Ten-year infrastructure strategy pipeline will require new approaches from industry

Deliverability and affordability will rightly be front and centre in the government’s new 10-year infrastructure strategy when it is published in June. However, responsibility for how that is achieved does not sit solely with government, although there is much that it could mandate. Industry has a duty to use best practice and lessons learnt to find better ways of working too.

If we can come together in this way, in combination with this long-term pipeline, there is huge potential for progressive improvement in cost and deliverability over the next decade. But to get that progress started, the industry needs to consider what it can do differently. Continuing with the same practices as before is unlikely to deliver a different result.

This change of approach needs to start at the very beginning with how projects are set up. This can take time but, if done right, the benefits will be felt throughout the delivery and ensure that the work achieves its outcomes.

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With a multi-billion-pound flagship strategy such as this, there is always the pressure to demonstrate that the investment is delivering value for money for the taxpayer, something that is usually proven through “spades in the ground”. However, this rush to get started on the physical building work does not always fit well with taking the time to set a project up properly for success.

In my opinion, there are two fundamentals for setting up projects that come forward under the 10-year infrastructure strategy differently – learning lessons from past projects and using programme management office (PMO) effectively. While neither is new, I don’t believe that the infrastructure industry currently gets the most out of either – and they are critical.

Effective PMO

One of the biggest mistakes made around PMO is taking what it looked like on one project and trying to apply it directly to another and expecting that PMO to know what to do. Too often people think they just need some planners, some cost engineers, managers covering risk, reporting and documents and you then have the answer to any problems.

However, to get the most out of using the PMO approach, it needs to be established around the understanding of what the project is trying to achieve and what “good” looks like for that specific project. This is different for every scheme, so picking job titles off a shelf based on what has been done before is unlikely to deliver a step change in avoiding strategic risks or the successful achievement of planned programme outcomes.

A successful PMO will have people with the skills to predict issues before a project goes wrong and have the authority to change the direction of the work

A PMO function must also know what the future should look like and consider all of the things that could go wrong. To do that, those tasked with creating the right PMO team  need to identify the dream – the look, feel and outcomes of the work – and then role play on the challenges to consider everything that will hurt the project and business case and kill the transformation.

With that knowledge, it is then possible to work out what functions are needed in the PMO to keep the project on the right path to deliver the good stuff and track it to prevent the bad things from happening during delivery. Essentially, a successful PMO will have people with the skills to predict issues before a project goes wrong – and who have the authority to change the direction of the work too.

Learning lessons

It may be 13 years ago now, but a great example of using PMO to do things differently was the London 2012 Olympics. There was a fixed delivery date and the team organised themselves differently, used quantitative schedule risk analysis – which was relatively new then – and incentivised the supply chain to come in on time. They then created a PMO to make that happen smoothly.

It was a great success. However, the industry did not learn from the approach and it has not really been used in the same way since, which brings me to my other point: the infrastructure industry’s failure to act on past experience.

I believe that learning lessons from past projects should be mandated for all new publicly funded infrastructure, with demonstrating how this has been done and put into practice linked to a project’s funding. The way the industry is currently structured, innovation is favoured over using tried and tested techniques or incrementally improving what has worked well before. We need to find a way to reward reuse that delivers productivity and efficiency in the same way that it is done with innovative methods.

Another challenge that the sector must face is the reluctance to admit errors when it comes to project delivery. The same used to be true of health and safety, but government mandate and a culture change mean that lessons are shared and listened to, so the sector is now much safer than it was. However, the culture around delays has yet to shift.

One of the major problems around sharing knowledge from past projects is that there is no single place to look for that information

The other challenge is finding the knowledge needed to make a difference – but other changes in government may create an opportunity to overcome that. Alongside the publication of the 10-year infrastructure strategy, we also have the amalgamation of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority with the National Infrastructure Commission to become the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA). This aims to restore investor confidence in the sector’s ability to deliver major infrastructure projects and presents a huge opportunity to ensure lessons are learnt and acted on.

One of the major problems around sharing knowledge from past projects is that there is no single place to look for that information – maybe NISTA can standardise where that detail lives and make it easier to consume?

NISTA also has a broader role to play in the success of the government’s plans beyond facilitating a change on sharing knowledge of past projects. In our submission to the  government in response to its consultation on the new strategy, we have called for action to ensure that NISTA is established with the right powers.

Above all, it must have the teeth to prevent schemes getting the go-ahead and entering the “forward pipeline of projects” until they have reached a sufficient level of design maturity. Primarily, this is critical to stop projects from being delayed or cancelled for short-term political expediency, but it will also be key to ensuring that they can deliver on programme and cost too.

If it can do this, along with ensuring that we really do learn from the past and establishing projects in the right way, then the infrastructure industry will be better set up for future success in delivering on the 10-year pipeline of work.

Andy Wain is head of PMO and controls at Mott MacDonald