LMP0001
Written evidence submitted by Mr William (Bill) Bebbington
Contents
8 Change (Variations and modifications)
10 Project/Programme Managers on Government Projects
11 The Infrastructure and Projects Authority
I am a former project management consultant, having worked or advised on project and programme management in 15 countries (in addition to the UK) as well as lecturing on project and programme management in 4 of those countries (India, China (at the behest of the IMF), South Korea and Oman). I have acted as a consultant to various UK Government Departments and NGOs, including the Home Office; British Rail (both before and after nationalization); NHS; Departments of Health and Defense; CEGB; et al., as well as the South African; Chinese, Polish and South Korean Governments. In private industry, I’ve worked at, or been consulted by, several major companies, and worked at a highly successful privatized company.
More recently, I have been an Expert Witness specializing in the project management. In this role, I have appeared at the Swiss International Court of Arbitration and Mediation in Zurich. As such, of course, my opinion is considered evidence in its’ own right although I have tried to appease you by presenting specific examples where I could.
When I first saw the request for evidence, I thought that the whole thing was designed for failure as what would probably happen was that any contractors who wrote in would blame civil servants, whereas any civil servants who wrote in would blame the contractors/suppliers.
I further thought that, since the process is being run by the civil service, they will eventually fall back to their comfort zone and call in the big consultancy firms, in spite of their continued failure to produce a solution to this long-term problem. I’ve recently seen that NHS Digital have called in McKinsey although the article that told us this, sort of gave the game away by stating what the solution should be (you need ‘town planners’ which, incidentally, is wrong).
There is a saying used in Total Quality Management that “the vast majority of people just want the opportunity to do a good job”. That is true of both the Civil Service and Contractors and I’ve met lots of good people employed in both areas. The question then is if this is so, why can’t we produce successful projects? If it’s not the people, it has to be the system(s), procedures and/or processes and, in that case, it’s a problem of leadership.
There is also one other major element that is missing from this exercise. If you do get anything useful from your trawl, how are you going to make use of it?
I originally put together a proposal which included a (fairly broad) solution and its’ implementation until I saw that you merely stated that you intended to interrogate the CEO of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.
I cannot understand what you hope to achieve by this. He will, no doubt, defend his turf, but is part of the problem as you will see when you read Section 11.
My submission is not as detailed as I would like as there is a lot to get through and I didn’t discover the Call for Evidence until fairly recently. If you need anything clarifying, you have my email address.
Private industry determines project objectives by analyzing the needs of the business, setting a business strategy and calculating what that means in terms of projects, that’s what Directors do. Government sets project objectives by asking people what they want.
Since few people working for the Government seem to understand the needs of large organisations, even when people hit on the right item for a project, they consider tactically and rarely figure out the strategy.
The NHS, again, is a typical example. As conceived, the Spine is potentially vital strategic resource of information that will be used to improve the health service. However, the Spine should not be considered as medical software and it shouldn’t be used by doctors unless for medical management purposes. It is a management tool and should only use anonymized data; it is an end product and there are a variety of applications that need to be in place to feed it information. To make matters worse, NHS Digital, which is responsible for the Spine, does not have responsibility for the whole of the Health Service, only for some parts of the NHS, and the concept has been ruined by turning it into a tactical tool. Each area needs its’ own database for the individual set of medical information/records and there needs to be a secure method of transferring medial data from one are to another on a case-by-case basis.
There are valid reasons for how this has happened and I don’t actually blame NHS Digital. Trusts are responsible for their own IT so there is no coherence even across the NHS as each trust does its’ own thing. As there is no single entity determining IT strategy, NHS Digital cannot influence groups and organisations within the health service. Unable to solve the basic problems, NHS Digital has changed the project objective. Their latest business plan says they are making the information simpler so that patients can understand it and manage their own treatment. I’ve asked around and I can’t find anybody who wants to manage their own treatment. It means that the enormous amount of information in the spine will not be available to be used by techniques such as data warehousing or data science. This revised objective won’t happen anyway as the software that is needed to populate the database, does not exist and nobody is writing it. The introduction of NHSX, which looks as though it is supposed to cure some of this, will only make matters worse as it is another opportunity to create duplication of responsibility while still missing some important areas as there is still no coverage of the whole of the health service.
As another example, the team that was building the electronic prescribing element of the Connecting for Health programme did not talk to the chemists when they were designing the system. When I asked ‘why not?’, I was told that it was because they were private companies! I don’t think my comment that they were “trying to design a piece of string that only had one end” went down very well. It does explain why, when the preliminary software was introduced, that only about 40% of the prescriptions were readable by the recipient, which, (surprise, surprise!), usually turned out to be the chemists.
