Welcome to the APM Podcast, brought to you by The Chartered Body for the project profession. My name is Emma De Vita, and I'm the editor of APM's Quarterly Journal, Project and Your host. In June, APM held its annual conference in Birmingham under the heading of Change Changes. The event explored how the project profession must adapt to the changing nature of change itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity.
It emphasised the enormous contribution that projects can and do make to forging a cleaner, safer, more prosperous and more inclusive society. The day kicked off with an inspiring talk from Carmel McConnell, founder of Magic Breakfast and longtime project professional, about the importance of having purpose in your work and how projects should be used to bring about some good in society and the
environment. Her presentation set the tone of the day, and there followed honest and thoughtful conversations about how project delivery can be improved and how project professionals can gain a sense of real fulfilment from
their work. The place was buzzing with new ideas and shared experience, and this podcast We've compiled some of the key insights that emerge from the first stream of sessions at the conference, which will focus on the transformative impacts that projects can have both on individual lives as well as economic, social and physical
landscapes. So listen on to hear highlights, including what happens when a project needs a reset, the cost of social value projects, and the future of professional bodies in a rapidly changing world. In our first clip, we hear from Joe Stanford. Joe is a project professional who has spent 20 years working in the healthcare sector and is currently CEO of the Healthcare Projects in Change Association. She appeared on a panel that considered the challenge of measuring social benefits.
So there are ways to measure social benefits and if you look at the management of portfolios, it talks about the social return on investment and how you kind of calculate some of that. The challenge is more about the practical application of it.
So having worked on projects where they've had to have, you know, impact assessments that look at the long term benefits of changes to things like legislation and regulations, part of that calculation is looking at translating health outcomes and the increased improvement in health or the reduction in the use of services because people are being treated. Poster there are ways of measuring it and there's there's tools and and guidance out there so. So there there are definitely
the tools for doing that. The the problem often is how you then review and evaluate it and certainly the Department of Health and Social Care hasn't really got to the point where it's able to then evidence how well it's delivered. I once had a a chat with the chief economist at DHS who used to sign off all of the impact assessments and used to do all of the calculations of them and that was at the start of the project to say you know what is it we're going to achieve.
And I said to him, How many of these did the you then? Evaluate to measure whether or not what was in the impact assessment was actually achieved in practise and he said none
ever. So part of the problem and and we we kind of discussing this sort of earlier is that where you have a very much focus on say one year budgets or three-year rounds or you've got a focus on delivery but not outcomes And your measures are well the business plan for this year is we're going to deliver this, this, this and this and you go and So what where is the measure of the outcome being?
Reviewed and achieved to say not just are we delivering stuff, but what are we measuring in terms of the benefits. And that's an organisational portfolio issue. It's the it's where the the business plan should be translated into outcome measures that say whether or not we are achieving it. And I think there's a real gap here between the project profession that might be looking at, well, with this project we're going to achieve these outcomes, but we don't achieve them.
The business achieves them. Who's working with the operational delivery teams to say and how are you reviewing and monitoring and measuring the outcomes of the changes that are being made? I think there's a big piece of work to do for the project profession and the sort of business and upside of things to work together on that as a more
holistic approach. I think the cross fertilisation and and working between professions to deliver those outcomes and measure them is the gap that we need to work on collectively. Our second clip is taken from the panel session on Remapping for Success, which explored why it is incumbent on project professionals to ensure that projects are properly set up and resourced so they can achieve
vital social outcomes. The panel was asked whether, in their view, organisations are prepared to introduce social value benefits and projects if they increase the upfront costs.
So let's hear the views of all three panellists, Gillian McGee of AstraZeneca, Andrew Morgan of HMRC and Mike Hudson of the National Trust. So I I, I run some of the governance for our portfolio of projects and and through the various gateways that we have for approvals we actively now factor that in and yes sometimes it does increase the cost of
delivery. But you know I I I don't I I I honestly don't see that we have a choice because we can't when when we're I'm I'm particularly thinking about some of the global sustainability challenges around carbon efficiency and so on. I I I just don't think it's responsible for us to be sponsoring projects where we're not taking an opportunity to make that better. I think we've building on what you're saying, I I think we've been used to producing cost estimates.
