the book cover to cover you use it as a reference, it has much more potential.

As project managers, we are always trying to drive a group of divergent people through a decision-making process, and this book is beautifully laid out, with helpful summaries at the end of each chapter about all the things that are blocking people from making good decisions. Reference lists in the appendices detail all the techniques you can use to attempt to unblock people in their decision-making.

For me, the book is upside down. I would like the solutions presented first, with reference later as to why they are necessary, but if you use it as a toolkit to dip in and out of, where the information sits is purely personal preference.

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Review by Sarah Walton, co-founder of Extraordinary Project Management PROJECT AUTU M N 2020

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COVID-19 IS A CHANCE FOR LEADERS TO ‘SHAKE THE BOX’

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The new ‘next normal’ is your chance to deliver projects using all the talent available, says Eddie Obeng, because thinking and acting differently demands a diversity of contributions

ART

Like the boy who shouted that the emperor had no clothes, COVID-19 has made it obvious to all that we could have adopted the new normal a long time ago.

With it, we could solve climate challenges, raise productivity and improve health and living standards. The prize is huge. We must think and act differently because the solutions are not the ones we had previously thought. For this, we will need contributions from many diverse people.

Full disclosure – I am biased, because I want women to succeed. My mother (95) was the first Ghanaian woman PhD. I grew up on stories of jealous men who, finding it hard enough to climb the greasy pole against other men, now found they had to compete with this brilliant woman (watch her keynote at bit.ly/39GcxlD).

Born in Africa, I have been black most of my life. I first discovered I was black when I became the first African in over 100 years to attend my British public school. Before that I was just Eddie. I’m biased because I know how a real minority feels. And I want everyone to feel the excitement and joy of being a one-of-a-kind pioneer.

Projects succeed when you use all the talent available. I’m sure you have a group of friends you’ve known forever. When someone says they’re bringing their new partner to your next meet-up, you dread it. You are not against the new person, you just want to preserve what you have. This is the curse of the dreaded J-curve.

The J-curve can happen when you add a new resource and the original ‘superteam’ members ignore their input. Productivity falls. Then another new resource is added, but now one of the superteam has to stop work to show the newbies “how things are done around here”. Productivity falls further. They are included but contributing nothing different. Productivity and creativity keep falling as you introduce more diversity and new thinking.

If you’re lucky, it reaches a turning point – the bottom of the ‘J’ – where the original superteam decide to learn a new way to work altogether, including the diverse newbies. Productivity skyrockets!

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If the old rituals stay, the team just steadily fails. Smart project leaders ‘shake the box’ with a new kick-off and new ground rules.

COVID-19 is a chance to shake the box.

It doesn’t make sense not to seize the advantage of new thinking or behaviour. But here’s why we don’t. As a young scientist, my project needed input from one very senior staff member with a reputation for being aggressive. Anything positive that didn’t fit that view of him, I dismissed.

Then I was summoned to his office and discovered he was incisive and helpful! To grab my attention, my colleagues morphed his incisiveness into aggression. After that, my fear and bias kept me in a mental prison.

Such propaganda is now called fake news.

Mental prisoners discriminate against ‘new’ or ‘different’ and keep you at the bottom of the J-curve. Fear, ignorance and fake news underpin every ‘ism’. Sexism rests on belief systems and inheritance protocols; racism rests on fake news that echoes from the days of the British Empire.

The new ‘next normal’ is your chance to deliver projects using all the talent available. Here’s how:

PROFESSOR EDDIE OBENG is an educator, TED speaker and the author of Perfect Projects and All Change! The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook. Read his white paper at eddieobeng.com/howdigitalwillsave theworld. Tweet him @EddieObeng or read his blog at imagineafish.com

Mental prisoners discriminate against ‘new’ or ‘different’ and keep you at the bottom of the J-curve

1

LEARN FIRST-HAND. In the old world, we relied on second-hand learning.

Most of your assumptions and attitudes were borrowed. In the COVID-19 world, no one knows how things work. You might as well find out for yourself. Be a pioneer.

2

GO WHERE THE FEAR IS. Fear is the best indicator of areas of uncertainty, chaos and opportunity. In the long run, it is safer to take the opportunity than to remain obsolete in your comfort zone.

3

GET THEM OUT OF JAIL. Connect with those who have an ‘ism’ in a non-threatening way. They are fearful and ignorant. Be kind. Being an ‘-ist’ makes them far more miserable than you imagine. The sexist men who thought that they should be better than my mother suffered because they weren’t.

4

KEEP RECREATING GROUND RULES. How will we work together? Keep shaking the box, don’t settle on a culture yet and include the people involved in recreating their way of working. Be ready to treat everyone differently in order to be completely fair to everyone.

Your best role model is you. Choose characteristics that help in uncertainty, like courage, kindness and trustworthiness. Project leaders are the ones who really shape the world. Other people just talk about it. You will decide what the emperor wears next.

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