Yet this should have been one of the simplest of packages as it is basically solved by adding an attachment to an email. I was in a queue outside a chemist shop about two weeks ago and people were still complaining about failures that still occur and that multiple visits are often required because not everything has supplied. One transplant patient had had a whole page of items missed. This is after 18 years of development of a simple application.
It now takes my preferred chemist 5 days to produce my regular prescription from the time I send in my request for a repeat. If I go to the Doctors’ and pick up the prescription to drop off at the chemists’, it takes 7 days, because prescriptions are made up centrally and delivered to the shops.
The railways industry is supposedly privatized but is still being run as if it was a Government Department since the Government is providing most of the money and therefore thinks it is right to continue to run the industry. Does the rail industry have a business strategy or is it left to the companies.
The Project Strategy describes what you want to achieve and how you are going to achieve it. In other words – it is a plan and a sub-set of the Business Plan.
In line with the comments made previously under Business Strategy, the NHS 5 year plan appears to have been generated by asking people what they want and picking a few projects out at random. There is nothing about solving the main problems of the NHS has, such as the shortage of GPs, the (increasingly) long waiting lists, pathetic procurement systems or the terrible productivity of operating theatres; and there is no coherence between the projects. The sole reference to IT that I found in the 5 year plan stated that the NHS would use IT to improve things! That was it. Little thought seems to have been given to a strategy and the 5 year ‘plan’ is just a wish list.
It doesn’t help that the long term plan only covers part of the NHS and not the whole of the Health Service (I know I’ve made this point several times during this document, but it is important). As more examples, the team that produced the Spine (when it was Connecting for Health, prior to becoming NHS Digital) had nothing to do with the IT once a cable went through an outside wall into a trusts’ property, IT became the trusts’ responsibility. NHS Digital didn’t talk to the Trusts and the Trusts spent as little on IT as they could get away with. Hospital IT is notorious and the Spine is not getting populated with the information it should be receiving.
The thinking behind HS2 is an embarrassment and is just making the Government look foolish, the budget is out of control and even if it is successfully completed, the gains (as far as we know) will be minor. Going ahead with the project looks to be a purely political decision and totally impractical. The only gain that I have heard mentioned is a saving of 20 minutes on the journey between London and the North. The argument seems a little lightweight when it is required to support the spending of over £100Bn (and rising), what are the strategic gains? Are they worthwhile?
On another major project, ask the Home Office if anybody actually sat down and wrote down the activities that the NOM and ROMs would have to carry out when the Offender Management system was being implemented. None of them seemed to have any idea and didn’t understand the need. It is quite simple, if you don’t have a proper definition, there is no way you can have project objectives, no objectives means no plan and no plan guarantees project failure (look up the acronym for the military adage, PPPPPPP).
The single most important action that PowerGen undertook following privatisation was to change the nature of the contracts they placed.
The CEGB, like most organisations at the time, used ‘technical’ specifications which allowed the client body to micromanage the contractors. However, PowerGen decided that, firstly, they were paying the contractors to design and build the products so why not let them get on with it and, secondly, they had much more experience at it than PowerGen did. Allied to the concept of leaving risk where it could best be managed, PowerGen moved to Output (or Performance) Based Specifications, (OBS or PBS).
The idea is simple – tell the contractor/supplier what you want to achieve, when you want it by, the relevant quality standards to work to, agree the consideration, the bonuses for successful achievement of objectives and the penalties for failure, and let them get on with it. In return, the contractor tells you that he agrees to provide the product/service required to the relevant standard, to the agreed timescale for the agreed consideration. The process stills follows the normal competitive tendering process and, once the contractor is selected, he gets on with it.
Major contracts with the CEGB were between 300 and 600 pages long and I would hesitate to define any of them as successful. PowerGens’ major contracts were about 50 pages long and any subsequent problems were nothing to do with the contract. Only two jobs ran late over the ten years between privatisation and the company being taken over by E.on, both caused by technical failure during commissioning and neither of those was over budget.
One additional problem was considerably more subtle but causes more problems. Following a period up to the 60s, when private companies paid better than the Government, Government salaries rapidly moved ahead and the Government was later able to pick up the most highly qualified graduates, usually insisting that they had to be Grades 1 or 2.1.
We therefore had a ridiculous situation where the better qualified engineers were checking the work of their less qualified colleagues. As a result, they always wanted to change things and we used to argue that there were so many changes that the original contract was only an agreement to work together and we’d decide what to do as the job went along. Since the client didn’t want to pay for the changes as they were not in the budget, this led to considerable conflict and delay. See Section 8 on Change Control.