But again talking with a number of attendees today, an area that often concerns us more is perhaps estimates of the pounds benefit and in the social value arena sometimes that can be really difficult to put real pounds against. Often it's seen more as intangible benefits. And so I think there are some real opportunities there in terms of growing our capability for improving benefit estimation and of course that then came to balances the view in terms of
the. Effective inflation on cost and so on and so forth because potentially we we kind of see that affecting the benefit side as well. Yeah, I mean, I I guess for us they're so caught to what we do that and that you're absolutely right. There will be trade-offs in terms of what what is ultimately affordable, but it may work the other way.
It may be that. Projects that can't start to demonstrate social benefit or that they're the ones that ended up getting, you know, deprioritised and it's the ones with social benefit included that that do. I mean, I think there is a challenge around how we, how we measure, but yeah, so I don't personally see them getting.
Crowded out. The next clip is taken from a session entitled Calling for a Reset in Response to Change, which looked at when it is necessary to reset a project or programme that has strayed off course, and how to make that happen. Here is Jack Hewitt, an associate and programme and project management at global built environment consultancy firm Arab, discussing the role of the project manager in identifying the need for reset.
You almost think about the different types of roles that people in a project team or a programme team would play at the point of a reset. And I think if I were to look at it through that lens the the first person that I'd come to, I mean fundamentally you're not going to achieve a reset without a project manager putting their hand up and saying something
needs to happen here. We're at risk of of not achieving our stated objectives, outcomes, benefits, whatever it may be. But I think that that's almost take that as a given and I think probably the the next personal role with a particular skill set that's valuable. There is the sponsor for that project and that might be a senior responsible officer in some palaces. It might be a project sponsor in other certainly in my
infrastructure. World project sponsor is the the one that always comes through strongly. But having an advocate there that's not part of the project delivery team but understands the context and help us help develop the business case in the first instance and knows what
the targets of the project are. Having them embedded in that kind of progressive assurance type position throughout the life cycle of the project means that number one, they can be really astute in identifying any deviations that might be beginning to occur on the project but also be they have that further reach within the the client organisation or your own organisation whichever part of the project that you come
from. But having the reach and the resources and the knowledge and experience of the. Answer is really valuable in terms of getting the message out there as to something needs to change here and I think finally perhaps a little bit of a left field one, but one that certainly to me is really important is someone.
They don't have to be a dedicated benefits management professional, but someone who understands that there are broader, particularly in this stream for today's event, social benefits, for example, social value benefits that are involved in projects. Having someone that is tracking, monitoring and doing that across the business and drops into particular projects with a with a strong understanding of them.
They can be crucial in terms of helping to spot the risks of of of needing a reset and then to help manage the process of delivering them to. A final clip comes from a panel session that asks the question, where do we go from here? It explored where the project profession needs to be in the next five years and how it needs to evolve.
Let's hear from Professor Adam Bodison, Chief Executive of APM, and Lucian Dragon, Managing Director for Europe at PMI, discussing the risks and opportunities facing professional bodies. For me, bringing a professional body, one of the things I'm often kind of asking myself is what's the role of a professional body now compared to what it was 20 years ago and what it might be in 20 years time from now. And is it, will it be different
or will it be the same? It will obviously be different. So we've got a future proof, the professional body to be there to support the profession. And and one of the changes, I think, again, kind of from a risk perspective is that 20 years ago professional bodies were all about somebody coming and joining the professional bodies as students, then becoming an associate member, then becoming a full member, then becoming a fellow and so on.
