Major Projects Association – Détails, épisodes et analyse

This episode delves into the critical role that business-to-business relationships play in the success of major projects. Drawing on insights from our seminar Do we have the Capability we need for the new types of Major Projects in the pipeline? and MIGSO-PCUBED's recent research, conducted in partnership with UCL, on the importance of business-to-business relationships, we explore whether we possess the necessary skills and collaboration to tackle the ambitious projects of today and the future.

Joining Andy Murray, Executive Director of the Major Projects Association, is David Whitmore, Managing Consultant at MIGSO-PCUBED. They discuss the findings from MIGSO-PCUBED's and UCL's joint research. Their discussion covers the importance of collaboration and relationships in project delivery and the key factors that influence project success. They look into how strategic and transactional relationships impact project outcomes, the challenges of aligning contracts with desired relationships, and the importance of measuring and managing these relationships effectively. 

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Links

MIGSO-PCUBED's RelationSHAPE

No More Heroes report 

Do we have the Capability we need for the new types of Major Projects in the pipeline? Highlights report 

McKinsey's Beyond Performance 2.0: A Proven Approach to Leading Large-Scale Change 

David Whitmore Strategic Advisor

David is a project & programme management practitioner with a unique mix of safety critical design, procurement and safety case expertise. He has a proven track record of transforming organisations and leading teams of people engaged in delivering complex, high technology projects.

Prior to joining MIGSO-PCUBED and following 7 years in the high voltage power transmission industry, David held director level positions with Rolls-Royce, Horizon Nuclear Power and Atkins working on nuclear major projects including design, manufacture, construction and in-service support projects. He led the project and programme management function for Rolls-Royce’s Submarines business and introduced innovative collaborative working arrangements with client organisations and supply chain companies. In Atkins David led the nuclear engineering function including a secondment to Horizon Nuclear Power as Engineering Director before being appointed as the Major Projects Director for the Atkins Nuclear business.

In MIGSO-PCUBED he is a Strategic Advisor to the CEO. He is developing new thinking for the delivery of major projects in the UK context and he has published a number of academic papers on the transformation of major project delivery. In 2020 he was seconded into Veolia Nuclear Solutions to lead the recovery of the Fukushima inspection programme.

If you would like to know more about the research discussed in the podcast or would like to get involved, please email david.whitmore@migso-pcubed.com.

In this episode, we are delighted to have Lawrence Rowland join us again, one year on from the first What can ChatGPT do for major projects? episode. 

Lawrence, a project data/AI specialist, talks to Andy Murray, Executive Director of the Major Projects Association, to revisit their discussion from a year ago and explore the advancements in AI technology, particularly focusing on OpenAI’s latest models.

Lawrence has been actively experimenting with AI and shares his insights and practical examples of using AI to enhance project management processes. Lawrence and Andy also discuss the potential future impact of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) on the industry.

This is the third in our series of podcasts on AI leading up to our Annual Conference AI is the answer. Now what’s the question? in October.

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Links

A selection of Lawrence's LinkedIn posts:

Project execution strategy and testing the research results

Consulting many documents: Tactic one is RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) with ai assistants (or in custom GPT); Tactic two is in context learning (the conference example)

Two GPTs talk to each other, one with Strategy documents, the other with Kindle clippings

GPT agents perform roles on the UK rail reform project (post 7 is here, including links to all earlier posts). And here they are talking in a meeting to each other 

How to use multiple custom GPTs as proto agents

The first type of agent that can go away and think for you and message you later is now possible with o1, once they allow it to think for arbitrary amounts of time

The second type of agent (Replit agent builds a decision app based on ontology)

A Manifesto for running projects with AI in 2024 Manifesto (full) 

AI in the Knowledge Economy paper 

Claude artefact (apps) you can create in Sonnet 3.5

John Schulman on AGI and ASI (YouTube)

About Ceefax:

Ceefax demo

Ceefax: What life was like before the internet (BBC)

Paying tribute to Ceefax (BBC)

Lawrence Rowland

Lawrence began as an engineer on large capital projects with WSP and Motts, and moving onto Bechtel and Booz Allen. He spent ten years in project and portfolio management with CPC and Pcubed, before transitioning to data analytics and AI for projects, working originally for Projecting Success. He now helps project services firms find relevant immediate AI applications for their business.

Follow him for daily posts on how to get started on LinkedIn or write to him at lawrence.rowland@reactai.com.

Tony Slater is Managing Director of SMP Alliance, the collaborative organisation set up by National Highways, Jacobs, WSP, BMJV, Balfour Beatty, Costain and Fluor, to deliver the smart motorways programme.

In conversation with Al Simmonite from Advance Consultancy, Tony tells the story of the Alliance and the challenge of creating an integrated, single entity; one that included National Highways and its key design and construction partners.

He covers:

• the value of the Alliance - a delivery model within which every partner wins or they all lose
• the aspects of collaboration that enable the Alliance to deliver its outcomes and how they were agreed on
• the power of common purpose and the new ways of working associated with the Alliance
• how to make it easy for people to navigate across organisational boundaries and work together
• the significance of an outcomes-based approach in identifying and recognising achievements as key progress
• the reality of individual and collective accountability 
• the Alliance learning model for sharing lessons and good practice
• the nature and role of Alliance leadership

In this podcast episode on the topic of change and delivery at pace, Andy Murray interviews project delivery experts from the pharmaceutical industry: Denise Moody of the Pharmaceutical Industry Project Management Group, Fraser MacFarlane from GSK, and Danie Du Plessis of Kyowa Kirin International.

