Defence Business: Tackling the project management monster | ADM Dec 2011 / Jan 2012
Gregor Ferguson | Canberra
“The problems we increasingly face are beyond complicated.” With these words, Minister for Defence Materiel Jason Clare launched a ground-breaking report on Complex Project management at Parliament House, Canberra, in October.
“As everyone here knows, in the next 10 years we will spend around $150 billion on Defence equipment,” Clare said. “The biggest mountain we will have to climb is the Future Submarine project – potentially the biggest and most complex Defence project Australia has ever embarked upon.”
While the Future Submarine is a looming challenge for Defence and industry, the defence portfolio also routinely comes under scrutiny for its performance in managing and delivering less-complex projects. This is one of the reasons why the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) has championed the science of complex project management and was a founding stakeholder in the International Centre for Complex Project Management (ICCPM), which is based in Canberra.
The ICCPM’s task force report launched by Clare is titled ‘Complex Project Management: Global Perspectives and the Strategic Agenda to 2025’. One of the key recommendations of the report, tacitly endorsed by the Minister, was the establishment of a Specialist Research Centre, named the International Complex Project Management Knowledge Development and Dissemination Centre, or KD2.
“As the name suggests, the aim of the Centre is not only to develop and disseminate knowledge but also to provide practical solutions to industry and government to tackle project management issues and support better project performance and outcomes,” said Clare. He is understood to be awaiting a recommendation from the DMO on what practical support defence can provide to the KD2 proposal.
The report makes nine Recommendations for Policy – what it calls the strategic level – and over 60 Recommendations for Action at what it calls the ‘tactical’ level.
The nine Policy Recommendations cover six Complex Project Management (CPM) themes – Delivery Leadership, Collaboration, Benefits Realisation, Risk, Opportunity and Resilience, Culture, Communications and Relationships, Sustainability and Education – which collectively inform the ICCPM’s ongoing research agenda and program. They are:
Maintain delivery leadership capability appropriate to the degree of project complexity
Operate to global CPM standards of practice, method and tools
Operate the entire supply chain as a single entity delivering against mutually agreed outcomes with equitable risk and reward sharing
Ensure that investment and risk management processes balance short-term expenditure and risk, in the context of through-life benefit
Implement risk and opportunity management processes which are appropriate to the degree of project complexity and adaptable to changes in the external environment
Address human behavioural aspects across all major stakeholders who are required both to adapt to changes in both project and future operational environments, and to share their experience, knowledge and wisdom
Establish systems to manage the interconnectedness and interdependencies that affect project success and build in long-term sustainability
Offer specialist CPM Education programs according to the degree of project complexity and required capability and ensure that knowledge, skill and wisdom, once captured, is preserved.
Establish and support a permanent, co-coordinated global specialist research agenda for CPM.
It’s clear nothing about CPM is simple and the recommendations for Action represent a real challenge for the leaders of organisations that take CPM seriously. Mastering CPM at both an individual and organisational level will require sustained effort.
The danger is that organisations will simply assume that CPM is another skill which can be applied to work in hand by individuals. It’s not: CPM is an agenda for fundamental change in the way both project customers and contractors organise and manage themselves and their relationships.
The report sets out Research Recommendations: identified knowledge gaps which, if filled, would shape the emerging science of CPM. These range from “VIII: What is the relationship between the application of rigid process compliance and complex project success?”; to: “XXV: What contracting models can best support risk and liability management in a collaborative emergent environment?”
The challenge for large organisations – both customers and industry groups – is to embrace the lessons of this research (and past experience) and use them as leverage to introduce constructive change.
The breadth of the Task Force which provided oversight to the report authors underlines the widespread concern within the defence community and other industry and infrastructure sectors over the difficulties of delivering increasingly complex projects efficiently and effectively.
The ICCPM isn’t waiting for the KD2 to manifest in bricks and mortar. Three research projects are already under way and the Institute is working with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) on a proposal for a Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) on CPM; this will be submitted for the next CRC round in mid-2012.
It now holds an annual Research and Innovation Seminar; the third annual Seminar will be held in Lille, France, in August 2012. Thanks to the success of the 2011 event, NASA has offered to host an additional facilitated executive roundtable event with the ICCPM in the US at their new Cape Kennedy Academy in 2012.