微密圈

I was delighted to see the publication of the 10-year infrastructure strategy and the government recognising the importance of infrastructure to improving the life opportunities of the country. What I found disappointing was that it did not dedicate any time to addressing a common point of failure in such projects 鈥� public sector capability that is too often, through no fault of their own, 鈥渇at and/or dumb鈥�.

While much space was dedicated to the work of NISTA to ensure that the strategy is delivered and provide assurance, nothing was said about how these projects will be delivered and the capability needed to do so. To achieve those improved life opportunities for the country, we need more than NISTA. We need a better way to be the client in order to deliver all public sector projects successfully.

I have spent a large majority of my career working for client organisations, mainly in the public sector, and of that a large proportion of 鈥減op-up鈥� clients: HS2, East West Rail and more recently, supporting the New Hospital Programme. Much has been written over many years about how to be an intelligent client 鈥� or capable owner, if you prefer.

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And I have spent too many hours of my life talking with people who have limited experience of major capital delivery about whether one should be a thin client or a thick client. (For the uninitiated, a thin client has a small permanent staff and procures something like a programme development/delivery partner, while a thick client instead hires that capability as permanent staff.) In the public sector, you sometimes also have to face these questions alongside restrictions on headcount, budgets, salaries and often all three.

In the major projects that I have been involved with, I have also observed a tendency to start everything from scratch: new delivery models, new processes, new systems, new governance. Many years ago, I had reflected on why everything seemed to take so long to deliver compared to my banking days. I realised that, when I was arranging project finance loans for power plants and telecoms networks, we were literally cutting and pasting the common elements from the last deal and only adapting them for the unique features of the current project.

I have found this need to reinvent the wheel particularly frustrating in the project management office/project controls space in government projects because it means that we are doing a terrible job at compiling comparable data as we keep starting from scratch

We knew that 80-90% of what we were putting in place would work because we did it the last time, and it also allowed us to focus on the stuff that might emerge as a different risk. Yet there is some sort of strange ego thing on capital projects that means that, if we haven鈥檛 created it ourselves, it鈥檚 not going to be good enough.

I have found this need to reinvent the wheel particularly frustrating in the project management office/project controls space in government projects because it means that we are doing a terrible job at compiling comparable data as we keep starting from scratch. When I was developing commercial offices, we had comparable data across a huge array of buildings, which was instrumental in understanding where there were outliers in costs so that we could focus on how to bring the costs back into line; like how we focused on those unique risks in my banking days.

Establishing new clients for every government project and continuing to debate its form wastes time and money. Once a project is delivered, the project teams all disburse and work on other things. Despite our endless 鈥渓essons learnt鈥� exercises, I have found that these are mainly performative and those lessons tend to live on shelves gathering dust, rather than in the minds of the team working on the next project.

Therefore, I believe that it is time to create a national capital projects delivery unit 鈥� or a single intelligent client organisation that can deliver national and local projects across the country. Despite all of our talk of intelligent clienting, we seem to fail miserably at focusing on developing the capability that would allow us to consistently be one.

Clienting is a different set of skills than policy creation, sponsorship and construction delivery. Yet it is not treated as a desired profession that people can proudly build their careers around, despite being the entity that is making the key decisions on what will be delivered.

In my experience, we tend to emulate the structures of the client as if we are the contractor, focused on on-site delivery. However, that is what we procure contractors to do for us, and no matter how thick a client we are, the public sector is still not going to become a contractor and deliver the inputs needed to complete the project.

Policy making and sponsorship involves establishing the outcomes that we are trying to achieve, but they are neither engaging with stakeholders nor procuring the supply chain.

The client role 鈥� thin, thick, intelligent or otherwise 鈥� is unique among the parties. It is the entity that develops the supply chain and then translates the sponsor鈥檚 outcomes into the detailed outputs to be procured from the supply chain.

It is the only entity which can and should engage with stakeholders to build political support throughout the project鈥檚 lifecycle and also engage with local communities to ensure that it is defining the outputs correctly for each community鈥檚 benefit. It is accountable for the vast majority of the decisions that result, whether or not the outcomes are achieved, and ultimately takes all of the risk, despite any forms of contractual risk transfer.

As many projects are delivered by local authorities or other government entities that don鈥檛 often deliver capital projects, having a starter kit 鈥� along with a team that has used it before 鈥� should help avoid the typical start of project chaos and the traditional finger pointing between the client and the first set of advisors

Establishing a single, national capital projects delivery unit will also save millions on every project by establishing a core PMO/project controls function which can be rolled out at the start of every project: a PMO-in-a-box starter kit, if you will.

As many projects are delivered by local authorities or other government entities that don鈥檛 often deliver capital projects, having a starter kit 鈥� along with a team that has used it before 鈥� should help avoid the typical start of project chaos and the traditional finger pointing between the client and the first set of advisors: the client complains that the advisors were terrible and not giving them what they want, but the client is also at fault for not actually knowing what they want in those early days! Project initiation time could be radically shortened, and we could get to delivery much quicker.

A PMO-in-a-box will allow us to consistently provide three things: a golden thread from strategy to deliverables which can provide a north star throughout the programme in order to avoid scope creep; comparable data which will allow us to understand costs and programmes while managing designs as they develop to avoid cost overruns; and a pipeline which could be used to help the supply chain plan their work and develop needed delivery capability.

Most importantly, a capital projects delivery unit would treat clienting as the important profession that it should be: one with a career path, clear personal development opportunities and the ability to take pride in being a successful public servant, something that we seem to be in very short supply of these days. It should increase public sector delivery capability by professionalising clienting and greatly increase the changes of delivery success.

In a world where our communities are desperate to see positive changes from their government, if we don鈥檛 establish this type of organisation, we may be destined to remain a fat, dumb client forever.

Beth West is on 微密圈鈥檚 Funding the Future advisory panel, she is a former commercial director of HS2, head of development at Landsec and chief executive of East West Rail