OneOne Hundred Blog

The recent Budget suggests that the government will be cancelling major projects for the foreseeable future.  Is this the right approach? Well only if the original purpose and business benefits of the project are no longer required.  We don't go into major projects quickly or lightly they need an established business case and a great deal of money has been spent on them prior to the contract award.

Cancelling the building of schools will leave a legacy of poor facilities and will impact education far and away beyond the debt horizon - Ditto with hospitals.  We build them because we need them - we need them for all the reasons established by the business case and probably more so.

The public sector spends about £40bn on projects every year - well it did - and that sounds like a great deal of money.  If that money were to achieve the business outcomes that it was intended to achieve we would be able to significantly reduce that level of investment. But it does not - 70% of all projects fail to meet their objectives and often involve large cost overruns, and the majority of these project failures all demonstrated the signs of failure (established by similar projects) within the first 100 days of the project starting. Despite a decade of developing and applying project methodologies and tools we are still failing on a massive scale.

Rather than rushing to cancel projects we should be insisting on the introduction of a 100 day review for every project and turning the failing £bn's into genuine benefits for UKPLC. The reviews currently undertaken in the early project phases do not focus on the lessons learnt from the previous failures - nor do they directly measure the projects likelihood of success at the crucial 100 day point.

A formal review at 100 days need not be disruptive to the project it can be achieved within a matter of days.
If the impact of the 100 day reviews on the current failure level was only 10%, the financial consequences are sufficiently large to impact UK debt - or provide the infrastructure that we really need.

So rather than writing off the money spent to date on the projects, lets ensure they are properly focussed and realistically planned, and get on with meeting the UK's needs.