And it was quite a vertical route through our membership grades and we see this in every profession. But that's changing. We see it in the wider world of work outside of the profession. People now are quite happy to join an organisation for a job and knowing at the outset I'm gonna do this job for three years or five years and then I'm gonna go and do something different.
So there's this. And we see that as a horizontal movement now, back and forward through the different levels of membership and so on. There's a risk there, but there's also an opportunity. So the risk is that you end up potentially losing people and the edges of the profession become even more fuzzy than they are now because people come in
and out of them. But the opportunity is, I always say, if you've ever been in a profession, even for a short time, it's a bit like the Hotel California you can check out,
but you can never leave. So I hope that these people that come through the profession take that knowledge of the profession and tackle some of the misconceptions that exist about what it is and what it isn't, and share that with the wider workforce and particularly with leaders who who some of whom I think have a fundamental misunderstanding about what project management and project professional broadly actually is. Well to add to that the the
point you just make around you know the the awareness basically missing right with the individuals. I think I wanna go back to the whole topic about the the talent gap right. We we mentioned there's there's massive amount of people that we need to bring to the profession to solve for the challenges that are upon us.
And I think that is a role of an association as well to make people and organisation and decision makers aware of the relevance of the profession and how they can create an environment in in in which the the professionals can actually strive. Right. And we we start thinking a lot about you know how do we bring new people to the profession which isn't known to crazy much and which doesn't seem to be very attractive.
A lot of people see project management more as a. You know it's all about processes and and spreadsheets and risk management and it doesn't come across very attractive to, you know, young generations, right. So this is where we want to focus as as organisations like APM and PMI to bring new people to the to the profession showcase that working on projects actually impacts, you know, large scale challenges, solves these challenges, impact
society. But how do we bring these young people in and also think about other audience that not necessarily are at our forefront now, people that want to change career, right, People that have been kind of doing project management in an accidental manner. How do we make them aware that this is actually really a profession that they can really get good? That and kind of grow in in that in that field. How do we help people who had took a break right back to the
work space. How do we help them to reenter the workspace and and one particular demographic group maybe that I would like to highlight here are our women. Quite frankly we we, I mean I'm actually very pleased to see that many you know women in the audience here today. But I still think globally that's what we see when we ask our our global community. We do see a massive gap still in
the gender representation in the profession. 2 third of global project management roles today are done by mail which isn't a problem right. But I think where, where we kind of want to kind of push a little bit. More for acceptance and diversity really is around bringing women to the to the workforce and we also found in that survey that we did with the global community that women seem to be a little bit stronger naturally in the soft skill side
of things. So what you refer to as the human side like things we need to focus on when technology takes over the process pieces maybe women seem to have what we found a bit of an advantage there naturally. And another interesting factor maybe to share is when we surveyed the people that are in project management, male and female, we found out that the gender gap actually gets much smaller when when we talked about, you know, who has a
leadership role in project. Management for men, that was like 2023% of these people in projects are in a leadership role and for women that's 20%. So that's really a bit of a smaller gap there, which is kind of indicating a little bit that there is an advantage for bringing women to the profession because they progress a little faster into leadership roles and therefore are a very good match to the profession.
We also found in that survey, if I can share that in addition, that women have a natural tendency to more easily open up to newer technologies. Maybe the adoption of AI and all of that is something that would drive a little bit differently and they are usually also more open to new ways of working. Seems to be something we found out on a global.
Survey that we did. So yeah, kind of going back to what the role here is for us, it really is to identify that massive gap that there is and come up with ideas of how we bring new people to a profession which needs to be known more, quite frankly. That concludes our WRU of the Change Changes Conference. Next year's conference will be returning to the Midlands on the 5th and 6th of June 2024.
To register your interest in the event, visit apm.org.uk/APM Dash Conference slash 2024. APM runs more than 200 events every year, ranging from webinars and award ceremonies to day long conferences. You can find out more at APM Events. That's It from us for this episode. If you enjoyed it, don't forget to subscribe or leave us a review. Thanks for listening.