Hot projects
What makes some projects sizzle while others leave you feeling cold? Is it just about the size of the budget or the sense of urgency and mission? Andrew Saunders uncovers the secret sauce of projects that inspire deep dedication from their teams.
What makes a hot project – one people want to work on – and what can we learn from projects like these? The seemingly obvious answer to the first part is budget. Public interest and scrutiny tend to multiply as the number of noughts on the end of the bill gets larger.
But money isn’t everything – a project doesn’t have to come with a nine‑figure price tag to be high stakes and high profile. Take the overall winner of the 2020 APM Project Management Awards, the Counter Unmanned Aerial System at Heathrow Airport. Designed and delivered at breakneck speed to counter the threat of disruption by drones flown by protest groups, the budget wasn’t megaproject‑sized – it was in the tens of millions – but the level of jeopardy was disproportionately high. With 260,000 passengers a day using Heathrow in the peak summer season, the financial and reputational costs of being forced to suspend activity in the event of unauthorised drone flights are huge. It was enough to get any project team’s adrenalin pumping.
Highly urgent, highly public, highly exciting
Ben Hooper, programme manager for the counter‑drone system, recalls the night in September 2019 when the new radar‑based technology faced its first real test. A protest group called Heathrow Pause was threatening to hold a ‘drone party’ in the skies over the airport, something with the potential to stop all flights in and out of one of Europe’s busiest air hubs. “Suddenly there’s media attention, the police are standing up 1,000 extra officers to help, there’s a huge liaison with airport security – even the MOD stepped in with their own countermeasures.”
With the new drone detection system only just operational and still with restricted coverage, tension in the control room was running pretty high. “It was a fly‑or‑die moment. The police chief operations officer was sat right next to our controller; we even had Heathrow’s head of comms there, because they knew the CEO would be phoning them about it in the morning. We had tested the system, but we hadn’t had time to fly drones over every inch of the airport to make sure we had full coverage. It could have gone either way.”
In the event, the technology worked perfectly, the airport remained fully operational and Hooper and his team heaved a sigh of relief. “From that moment on, all the external stakeholders had real faith that the system worked – and worked well,” he says. It was the vindication of a project delivered in an unconventional way to tackle a novel and unconventional threat, driven by executive interest from the very top. “The CEO effectively said: ‘Sort this out. How much money do you need?’ I had an executive order – basically a letter with his signature on it – that I could wave around to get people to move. Although I didn’t have to do that often because everyone understood the situation.”
But even in such exceptional circumstances, Heathrow’s established project gateways system was not subverted completely, but rather modified and accelerated. The most important aspect of the project was the realisation of benefits – in this case, providing drone detection as soon as possible. So mobile drone detector units were deployed to provide at least some coverage while the main network of fixed sensors was being installed. The gateway methodology was tweaked to speed up delivery. “We went straight in at gateway three – the final investment decision – and we also started work on site at gateway three, which you wouldn’t normally do until gateway five.”
Flexible waterfall
The major lesson, says Hooper, is that flexibility and agility can coexist with necessary procedural controls. “We tailored the project to suit the context. It was still a waterfall methodology, but delivered in a flexible and agile way. The important controls were still there, but we achieved things in a few weeks that would normally have taken months or years.”
It’s a view that ties in with the research on megaproject success and failure by Saïd Business School’s Bent Flyvbjerg. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Flyvbjerg cites examples such as the Madrid Metro and the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada to argue that breaking big projects into smaller discrete modules is a success characteristic, precisely because it allows benefits to start accruing well before the project is complete.
A clear and urgent mission
But perhaps the hottest of hot projects are those rarities that are both high budget and very high stakes. Take the UK vaccine procurement and roll‑out programme, a scheme where not only huge sums of money (around £13bn), but also thousands of lives, depended on fast, effective and perfectly coordinated action. Having to take fast decisions about which vaccines to order, very early and with limited information sounds like a potential recipe for disaster, but a public health crisis on the scale of the pandemic necessitates a fast‑tracked permission process, says Nick Elliott, former director general of the Vaccine Taskforce and now a director at Turner & Townsend.
“You can get access to decision‑makers more quickly in a crisis, especially in a government environment where process normally rules. It allows you to play your cards in a slightly different way. People recognise the importance of delivering outcomes so you can push the process and be more agile.”
Clarity on what those outcomes should be from day one helped guide effective decision‑making – for example, there was no point investing in a vaccine that couldn’t be ready in a few weeks, even if it was shown to be effective. “Government projects tend to be process‑driven rather than outcomes‑driven, but we set the Vaccine Taskforce up for success right from the start – we were absolutely clear on what success looked like and what our goals were, and we worked backwards from that.”