OBS contracts dramatically reduced the amount of change during projects, reduced spending and project duration.
A lawyer once told me that JCT contracts were designed to get people into court (where the lawyers could make money, everybody else involved loses). The same could be said of most of the other styles of contract and is a result of getting lawyers involved in what should be a mutually satisfactory agreement. The contract is a tool, just as much as anything used by a tradesman, and should be designed to produce the results that both parties want.
A prime example of the damage caused by poor contract strategy is the disaster of PFI contracts of which NPfIT was an example, in spite of being totally unsuitable for that type of contract. It went on till 2012 because the Government found that it couldn’t terminate it (because that is the nature of PFI contracts) in spite of it being a money pit.
One final point, contractors need to have faith that they can make a profit. If they don’t they go out of business and all their employees end up on the dole. The best way of making a profit is ‘repeat business’, contractors/suppliers don’t want to be the enemy. Give them a chance to show what they can do and get away from micromanagement.
It used to be accepted that the design of any project needed to be 70% complete before you actually started putting a spade in the ground (or whatever measure the project uses to mean actually starting work).
Apart from research projects or where there is a degree of uncertainty that needs to be resolved, it is now possible to carry out close to 100% of the design using object technology. There is a (relatively small) up front cost but the reduction in variations and modifications are substantial.
Using the right software means that the product can be built in virtual reality and all sorts of checks such as constructability, safety walk-throughs, clashing checks, continuity and practicality, can be carried out very quickly prior to anything being done.
Design is cheap; building is expensive; so get the problems sorted out at the design phase.
I carried out some research a few years ago and calculated that changing civil works after contraction had started, cost about 3 times the original; mechanical and electrical works cost about 7 times the original; electronic (which includes programming) items cost between 30 and 100 times the original (it was a time when solid-state was coming in so changing a minor item tended to affect a lot of the work).
The big problem is to stop the clients’ engineers thinking that they know better than the contractors’.
The contractor is responsible for performance; let him get on with it. (This duplicates to some extent, what I have written earlier about Output or Performance Based Specifications).
I will refer under another section about Government contracts making it difficult to define what the final project will look like and therefore impossible to design.
This is another vital project management function that does not sit well with the political environment. Looking for problems? Not done!
I have to admit that this one area I could not understand. Why would you not want to let your boss know that you have solutions to potential problems?
There is a peculiar belief that you shouldn’t even hint that the project has potential problems and yet consideration of the potential risks is an extremely cheap method of reducing problems.
Like project reporting, consideration of the risks only works properly if you have a plan in place as risk is only a thought about what might happen to the plan.
For clarity, an issue is a risk that comes to pass. Fortunately, most risks will have a date at which the risk goes away (usually after the achievement of a specific activity) and subsequent to that date, will never happen. Sometimes, changing the plan may obviate a risk. Part of the skill of the project manager is this type of risk management and most risks don’t happen.
Even where thought is given to Risks and Issues, it is not properly understood. For example, why does the I and PA have a separate specialisation covering Risks and Issues. It should be the Project Manager(s) and Planner(s) who have input to the contractor/supplier in building the register. As such, it is part of their jobs and the process of understanding the project(s). Since the contractor/supplier is carrying the risk under OBS contracts, he should manage it.
During my time with the Connecting for Health Programme, I once calculated that individual IT project managers were spending 60% of their time producing the incredibly detailed weekly reports which meant that less than 40% of their time was available for the actual management. It was less than 40% because there are always meetings that have to be prepared for and attended. Since there were hundreds of projects, the amount of information produced each week was enormous, most of it useless.
Many Governments (not just the UK) are only interested in this years anticipated outcome compared to the budget. I can understand that for Government departments, this information is important but I can’t understand how anybody can think that it is useful in monitoring projects.
There are two techniques that make life easier. The first is to use exception reporting. The most important information for any project manager is what is going wrong when compared to the plan Exception reporting means that you concentrate on problems. If things are going all right, there is no need to report on them (apart from a statement that they are OK so whoever is reading the report knows that you haven’t forgotten about it). This avoids the excess detail that is unnecessary and confuses rather than clarifies. If a problem is being dealt with, say so and move on. If you can’t deal with it, ask for help. The most important part of your bosses’ job is making sure you have the resources to solve problems. Note these resources are rarely directly about money, although there is often a cost. Usually, it is about a skill set that is not immediately available. The money is controlled by getting everything else right!
