News analysis - The James Webb Space Telescope is Go

Hubble’s replacement has travelled a million miles from earth and is preparing to take groundbreaking images of the cosmos.

A joint project between the European Space Agency, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, the powerful telescope is ready to collect data about the distant universe after its massive kite‑shaped sun shield was unfurled and its 18 hexagonal mirror segments moved into place. The first tests of the near‑infrared camera on board the telescope were conducted successfully in February, with the hope that clear images of a perfectly focused star will be captured by June.

“On a mission as large and complex as this, almost every moment is critical,” Bill Ochs, NASA’s project manager for the telescope, told Project, although he singled out the testing of the observatory vibration and acoustics in the rocket, and the final folding of the sun shield into its stowed and launch configurations, as particularly nail‑biting. The biggest project management challenge so far, he said, has been “balancing all the testing and risk mitigation required for mission success versus budget and schedule.”

Explaining his project management approach, Ochs said: “Always listen to your team – don’t assume you are smarter than them – and from there you can make informed decisions at critical points. Also, you need to protect your technical team from the pressures coming from above when it comes to maintaining schedule. Risk mitigation, even at the cost of project schedule, is key to success.”

Elizabeth line on track

With the central London section planned to open this summer, it’s time to consider what the £18.9bn Crossrail project’s legacy will be.

The Elizabeth line entered its final phase of testing in February and is within months of opening – as long as its running is “flawless”, said Andy Byford, the boss of Transport for London. “Better to take an extra couple of weeks, after how long Londoners have had to wait, than have people loving the surroundings but disappointed by the reliability,” he told The Guardian in February. “Some days it is 98 per cent on time, but some days have been 80 per cent, and that’s not good enough.”

Twelve passenger‑less trains are already running every hour between Reading and Paddington in the west and Shenfield and Liverpool Street in the east. By the end of the year, the plan is that trains from the east will run as far as Paddington while those from the west will terminate at Abbey Wood. Next year, the whole line will be joined up to make a single railway, completing the project, with each train carrying up to 1,500 passengers.

“We are now in the trial operations phase where our staff are working through 150 practical scenarios, ranging from what happens in the event of an active shooter, to what do you do if you lose all of the escalators, all the way to full mass evacuations,” Byford told The Times. The Elizabeth line’s 10 new central London stations are also being prepared for use. Of Paddington’s glass‑roofed station, Mark Wild, the chief executive of Crossrail, said it was “epic, a beautiful outcome”.

Future‑proofing

The stations and trains have been designed with the ability to cater for increasing passenger numbers, and station circulation spaces have been established with forecast passenger numbers plus a percentage uplift, which means they will be appropriate for decades beyond the opening date. The station platform tunnels have also been designed and built for additional train carriages without new excavation, and the trains are also capable of having two more carriages added. The new signalling has been designed so that the service can be upgraded to 30 trains per hour.

But the delayed megaproject has had its share of problems. In August 2020, the outgoing Crossrail board warned of a £1.1bn budget overrun, and the government had to loan £825m to complete the project. Bond Street station was three months behind schedule and has been separated out from the opening of the rest of the line. It will instead be ready in late 2022. The current Crossrail scheme was first conceived in the early 1990s, but it wasn’t until 2008 that the Crossrail Act finally gained royal assent, with construction beginning in 2009.

An act of will

In an interview with Project in 2019, Crossrail’s chairman Tony Meggs put the project’s veer off‑course down to the “classic project management paradox” of the balance between the huge self‑belief necessary to make progress on the one hand, and pragmatism about what can actually be done in the time available on the other.

“A big project is an act of will, and you need people with a very strong will who can run it, manage it and move it forward,” he said. “Crossrail was very successful in the past in that it had very strong leadership and determination, but those same characteristics caused problems at the end. You have a project team who really do need to be optimistic, hard‑charging and focused, but you also need a bunch of more sceptical people doing the independent assurance who say, ‘Oh but this is so very difficult, are you sure?’”

Complex systems of systems

Simon Bennett, head of learning legacy for Crossrail, tells Project that one of the major challenges faced by the project was underestimating the scale and complexity of the railway systems and integration. The Elizabeth line consists of three sections – the newly built central section, and the existing east and west surface sections. Each of these has a different signalling system and the new trains need to be able to work with them all, including smoothly transitioning from one to another while trains are moving across London at high frequency, he explains.

The trains also need to work with station systems such as platform doors, and the stations themselves are complex systems of systems. “The sheer scale of integrating, assuring and testing all these interconnected systems was underestimated. A key project management lesson is to maintain a focus on those final phases of the programme right from the start,” Bennett says.

