Welcome to the APM podcast. APM is the chartered body for the project profession. My name is Emma Devita. I'm the editor of Project, APM's quarterly journal and your host in this podcast. I'm speaking to Jonathan Simcock, a highly experienced and respected project leader in the UK who has held executive roles in oil and gas, energy, utilities and telecommunications sectors.
He has been involved in the largest UK government project since 2007, when he took over what became the Infrastructure and Projects Authority and is now the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority, or NISTA. Until last year he was chair with the Submarine Delivery Agency in the MOD. His book, The Delivery Gap, Why Government Projects Really Fail and What can be done about it, comes out later this month and is available for pre-order now.
When the UK is facing low growth, poor productivity, an increasingly insecure world and climate change, closing the delivery gap is an imperative, as important as any of the other challenges of statesmanship, he argues. So we at the APM Podcast couldn't wait to get him into the studio and ask him what he's learnt about delivering government projects, whether they're all doomed to fail, and what it takes to deliver some of the largest and most complex
projects successfully. Welcome Jonathan. Thanks for joining us at the APM Podcast. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you ever so much for inviting me. No, it's a pleasure. I would like to begin by asking you briefly about your career and what you're doing now. So I spent the 1st 2/3 of my career probably in oil and gas. We didn't always call when I was doing projects in those days, but they were really big maintenance projects. We would call them now capital projects.
I did quite a lot of mergers and acquisitions and then I did quite a lot of transformation, internal transformation in oil and gas businesses. But then relevant to this conversation, in 2007 by a series of accidents, I ended up as the major projects director in something was called the Office of Government Commerce, which as you say, turned into the Major Projects Authority, then the Infrastructure Projects Authority, and has now been merged into the new body.
Mr I have to say in 2007 I was spectacularly under qualified for that job. I think I we got it because no civil servant of the right grade had had applied. But since then I've been leading, governing, advising, assuring on great big government projects one way or another. As you say, I was chair of the Submarine Delivery Authority until last year and earlier this year I stepped away from the board of Sellafield, the nuclear site in, in the Northwest.
What I'm doing now, I'm spending quite a lot of time promoting the delivery gap and and meanwhile waiting for, yeah, waiting for the next challenge, probably in an advisory or a a non executive role. Let's talk about your book. So it's it's called the delivery gap. What do you mean by that? What is? What is the delivery gap and and why? Why did you want to write the book now?
So I think that the level of public debate about great big projects is terribly shallow, very superficial in the media. So if you listen to if you listen as I do, to sort of political podcasts or read, read political books, then the reason we have problems in big projects, it's all to do is oh, because we funny, we had some decent project managers or if only politicians were, you know, we had some decent politicians or if we sorted out the planning system.
There is some truth, of course, in all of these things, but they betray A superficial understanding of what this is. This the the challenges that really go on in great big projects. So I, I had in mind to write a book of explaining, you know, why is this so hard that my first working title was not the delivery gap, it was how hard can it be? But then in the wake of the HS2 failure, I'm going to call it failure.
I, I realised that in my heart, I'm sometimes for these great big projects, expecting them to fail. And I'll come back to what I mean by failure in a in a minute. And that felt really uncomfortable, particularly in the context that you mentioned, which is, you know, we're in a we're in a country with no growth, with poor productivity, with a desperate need for for infrastructure investment, with growing defence threats.
We need projects. So to stop you to have to have this sort of mindset that of course with these things never work, that's really unhealthy. So I wanted to get under the skin of what really is going on here and I wanted it to be an insider's book. You know, there are good project management books from academia. There are some quite good public sector project books from sort of journalistic view.
But I wanted to spend time and I have spent time talking with the ministers, the ex ministers, typically senior officials, the delivery leaders, civil servants, the supply chain to, to get a more of an insider's view about what really is going on here. And, and I think my conclusion out of all of that is good people are struggling in a, in a system that's failing. And it's to do with the incentive structures that Dr tendencies and behaviours that
lead to failure. And then, and if we only think about improving the process and sorting out the planning system and so on, then when we're, we're not going to get to grips with the with the root causes here the book, the book is structured with 7 case studies at the beginning. Which case studies do you cover in the book? So I cover Crossrail, the Elizabeth line, I cover the Palace of Westminster Restoration and renewal project, I cover the Universal Credit project, completely different
kind of of project. I cover the smart metre implementation programme, of which I'm definitely one of the guilty. I cover the the huge project for privatising the management of all of our nuclear legacy sites, including Sellafield where I was on the board. I cover the national programme for IT and the health service, massive top down rewiring and the health service and I cover the, the programme for the Astute tax submarines. So you'll, you'll, you'll notice from these that I'm talking
about huge projects. You know, most of these projects are 10 billion plus. And that's, that's really the, the, the light, the, the light I'm trying to shine is on that kind of huge endeavour. So that's, that's what motivated me to, to, to write the book. You asked me what I mean by the delivery gap. Yeah. Success and failure of projects is not a simple subject. Actually, it's worth the conversation in its own right.
