The change makers

Andrew Saunders reports on project professionals’ pivotal role in making change happen and how they experiment with change themselves.

In every way you look at it, a project professional is a change maker, but while you might be enthusiastic about change, getting others to sign up to it can be a hard task.

“Project managers do have to be very good on the business case and the financials, but that’s really just the thing that gets you through the door,” says Carmel McConnell, founder of breakfast for kids charity Magic Breakfast, author of Change Activist: Make big things happen fast and keynote speaker at this year’s APM Conference. McConnell says that projects are essentially about delivering change, and that making change stick depends on the ‘why’ at least as much as the ‘how’.

That means persuading others that what you are changing really needs to be changed, and for reasons that matter to them rather than just because the boss says so. “Most people don’t care about new projects. If they’re in a meeting and someone says, ‘We’re going to do this great new project’, what most people are thinking is: ‘Shoot me now. I’m too busy,’” says McConnell.

The way to get over that initial negative reaction, she says, is to understand not only the business case for change but also the emotional and even moral case – why this change has to happen and how they can contribute to it personally. “What do I bring to this as a human being with my own values? What will I want to talk to my mates in the pub about? If you can get that nailed, as well as the business case, it will build real commitment to a project – it’s a rocket booster.”

Fear of change, while much discussed, is not as much of a roadblock as it can at first appear. “What people really fear is unwelcome change. The sense that another burden is being heaped upon them. But if they’ve been involved in the process and the improvement is something they feel genuinely signed up to, then you don’t get that big fear,” McConnell adds.

Emotions over logic

The change challenge is compounded by the fact that, for many project professionals, ‘change’ is still more about stuff rather than hearts and minds, adds Donna Unitt, Chair of APM’s Enabling Change Specific Interest Group. “When you ask them, a lot of project managers will say that change is about new IT systems, for example, rather than people change. But often issues with accepting change arise when people’s emotions take over. So we’ve been doing quite a lot of work on the neuroscience of how our brains work, and how people tend to be led by their emotions rather than by logic.”

That calls for project professionals with a wider set of skills that embraces not only practical delivery, but also ‘softer’ leadership factors. “It’s more about empathy, listening and communication. You do need a level of emotional intelligence, but it is something that can be learned,” says Unitt. Another key is to make sure that they factor in change management from the start of a project, so that it does not fall by the wayside as things progress, she adds. “It’s about realising the need to build time into your project plans to spend with people and find out where they are coming from, rather than just trying to bulldoze things through.”

Negotiation and inspiration

Ultimately, these softer skills will become increasingly important for career development as technology takes over more of the everyday tasks of project management, concludes McConnell. “The technical aspects will become increasingly outsourced – they already are. No one is sitting drawing critical paths anymore. But there will always be change in business, new projects starting and people who are confused about it. So the job becomes more about negotiation, inspiration and how you make sure your project gets in front of the board, rather than someone else’s.”

Here follows a series of accounts by 2022 APM Award‑winning change makers on how they made change happen, and how they experimented with change themselves.

Cyber Resilience Programme, MOD & Atkins

Winner of APM’s Innovation in Project Management Award

Cybersecurity is increasingly on the frontline in the 21st‑century world of defence. The Cyber Resilience Programme (CRP), a Ministry of Defence (MOD) initiative supported by Atkins, is a 10‑year plan aimed at making the organisation more responsive, flexible and effective in managing cyber‑risk.

Challenging a long‑standing MOD culture where fixed project deliverables are defined at the outset was key. “We’re a risk‑averse organisation and it’s hard to change that,” says Jason Gnaneswaran, CRP Programme Manager for the MOD. Introducing innovative approaches such as the use of ethical hackers and bug bounties (payments to hackers for finding vulnerabilities) required project leaders who were able to persuade the owners of some highly sensitive MOD systems that these new approaches were the right thing to do, says Steve Morgan, who set up the project in 2019 as an Atkins managing consultant to the MOD, before handing over to Gnaneswaran in 2021. “We were basically saying, ‘Do you mind if we use ethical hackers to try and penetrate your system?’ Many people were understandably nervous about it.”

But once it became clear that this novel approach was getting results, they quickly came round, Morgan adds. “They [the hackers] found vulnerabilities that other forms of penetration testing had not. The system owners quite rapidly moved to become advocates.”