The second technique is the use of breakdown structures to tailor reports to the individual. Not everybody needs everything. Senior managers only need summaries, whereas team leaders need a lot of detail, but only those items relevant to the team. I remember working at a Shell site some years ago and they had a team with a handcart delivering the monthly report. One manager I talked to spent several hours each month sorting out the two pages he actually needed from the thousands he received. It was before the days of PCs and can be even worse nowadays as churning out long reports is easy.
Shell no longer gives everything to everybody. The civil service still does. An odd reason seems to be that if you somebody all the information, they can’t argue that they haven’t seen it. All that happens in reality, of course, is that they don’t bother looking at it.
It is worth looking at the current I and PA report. How does anybody use it to do anything useful?
It is ironic, as project management is supposed to be the management of change, that this area is the cause of so much strife.
Most modern Contracts are written in a way to reduce the need for change because it interferes with performance against the plan. This does not apply to research projects, by their very nature, change will occur. They should just be allowed a bigger contingency.
In Japan, it was fairly common for any potential changes to be noted during the project duration and, if they were still required, retrofitted. It was amazing, when checks were made at the completion of the project, how little actually need changing.
Civil service contracts are often so badly written that the project cannot be performed without major change during delivery. This has to stop.
They are also a source of significant conflict between the parties involved in a project. The client is concerned because he has no money for them (especially as Government contracts tend not to have contingency); the contractor, because he can rarely recover the true cost of a variation or modification; and sub-contractors, because they get screwed by the main contractor who needs to cover his losses.
Project Management is a team game, yet the parties involved in major projects for the Government don’t trust each other. There is an enormous level of resentment between the civil service and private contractors (both ways) and there is a huge amount of jealousy.
I have already referred to the Connecting for Health project team responsible for the Electronic Prescribing, refusing to talk to the pharmaceutical companies and this is exactly the sort of trouble this lack of trust causes.
When I started writing this commentary, I actually included a section as part of the introduction that stated that I didn’t believe that anything useful would happen because there was nothing that said how it would continue following the submission of the evidence apart from an interrogation of the CEO of the I and PA. What will that achieve? According to his annual report, there isn’t a significant problem that more of the same won’t cure (qv. Section 11). NHS Digital has already had a report from MacKinsey, so they won’t need anything!
So why am I wasting my (unpaid) time on this missive? I have to hope that someone will recognise that I am actually trying to be helpful, supported by eternal optimism.
In several countries, it is not uncommon for project personnel to share team building exercises or have nights out together. A prime example was the Japanese/Turkish Joint Venture, where each company puts on a performance for the Christmas show. All of us, clients and contractors ended up together on Youtube.
When things go wrong on a team-based project; people work together to put things right. On Government projects, when things go wrong, everybody seeks to apportion blame. Meanwhile the problem is ignored and gets worse. Why was Connecting for Health allowed to go on till 2012? (Oh, yes. It was the wrong type of contract and you couldn’t stop it until then!). On the Dungeness Magnox power station, my company carried out a ‘lessons learned’ exercise and discovered that there were two occasion during the build where it would have cheaper to raise the construction to the ground and start again.
The damage done to the UK IT industry by the dreadful management of IT projects is beyond belief and Government seems to have no idea. Companies that should have been World leaders have been kicked to the kerb and whole industries which should have existed (such as a comprehensive suite of health IT applications) do not exist. (I know it is not part of this exercise, but allowing the sale of Arm and Deepmind has worsened this distrust as the Government is obviously not bothered. Subsequent action is too little, too late. I have some ideas of my own but suspect I will trial them with the Americans).
I am not a fan of the CBI but I can understand why they would think the Government is more interested in appeasing foreign governments than promoting British interests. Letting the Chinese (who, incidentally, are dreadful at Project Management) build nuclear power stations in the UK, absolute madness. (Rant over).
Why do so many major Government projects have a finance person in charge? You obviously need accountants to keep track of costs but few that I have met have experience of managing major projects or programmes. In private industry, even SAP implementations tend to be managed by database specialists.
Projects are not managed by controlling the money and few finance people have the strategic understanding to realise this. It is actually the other way round – you control the money by managing the project properly!
An obvious example is my perennial favourite, NPfIT (later, Connecting for Health, and even later, NHS Digital) which had an accountant from PWC when it started, had another accountant following him, then had a banker and now has a commercial director (Please note that this latter is unchecked information as the name of the current Chair had not appeared on the web site and was not in the NHS Digital address book when I rang to check). Judging from the so-called business plan of 2018/19, senior level experience of major projects is still limited.