During their conversation, we learn:

• the imperative and the challenge of focus and prioritization
• how a highly innovative industry uses a mix of waterfall and agile against the backdrop of a strict regime of regulation
• why organisations die of indigestion rather than starvation
• how to manage projects in an industry where multiple projects will die, very few projects will get to success and where spending on projects is in the billions
• the challenge of bringing new critical projects into the portfolio and the need to terminate other projects to provide the requisite space and resources
• the opportunity to things faster by doing them concurrently, rather than sequentially
• the five Cs of successful change

Gareth Parkes, Head of Data and Analytics at Sir Robert MacAlpine, interviews Ed Burns, CCO at Mafic, Luis Lattuf and Yixue Shen, both researchers at WMG, to help us understand where project data analytics is going and what are the practical applications, obstacles and opportunities presented by the fast moving technology.

During their conversation, we learn about Mafic's real world application of data and what they have learned about the problem of trust, the need for both organisation and users to derive value from the tech, and how the power of positive motivation is encouraging uptake along with fundamental changes in management assumptions and style. 

We also hear the evidence of the importance of the technology enablers: ease of use and usefulness and ways of overcoming the barriers to adoption; as well as discover the difference between artificial intelligence and machine learning, and how the latter can be used to predict project performance.

Join Andy Murray, Executive Director of the Major Projects Association; Jenni MacKenzie, Commonwealth Games Senior Programme Manager; Mark Russell, Chief Executive of The Children's Society , Dr Simon Addyman, Associate Professor at UCL; and Deirdre Fox, Non-Executive Director at Advance Consultancy as they explore collaboration and leadership in major projects.

During their wide-ranging discussion, they cover:

• How the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games used collaborative leadership to deliver, despite the Covid pandemic, a curtailed schedule and the need to descope parts of the original plan
• Why collaboration is a strategic imperative for The Children's Society and how they deliver 80 different services to 50,000 children with and through others
• The importance of co-creation and co-design 
• The need for a North Star for what (collective) success looks like
• What time and means you have available for teams to come together across organisational boundaries
• The role of the generous and incomplete leader within all of this.

Professor David Clutterbuck recently celebrated his 75th birthday (and published his 75th book). In this wide-ranging Masterclass he shares his good humoured and razor sharp insights from nearly 50 years of coaching and mentoring.

• a range of models such as The Diversity Awareness Ladder, the five different levels of interaction we have with other people;
• how, as a coach or a mentor, you can help people have the conversations they need to have;
• the problem , in the context of complexity and collaboration, of organisational reward systems that remain focused on the individual rather than the team;
• the challenge of organisational leaders who are unable to think systematically;
• the ubiquity of HR bling, for example: succession plans (that aren’t worth the paper they are written on); performance reviews (that simply provide managers with a formal structure to hide behind rather than have the conversations they need to have);
• the five levels of coaching which rise to (the fifth level) coaching teams of teams in large projects; where coaching enables the formal and informal conversations between teams (and where the informal conversations are the more important);
• the concept of rapid teaming: enabling temporary teams, which may only be in place for six months, to hit the ground running and perform from Day One;
• ways in which coaches and mentors will need to adapt to respond to changing contexts and technology such as AI and Automation.

In the second part of our Annual Conference podcast, Andy Murray interviews Nick Smallwood, CEO of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, on how to change the way people think about delivery to make what you do 'nothing less than world class'.

In a wide-ranging interview, they discuss topics such as benchmarking, project and programme leadership, risk versus reward, and what project organisations look like when 'curious leaders enable communities of curiosity'; facilitating new thinking and the adoption of innovative tools, processes and approaches.

Every major project encourages an unwavering focus on successful delivery. Whilst this has the advantage of generating continual forward momentum and progress, it carries with it a real risk: the creation of an echo chamber.

In an echo chamber we remain fixed in our own limited bubble, unhearing or sceptical of any voices from 'outside our group' who may be advocating a different approach, questioning elements of our model or our delivery plan and playing the critical role of Devil's Advocate.

The Major Projects Association annual conference in January 2023 explored the phenomenon of the 'echo chamber':

• defining the concept and its impact on project delivery organisations
• exploring how the echo chamber manifests itself and the behaviours it engenders
• looking at the antidote to echo chambers - encouraging diversity and inclusion, making time for reflection, listening to sceptical voices, tackling confirmation bias and 'not invented here' syndrome
• discussing the skills and new behaviours needed by everyone from the lowliest member of the team to the leader
• reflecting on the case example of Sellafield and how a historically risk-averse organisation worked to build a new model and a new culture to embrace change and innovation.

The podcast episode, the first of two, features Andy Murray, Executive Director of the Association, interviewing Professor Harvey Maylor of Oxford Said Business School; Andrea Powell of EY; Lauralee Doughty of Sellafield; and Richard Corderoy of the Oakland Group.

In the second episode, Andy interviews our keynote speaker from the conference to pick up and explore the ideas of the echo chamber  in the context of the work of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.

In the latest episode from our podcast series spun out of the Association events programme, Andy Murray interviews James Stewart from Agilia Infrastructure Partners, Paul Innes from Grant Thornton, and Stewart Westgate of Boston Consulting Group. In their discussion of how to make major projects investable they explore the wide range of contractual models that have emerged over the last 30 years and explain:

• The underlying theme of confidence and some of the things that underpin it which you can't put on a simple scorecard
• The importance of 'the right people/right team in improving confidence
• The role of the sponsor and the dealmaker and some of the capabilities they need

In an environment in which investor confidence has taken a battering over recent years and where risk appetite is at an all-time low, finding ways to demonstrate the appeal and affordability of your project and crafting the right story to engage investors is a fundamental capability.