But in in context of this book, what I really mean is as simple as, did we do what we said we were going to do on the day we said we were going to do it for the amount of money that we promised? Did we do what it says on the tin? A successful project will kind of meet its promise. What if that promise gets
redefined over many many years? So I think if the promise is redefined, so if if we're halfway through something and we say, look, we don't really want a blue one, we've decided we now want a red one. And the project says, well, OK, if you want a red one, that's fine, but it's going to cost 2 billion more and arrive 5, five years later and everyone says, yes, we still want to do it. That can still be a successful
project. However, as you know as well as I do, Emma, any, any experienced project professional will tell you that the best way to kill a project is to change your mind halfway through about what you're trying to achieve. So the, so the worst thing a project leader can do is to not face up to the realities of what change means, not force, if I
can use that word. The stakeholders, the sponsors, the the funders of the project to the consequences of the change they want to make and fudge it to pretend that while we can sort of still do a blue 1 and it might be a little bit more expensive, but it probably won't because that's what everybody wants to hear. So there's so there's something, there's something really important about professional confidence and candour. Candour.
So actually you're describing some behaviours there that I wanted to circle background to because you referred to incentives and behaviours and perhaps the wrong behaviours are being encouraged and perhaps not having candour is one of those behaviours. So could you tell us a bit more
about that? I spoke to a leader of a project that everybody or almost everybody listening to this project will have will have heard of who described the, the, the systemic pressure on them to undercook their estimates.
You know, now, now he was absolutely clear that he wasn't going to do that, but he was also, he was also honest enough to say you shouldn't underestimate the, the ability to sort of get yourself to believe what you need to believe in order to get to where you want to get to. And, and, and so the, the example that he's using, I'm, I'm keeping it very anonymous here. He said, well, if you know, I'm, I'm going to say that it's, you know, X billion and, and X years.
And I know in I know that if I said it was X + 4 billion and years plus three, that, that I, that I wouldn't get next year's funding and without necessarily funding out no project. So he's, he's it's, so he's not lying. But those pressures exist in the system. And it's somebody else described to me this tendency as limbo dancing that that's kind of what we do in in developing a big
government projects. Why do these pressures exist in the 1st place and is it because of poor estimation, lack of clarity over the purpose of the project, political desires and ambition, and but compounded with this kind of miscommunication and lack of trust because people don't stick around long enough? What would stop this happening in the first place? All of the above, all of the above. So if if a strong minister.
So I'm now thinking about the case of Universal Credit, a strong minister with very strong vision, determined to overcome any barrier to get going and to make this project survive and to, to get it, to get it going. Nobody in the system was strong enough to to stand up to that. Not, not by saying, well, you know, your project plan says this. Well, my project plan says that because it was too early for a project plan. There was, you know, we haven't
got a project yet. We don't know how we're going to do it and the incentives in the system don't encourage anybody to to stand up. What, what can we, what can we do about these things? When I started writing, after a little while, I felt I'd not really, I'd not really satisfied
with this. And I realised that what, what was happening was I've spent so many years writing gateway reviews or structured advice for senior officials or for ministers that, that I was cramping myself into a sort of a style of writing which where I was continually hedging and thinking, well, how will that read to a minister? And what will, how realistic will that be in the political context into which I'm delivering it? And could I rephrase this in a way which makes it gentler?
And, and I had a, a conversation with a, a literary agent in the process of trying to get a publisher. And he said that's, that's really not what you're trying to do here. You're not trying to say to, you're not trying to produce a sort of a set of simple recommendations which are bound to be easily applicable in the environment you're talking to. You're trying to advance the debate. You're trying to get people thinking about things in a different way.
And suddenly I found myself much freer to to to, to think about things which, yeah, I wouldn't look particularly easy if they landed on on the desk in Mr the Day after Tomorrow. But. But I came into that conversation because you asked me, what can we do about this? One of the things I feel more and more strongly about is that the players in this game, with the probable exception of the politicians there should be, we should be subject to a kind of a
duty of candour. Now it it, it, it, it shouldn't be OK to allow a business case to go forward with estimates that are under cooked where everyone sort of knows they're under cooked. But you know, this is what we need in order to get the project going. And I, and I'm that this isn't a criticism of individual project people, let's say it is to do with the system.