With 60,000 civilian staff, simple human error is still a major source of cyber‑risk for the MOD. The CRP’s teams worked with behavioural scientists on more effective ways of building awareness, such as games where employees’ understanding of cyber‑risk are put to the test, and even set loose a ‘malicious floor walker’. The latter being someone wearing a T‑shirt emblazoned with ‘I am a cyber‑risk’ who approaches employees and asks, for instance, to borrow their laptop to charge a phone. “Letting someone log into your computer without knowing who they are is a real security risk,” says Gnaneswaran. “But often we say yes because we want to help each other.”

The effectiveness of the behavioural initiatives on culture change has been an eye‑opener, says Gnaneswaran. “I’ve been involved in transformation programmes that, in hindsight, I can see would have been more successful if we had included a suite of behavioural interventions. I’ll definitely take that with me to any future change programme.”

Project Rubix, Openreach & Accenture

Winner of APM’s Programme of the Year Award

Openreach’s 12,000‑strong Fibre Network Delivery unit has the crucial task of connecting 25 million UK homes to the fibre‑optic network. But issues with disjointed systems, legacy IT and a variety of regional ways of working were causing delays and incurring excessive cost.

Enter Project Rubix, a digital transformation partnership between Openreach and Accenture starting in March 2020, which aimed to realise over £100m of efficiency savings annually. “Our CEO wanted us to go faster. The aim of Rubix was essentially to drive significant savings that we could reinvest into the fibre build,” explains Zane Bowen, Transformation Director at Openreach.

Analysis of previous projects identified some common failings, notably that transformation teams tended to work in isolation and did not engage with the wider operational business early enough. The result was a feeling that transformation was something that was being done to the business rather than by and for it, and a consequent unwillingness to get behind change. “Transformation was an island in head office where we looked at spreadsheets. The conditions for project success were not really present,” says Bowen.

So, for Rubix, operational staff were built into the agile delivery squads from the start, ensuring that not only their knowledge and input were incorporated into the project, but also that people felt involved in the change. “Embedding operational voices into the squads was really important – it meant they really felt part of the team and were wedded to the success of the initiative,” he says.

A clear strapline – ‘Simpler, smarter, better’ – made it easy for people to understand the overarching purpose of a large and complex project, and the results speak for themselves. Savings of £400m were achieved over three years; 2,000 engineers were freed up to work on the fibre build; and there was a 23% increase in engineering throughput and a 90% reduction in complaints. “Change is always the hardest part of any delivery,” concludes Bowen. “But the more you win the trust of the people you are landing the change into, the easier it becomes over time.”

Project Orpheus, Rolls-Royce

Winner of APM’s Transformation Project of the Year Award

The opportunity to discover and test radically new ways of working was a key driver behind Rolls‑Royce’s groundbreaking Project Orpheus. Its deliverable in the traditional sense was a small, fuel‑efficient jet engine for testing, but the less tangible results – innovative ways of working and an eagerness to embrace change – were in many ways more significant.

The need for more change, faster, is increasingly pressing, says Project Orpheus team leader Alex Darvill: “It’s adapt or die.” Eschewing Rolls‑Royce’s traditional project teams, where individuals cycle in and out as their expertise is required, Orpheus took an approach based on making change stick through continuity and accountability. Its core team members were hand‑picked because they were representative of the company’s demographic – and 80% of them stayed with the project as it progressed. “There’s a continuity of people,” says Darvill. “Most quality escapes happen at the interfaces where you hand over work to somebody else. We had roughly 100 times fewer interfaces than usual at Rolls‑Royce.”

Working in scrums of eight or nine, team members were empowered to ‘unclog the arteries’ by choosing the simplest and most appropriate methods to achieve the task. This was such a huge mindset change that the project leaders even devised a thought experiment to help their people make it. “When they were faced with a problem, we said to the teams: ‘Ask yourself what you would do if you were working for a start‑up in a garage.’”

The key insight was that the real value of an agile hardware project is learning. “Learning is our minimum viable product. By releasing as much learning as possible as early as possible, much less unanticipated risk emerges through the course of the whole project,” says Darvill.

Ultimately the goal was to allow the team to demonstrate their true capability and creativity. “You can get 10% more just by getting people to do a process faster. But if you can empower them to completely recreate the process themselves, that’s doubling or tripling their effectiveness. This is what made the project special to me: creating an awesome team and watching them make the impossible possible.”

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2023 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.