Several clear project management lessons have already being taken up by government and industry following reports by the Department for Transport, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, the National Audit Office and others, he notes. “One is to schedule projects with completion windows rather than fixed end dates – the challenge to clients and project managers will be to use this new approach effectively. Another is the systems approach. There is increasing focus on treating projects as systems, and systems of systems, and the Crossrail experience will be useful to demonstrate how important that is and how a systems approach can be implemented.”

The team benefited from the experience of people and organisations who had been involved in the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and the Jubilee line extension, and as the project moved into delivery more experience became available from the London 2012 Olympics and the Thameslink programme.

“One of the major benefits of the increasing activity in major projects is that there is now much more opportunity for effective knowledge transfer, including through partners like APM,” Bennett adds. “Personally, I’m proud of the learning legacy. We’ve moved knowledge sharing on beyond the already excellent work of the Olympics Learning Legacy and passed the baton to HS2, who are sharing the lessons from an even earlier point in delivery.”

Further reading

Read Karen Elson’s article, ‘How HS2 is helping embed the learning legacy as an industry standard approach’, on the APM blog.

Crossrail chairman Tony Megg’s advice on megaprojects

1. Pay close attention to the risks throughout the project. “When you’re so committed [to completing a project], almost come hell or high water, there’s always a risk that you start to filter out information that doesn’t agree with your desire. And then the information that comes to you starts to get filtered before you even see it.”
2. Be an open book to the sponsors. “We’re totally transparent with our sponsors and give them feedback every single day. That openness is quite different from the past and from the way that most major projects are run.”
3. All projects should be treated as digital projects. “One of the things I really believe is that all projects now are essentially digital, and infrastructure projects should be treated as systems integration projects from the get‑go.”
4. Remember the wider benefits. “What I always say to the suppliers and the team is that we’re not just doing this for ourselves. We’re not just doing it for Crossrail or London. We’re doing it for this whole industry for the long term.”

Inflation as a project risk

High inflation, rising energy costs and a weakening economy will be the story of 2022 – so should you prepare for the extra risk?

After a long and stable period of low inflation, UK inflation hit a 30‑year high of 5.5 per cent in January. The Office for National Statistics said inflation was last higher in March 1992.

“The government might have hoped that the fading of the pandemic’s clouds would leave a sunlit economy. But, as is their wont, events got in the way. The economy, the people and the government face hard times,” wrote the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator Martin Wolf in February.

The growth in prices of imported energy is a real risk to the UK economy, and employers are set to increase wages at their fastest pace in almost a decade this year. While the risk to household budgets is real, should professionals be concerned about the impact of rising energy prices and inflation on their projects?

A new risk

Inflation is not routinely considered when determining risks for a project.

“Most project managers under the age of 50 will have worked all their careers in a relatively low inflation economy; and where projects deliver in a relatively short timeframe, say six to nine months, increases in input costs between the start and the end are fairly small,” says Paul Chapman, director of the Major Project Leadership Academy at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

“Unless project professionals have experience of delivering projects with longer durations where even small price changes mount up and have a big effect, or with big budgets where a small change is still a lot of money, then the resurgence in inflation in developed economies that makes a material difference in short periods of time will be something new.”

Emma Willson, director of the Major Project Delivery Hub at the National Audit Office (NAO), tells Project that: “We’ve not often seen inflation as a driver of programme cost pressures… With over 20 years of fairly low and stable inflation, inflation risk has inevitably not been a focus within programmes.”

However, she says project professionals should now be considering inflation as a risk: “Inflation risk creates uncertainty, so aspects of the programme are harder to manage (and contract), and can make it harder to estimate future funding requirements. And with things seemingly more up in the air now, the real question for major projects is whether this risk/ uncertainty will continue into the long term or is just a short‑term blip. If, for example, HS2 development covers 20 years of low and stable inflation, and this year there is a spike but then a return to trend, inflation won’t be the biggest risk they’ve had to manage.”

Managing inflation risk

Willson recommends inflation be considered in a project’s business case up front as a key external risk and then revisited. However, government projects (the NAO’s focus) generally exclude economy‑wide rather than sector‑specific inflation from key appraisal metrics.

“Our lessons learned report in 2020 reinforced the need for senior decision‑makers to ensure that they understand the underlying bases of estimates, and where areas of risk and uncertainty lie, which will include inflation. An estimate produced from early high‑level information is unlikely to be suitable for setting a programme budget and schedule and should be revisited,” she adds.

