In this video, we will explore how delivery organisations can assess whether they are fit for purpose by looking at best practice developed by the UK government in partnership with industry and the University of Leeds. Often, projects underperform due to poor planning in their early stages. Also, some project teams fail to understand the complexities of the wider context of the project and do not appreciate the capability needed to manage the delivery environments in which they are operating. This can lead to inappropriate decisions being made, resulting in inefficiency and poor value for money in the later project stages. To avoid this waste in major projects and programmes, it's important to align delivery capability to the management needs of the project. Too little or inappropriate capability can expose the project to risk. But conversely, high levels of capability across all areas is not necessarily good value for money. So, what do we mean by delivery capability? It describes the model and approaches applied by the organisations involved in delivering a project or its benefits. This includes the sponsor, client, asset manager, and supply chain. To better understand delivery environment complexity, we can look at the factors that interact to create a complex environment. Complexity can be thought of as a number of elements which come together to increase the trickiness of achieving the project or programme objectives. Complex environments, such as those associated with major projects, are different from merely complicated projects or environments. You cannot manage a complex environment by managing its parts separately. Complex environments must be conceived of and managed as a whole, recognising how the elements of the environments are interconnected. Having said that, it is important to recognise what each of those elements are and when they come into play. In major projects, complexity can emerge across a number of key areas. To name a few, complexity can be generated in relation to: the project requirements, if the delivery team is not clear about what is required of them and how this works towards meeting the project objectives; and the stakeholders: is there a significant number of stakeholders with high levels of influence and differing expectations? And another, often underestimated area, the extent of organisational change required. Does the project involve a significant change in the way the delivery team normally conducts its work? Once we've understood what is contributing to the complexity of the major project delivery environment, an overall profile can be created. From this profile, delivery capability can then be designed and developed across the participating organisations. Thus, heading off some of the downstream issues in performance that are symptomatic of poor project initiation. To help delivery teams understand and align delivery capability and complexity, the UK government in conjunction with academia and industry has developed the Project Initiation Routemap or Routemap for short. The Routemap is an approach that uses the principles of aligning complexity and capability to assess a project team's readiness to deliver. The Routemap not only addresses common issues in the early stages of major project development, but also encourages project teams to focus on the whole project, rather than allowing decisions to be made in isolation or in functional silos, such as engineering, operations or human resources. This often happens as project teams find it easier to focus on the tasks needed to deliver a solution like setting up a process, procedure, practice, and technology, rather than designing the whole organisation needed for delivery. This can mean that important enabling parts are omitted or not consistently understood like the project vision, the delivery culture, and the skills for delivery. The Routemap is unique because it takes a socio-technical perspective of project initiation. It helps projects to look at creating the environment and organisation needed, considering goals, vision, people, practice, technology, culture, and processes needed for delivery. It also supports early stage project decision making by assessing complexity and current and required capability. From this, we can analyse gaps and identify best practice. It's important to note that the Routemap takes a project specific focus and acknowledges that there is no one solution to a problem or need, but there are characteristics common to both successful and unsuccessful project delivery. The Routemap approach works particularly well in situations where there is a high chance that capability and complexity are misaligned. For example, we are more likely to see misalignment of capability and complexity when a project is new to an organisation. For instance, if it involves something novel, or a different way of working or if the project is on the significantly larger scale than those previously undertaken.