The only reason seems to be the strange fixation on annual budgets and ensuring that the money spent matches the forecast. Spending the money does not guarantee achievement!
Some years ago, I took over a project that was contracted to the Department of Defence and was shocked at the terrible state of it. The software didn’t work and the physical design was awful. I did sort out the software but it was too late to change the physical design. I was called over to see the MoD Project Manager and expected to get told that we weren’t going to be paid because it was so bad. Instead he told me that it was getting close to the end of the financial year and I need to get the invoices in as, otherwise, the money would no longer be available.
Obviously, he would have got in trouble if the money had remained unspent. I, of course, rang up our accountant and told him to get the invoices out immediately so he wouldn’t be in trouble.
I looked up Connecting for Health on Wikipedia. It is a scathing report but missed most of the problems. These are just some of those they missed:-
These examples are mostly hearsay, but if nothing else, demonstrate the lack of confidence that the project teams had in the management of the work.
Elsewhere, I have mentioned that the wrong contract was used for the Spine development; the refusal to talk to other stakeholders;
Never having heard of them before, in spite of being involved in major projects for years, I decided to look up the web site for the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.
I discovered that it is an important group, reporting to HM Treasury and the Cabinet! I also discovered that it has a bunch of people who are needed for the development of projects, such as business analysts, planners; and lots of other job titles, many with overlapping responsibility. This is typical of civil service organisation structures as it effectively means nobody is responsible for anything.
I realised on reading through it, that it is like one of those articles that newspapers confuse you with until you see the little notice hidden somewhere on the page that says ‘advertising’ and you realise that it is not actually an article. It was the introduction on page 2 that gave it away, and I quote, “The UK is unique in the world in having a cross-governmental understanding of the size, scope and viability of a well-established portfolio of major projects. We have a good track record of delivering against government priorities”. If this is true, why are you carrying out this ‘Call for Evidence’ exercise?
I would have thought the main reason for your call for evidence is because this is not true! Don’t get me wrong, the British civil service is by not the worst civil service in the World by any means. I have worked with worse.
This is not actually a report and is not useful for taking any action. Parts of it are just silly.
Three examples; first, the Medical Examiners Programme shouldn’t even be in the major projects list. It should be just a database report after the proper software has been implemented and, doing it out of sequence will cause much delay to the overall system and increase costs. It’s like starting to build a car with the alternator and adding the rest of the car bit by bit. The alternator won’t work until the whole car is built and on the road anyway. Secondly, some of the Defence Projects are so badly defined it will be impossible to determine when they are complete. How will it be controlled if it is being made up as you go along? (Unless I have this wrong and it confusing for security reasons?) And, finally, there is a section on page 5 which is entitled ‘Principles for project success’. Apart from the fact that the list is wrong, what on earth does ‘Being an intelligent client’ entail? Did somebody really think that sounded good?
There are lots of other things but it is getting to the stage where I need to finalise this evidence and submit it. The Annual Report (the current version is for 2019/20) is pretty much a waste of time. It supposed to provide transparency but doesn’t. It is just confusing and I can’t see the point unless it is to keep civil servants employed.
It is attempting to manage the delivery of projects by considering tasks instead of business needs. Get the fundamentals right and the rest will follow.
Much is made of the complexity of major projects and using this as an excuse for poor performance. With all due respect – this is rubbish.
I remember a management training course when the question was posed ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ The answer, of course, was ‘You cut it up into bite-sized pieces’!
Using breakdown structures is one way of doing it; another is modifying the scope so that the work scope is more easily managed. As an example of the first method, laying rail is a straightforward job, just split it into lengths (from A to B, B to C, etc.) and do the same with the catenary. Each station to be built or modified is independent. The same with bridges or underpasses. Suddenly, it’s a lot easier to manage.
Regarding the second technique, I’ve already mentioned that Connecting for Health was not ‘thousands’ of projects. It was about 50 that were repeated hundreds of times each. Just pick an area and get private industry to design produce the software and hardware to satisfy that small group of trusts. Once things have been successfully implemented, it is easy to spread the results across the country and you now have a group of experts who know what the problems are going to be and how to solve them.
There are two reasons for using private industry to produce the software. Firstly, if the exercise is successful, in can be paid for by selling the software abroad (which will also ensure there is a ready source of income towards the maintenance) and, secondly, the private company will continuously search for improvements in the software that could provide a commercial advantage.
Government departments would need to get involved in setting Standards (as in British Standards). NHS Digital (or possibly NHSX), for example, would have to be involved to make sure that packages that need to, talked to each other.
I have solutions but would expect to be paid for implementing them so this is pending resolution of a suitable contract.