The NAO has often seen rising costs across programmes – although not driven by inflation – including the Home Office’s emergency services network, which is expected to cost £3.1bn more than forecast. In its 2019 report on Crossrail, the NAO reported a £2.8bn increase in funding to cover cost increases and remaining risks. “The compressed schedule, contractual model, loss of downward cost pressure and absence of a realistic plan contributed to underachievement in terms of cost and progress,” says Willson.

But how can this learning be applied to inflation risk? “Many of these cost risks can be managed in a similar way. First, there is a lesson around understanding the uncertainties and drivers of costs. What types of things are inflating? And for what reasons? For example, could this be construction design costs given a constrained resource pool or supply chain issues? Second, be realistic and open about these risks – it is widely accepted that a bias towards optimism can lead officials to underestimate risks. Finally, lessons should be learnt around managing the risk to reduce uncertainties.

“In terms of inflation, what is within a programme team’s control? Could investors make the construction sector more efficient, or shortages within supply chains be addressed? In many ways, in applying lessons from managing other cost risks, programme managers could be well placed to manage increasing inflation cost risks.”

Inflation shopping

Chapman recently published the research paper ‘Inflation Shopping: How Transport Infrastructure Project Cost Evaluation is Affected by Choice of Inflation Index’ in the Engineering Project Organization Journal, which looked at how the choice of inflation index on the funding and financing of transport infrastructure projects affects the outcome of ex‑post cost evaluation and the allocation of inflation risk between parties.

“When planning a project, the various inputs required for delivering its intended outcome should be costed in advance to provide the project with a budget. Over the time it takes for the project to progress through its life cycle, the cost of these inputs is likely to change, typically as a result of inflation, putting pressure on the project’s budget. A typical way of costing a project to account for inflation is to take the nominal cost, the cash spent in a given time period, and convert this to a real cost, stated in a base year, by adjusting using an inflation index,” Chapman tells Project.

“What the research established was that inflation is not uniform and different commodities experience different price changes. This means that project professionals need to choose an inflation index based on a basket of goods and services that most closely reflects their project’s inputs. This choice of which inflation index to use makes a material difference to the apparent success or failure of being able to deliver a project against its budget.”

Deliver to a realistic budget

Chapman says his research highlights the need for project professionals to include in their risk management activity how inflation presents a risk to successfully delivering the project against its agreed budget, and also wider issues like the resilience of their supply chain partners in a higher inflation economy.

“To understand the particular inflationary risk they face, project professionals should seek to establish the basis for accommodating changes in the cost of inputs to the project, ie payments to suppliers; whether and how the project’s budget can change over time to reflect changes in input costs; and how their project’s funding changes over time and if this aligns with changes to the project budget. This understanding can then guide decisions on how best to manage immediate risks… and on which party is best placed to hold which risks.”

Levelling up

In February, the UK government published a white paper setting out the blueprint for the next stages in its programme to ‘level up’ the country

A strong vision, a clear delivery roadmap and a project‑centric approach are needed to deliver the changes required to ‘level up’ the UK, according to APM. Speaking in response to the government’s latest white paper, APM’s head of public affairs Andrew Baldwin said: “While the headlines will focus on the 12 levelling up missions detailed in this paper, the government has also referred to this initiative as a decade‑long project. Whether or not new funding is available, the people charged with delivering these missions must use a project‑centric approach, ensuring there is a strong vision for the benefits they intend to deliver and a clear roadmap for realisation of those benefits.”

Levelling up secretary Michael Gove told the House of Commons in early February that he had adequate funds to meet 12, decade‑long, rolling policy ‘missions’ to narrow regional inequalities across the country, despite no new government money being announced.

A 12‑pronged mission

Reaching back to Renaissance Tuscany as a model to emulate, the government is striving to follow a “contemporary Medici model” for a New Industrial Revolution. The white paper promises to create nine new county mayors in England by 2030 to drive efforts for boosting economic growth, increase state‑funded research and development outside the south‑east, improve digital connectivity, reduce serious and violent crime, and boost life expectancy. The 12 missions also include housing, wellbeing and ‘pride in place’.

The 300‑page paper defines the government’s levelling up mission: “While talent is spread equally across our country, opportunity is not. Levelling up is a mission to challenge, and change, that unfairness. Levelling up means giving everyone the opportunity to flourish. It means people everywhere living longer and more fulfilling lives, and benefitting from sustained rises in living standards and well‑being.”