Getting the right people in place at the top was another critical factor, Elliott says. “I had spent four years running defence programmes so I knew how long things could take, but I also knew which buttons to press. I knew that if we said, ‘We’re not going to follow government process because we haven’t got time’, we would come up against a brick wall. And Kate Bingham [chair of the taskforce] came from a venture capital background, so she knew the clinical and drug development side. Between us, we had a really good understanding of the environment we were operating in.”
Yet not every project will have a nationally important mission or a galvanising sense of urgency, so how do you achieve success without the excitement of being a headline‑making piece of work? It’s about creating a shift towards an environment that fosters success, as highlighted by APM’s new report Dynamic Conditions for Project Success. The report looks at project success through a post‑Covid lens and identifies nine dynamic conditions that can help you sprinkle some gold‑dust on any project. These include ‘hard’ project management favourites such as the use of technology and data, contracts, knowledge management and the importance of training, while also encompassing ‘soft’ factors like interpersonal skills, diversity, agility and team ethos, which are perhaps not so commonly equated with a project professional’s toolkit.
Diversity
Elliott echoes the importance of diversity of thought, citing the wide range of cross‑industry capability and experience that was built into the Vaccine Taskforce’s steering committee. This 11‑strong group brought together experts in manufacturing, medical devices, clinical research and the NHS. It included individuals with backgrounds in everything from supply chain management to corporate M&A, and even a former ambassador to advise on developing international relationships for vaccine delivery overseas. “It was a naturally diverse team that gave us every capability we needed at that level,” Elliott says.
Working on a hot project
As well as agility and telescoping processes, hot projects can also teach you the benefits of being open to innovative ways of getting things done in trying circumstances, says Gary Poole, group head of programmes for aerospace systems business Meggitt. He was a member of the cross‑industry consortium that came together to scale up the production of ventilators at the start of the pandemic. One of their key challenges was setting up new manufacturing lines across the country so that production runs that pre‑Covid might have been measured in tens of ventilators could be ramped up to thousands of machines in the space of a few weeks.
Testing, inspecting and certifying these new production lines was made much easier thanks to the use of augmented reality (AR) Hololens technology from Microsoft. One operative with an AR headset could be the eyes and ears for a whole team of experts dialling in remotely, dramatically speeding up the process and minimising the need for travel amid pandemic restrictions. “Like most project managers, I am a pretty structured kind of guy, and people who come up with what look like wild and wacky ideas can tend to frustrate me,” Poole admits. “I had to challenge myself to be more open to those ideas – that’s where things like using Hololens came from, and it was really key for us.”
The power of a hot project
And despite the substantial pressures and heavy workload involved, Poole reckons that being part of a hot project has its compensations. “I’ve worked on a number of high‑profile projects in my career and in my view they are easier to deliver than normal ones, because they take priority and get the resources they need.”
For Elliott, one of the most lasting impressions from his time on the Vaccine Taskforce was the power of a ‘burning platform’ to bring people together with a single overriding aim. But surely the problem is that most projects simply don’t have such a compelling goal – how do you galvanise effort when the burning platform simply isn’t there? “Often they are there, we just don’t recognise it. Of course, the Vaccine Taskforce was a bit different, but the outcomes of many projects – whether they are financial or something else – are actually really important and we should treat them that way.”
So perhaps the most universal lesson is that, with the right approach and mindset, every project can be a hot project – or a much warmer one, at the very least.
Tips for fostering dynamic project success
- Creating the right environment for success doesn’t have to cost a fortune. As APM’s Dynamic Conditions for Project Success research reveals, there are some simple actions that all project professionals can take that are low cost and easy to implement.
- Informal mentoring. Take time out of delivering your current project to mentor and support the next generation of project managers and build the future talent pipeline in your organisation. If you think you are too busy, remember that mentoring is a two-way street – you will learn as much from your mentee as they do from you.
- Encourage diversity. The greater the diversity of thought, opinions and backgrounds that can be included in a project team, the smaller the risk of groupthink and the more thoroughly tested and robust its ideas will be. Diversity can generate challenge and potential disagreement, but project professionals with good leadership can channel this into constructive debate and ultimately a greater chance of success.
- Adopt financial sustainability as a mindset. Always think lean and look for efficiency savings. Avoiding process duplication saves money and time as well as leading to faster outcomes.
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