A project‑centric approach

The government means to eradicate geographical inequality by “improving economic dynamism and innovation to drive growth across the whole country, unleashing the power of the private sector to unlock jobs and opportunity for all”. Productivity will be improved, economic growth boosted, innovation encouraged, good jobs created, education attainment enhanced, and the social and cultural fabric of those parts of the UK that have stalled will be renovated, the paper says.

Commenting on the plans, Baldwin said: “As the chartered body for the project profession, APM believes that projects are the means for delivering positive, long‑term, sustainable change. It is imperative that a long‑term initiative such as this ‘decade‑long project’ establishes clear goals and specific plans to achieve them.

“We need to see more detail on the proposed shift in power from Whitehall to local leaders, but there is an opportunity to re‑evaluate how communities plan and deliver levelling up activity. More leaders are acknowledging the value of applying project‑led approaches more broadly. Understanding of what constitutes a project is also changing.

“Work – whether at local government level or in a particular industry or sector – is being seen in terms of projects, rather than ‘tasks’, with outputs, outcomes or benefits being delivered through planned change, balancing the constraints of time, cost and quality.”

Download the Levelling Up the United Kingdom white paper.

 

A tribute to Dr Martin Barnes CBE

A founding member of APM, and an ambitious pioneer of the profession, Project shares APM’s appreciation of his life and work.

The profession pays tribute to Dr Martin Barnes CBE, a founding member of APM, who sadly passed away in February. Martin was APM’s longest‑serving president (2003–2012), chair from 1986 to 1991, and was named an Honorary Fellow in 1995.

“Martin had a number of senior APM roles and accolades, including as a winner of our most prestigious Sir Monty Finniston Award,” said Professor Adam Boddison, APM’s chief executive. “However, it is most notable to me that he was above all a friend to APM. Although I did not have the opportunity to meet him, I have been struck by the warmth in which he was clearly held.

“It is sad that, in APM’s 50th year, we are seeing some of APM’s founders pass. However, we are so grateful to Martin and the other founder members for setting us on such a good path. It is a testament to them that we have such a bright future.”

The Barnes triangle

Martin had a civil engineering degree from the University of London and a PhD from the University of Manchester. His doctorate was awarded in 1971 for research into improved methods of financial control for engineering projects. His contribution to the profession was immense, not least for his invention of the classic time/cost/quality triangle – known as the ‘Barnes triangle’ or ‘iron triangle’.

Speaking to Project in 2012, Martin said that he “really didn’t know just how important it would become”. He said that he created it because, when he was first running projects, “they weren’t even referred to as projects. You had cost engineers to look after the money, planning engineers to look after the time, and nobody was really looking after the value or quality of what was actually being produced. Nobody was in charge of making sure that the end product was the useful or valuable thing that the client wanted.”

An international career

Martin set up his own project management business in 1971, which merged with what is now PwC in 1985. Latterly a consultant, Martin was also executive director of the Major Projects Association for nine years until 2006. He advised on significant projects in many countries for the World Bank, other funding agencies, governments, promoters and major contractors, and across many sectors including engineering, defence, aerospace, IT, finance, business change and the media.

Martin’s BBC television programme on project management has been used as a training aid in many countries. He also led the team that produced the New Engineering Contract (NEC), a system of contracts designed to facilitate and stimulate the use of modern project management across all the contributors on a project. The NEC is now being used in over 20 countries and has been adopted by the UK government for all publicly funded construction projects.

Martin had been active in the International Project Management Association (IPMA) since 1972, and was a Fellow, former board member and chairman of its Council of Representatives. He was a recipient of the Chartered Management Institute’s Special Award and of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Watson Medal in the UK. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK’s highest engineering recognition, and was a Churchill Fellow. In 2009 he was awarded a CBE for services to civil engineering.

A committed pioneer

Asked by Project what his proudest career moment was, Martin replied: “Seeing the success and wide adoption of the NEC for one. Making and being in the first television programme about project management with the BBC was great fun. But I am proud of the project management courses which I developed and ran at the Outward Bound School in the Lake District for many years.”

Tom Taylor, a fellow past APM president, said: “One of the reasons Martin was the longest‑serving president of APM was because he wanted to be in on the whole project management journey. To be present from unknown and unheard of right through to chartered status – in a single lifetime or a single career. And he made it – all the way – in his lifetime and his career. Martin was not just on this journey, he was in the front row every step of the way – leading, encouraging, cajoling, entertaining.”

Martin had always been at the forefront of the development of project management and worked relentlessly to ensure that it became a fully recognised profession. Always a pioneer, Martin changed the landscape of project management forever.

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.