And so one of the things I, I think we need is rather than the mountain of project assurance, which which any big project in government gets drowned by, I think there should be something that is genuinely independent that the, that the, that the professional knows is going to be exposed, you know, but to people to, to a, to a small group of experienced people who can, who can hold them to account. No, that doesn't exist at the moment.
You know, the National Audit Office is a wonderful institution and full of wisdom that nobody particularly takes much notice of. But it's auditing, it's backward looking. I'm talking about something that would feel a bit more like a kind of project equivalent of the Office of Budget Responsibility. Consequently, everybody will hate this idea. But do you see what I mean? Is that not part of Nistor's role? I'm sure it is.
And you know, you can follow that thread right back to, to my time in in #1 Horse Gas Rd in the Treasury. But Nistor's not independent. You know, every everybody involved in that is that decision making works for the Prime Minister. It's, it's so it's, it's, yeah. It's just not independent. Yeah, completely outside of that, what were you going to say about Crossroad?
I think, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier on, but everyone I guess remembers this, that first of all, though, just to be completely clear, Crossrail is a fantastic piece of infrastructure, You know, one that the nation should be proud of and the people that built it should be proud of and is, you know, delivering above its above its volumes and its and its passenger numbers and so on. And the, and the early phases of the Cross Road project went brilliantly well.
The civil phases were a were a miracle. However, in August 2018, the project was still saying that it was going to open the central section of the of the railway in December 2018, four, four in four months time. And at that point the underlying problems became undeniable and serviced publicly and the the overall railway was not fully opened until 2023. Billions of pounds more spent
and yet years more consumed. And yes, it's a wonderful railway, but that is not OK. So the people leading that programme, some of them knew but weren't prepared to say. And some of them, you know, had managed to convince themselves that they that they didn't know. That isn't that is not all right. That's the kind of, that's the kind of behaviours, if you like the tendencies, which we've got
to, we've got to overcome. I use it as an extreme example and, but, but just to be clear, this is absolutely not a unique situation. I have sits at around so many tables where everybody kind of knows that the schedule that they're looking at is not a realistic 1.
And then, and then the project leaders will look at each other and say, well, you know, if we rebaseline now and and say it's going to take another year, then in a year we'll have lost all of that float and we'll be back to say to rebaseline it again. There's this fear of facing reality. To ask an obvious question and the fear of facing that reality is the fear of what? What are the consequences
they're seeking to avoid? There is a genuine concern around project leadership tables in a situation where the schedule is under real pressure and where it's likelihood of delivery has become very low or even non existence. There is a genuine concern around that table that if you acknowledge that reality and say to use the Crossrail example, it's not going to be 2018, it's going to be 2020.
There is, there is a concern around that table that a year later all of that new float, all of that new schedule contingency would have got swallowed up and that we'll be facing exactly the same situation again. And then it won't be 2020, it'll be 20. And that is, there is, there is some truth in that line and it is a, it is a, it's a genuine tension in a big project to say at what point is the right point
to rebaseline the schedule. It's a, It's a It's a valuable and important conversation, however. There is something else going on with that around that table and that is if I acknowledge this isn't going to get delivered, then I have to go and tell the sponsor this isn't going to get delivered. He has to then go and tell the minister, or in this case the the mayor, that he isn't going
to get delivered. We'll end up with a, a team of outsiders will be sent in to work out why we've done such a bad job and what we should do differently. That's going to distract us for, for six months and I might lose my job. And, and, and so, so these subtler tendencies, the subtler incentives, encourage the delusion, encourage the obfuscation, encourage the unreasonable optimism that is endemic in in a lot of
government projects. You know this is known about, isn't it, that people have this optimism bias? Why does this still happen? What fundamentally needs to change then? Yeah. So I, I love the phrase optimism dies bias. It sounds, doesn't it? It sounds like a kind of a, a very human sort of tendency to look on the bright side. You know, it's quite a warm thing, you know, optimistic.
It sounds nice, doesn't it, what we're talking about in these kind of situations, and I'm going to, I'm going to use a deliberately nasty way of describing it. It's a kind of a collective conspiracy to delude ourselves and not only ourselves, but our sort of stakeholders and, and
funders. And that's why I think this happens a lot less in the private sector than it does in the still happens in the private sector, just to be clear, but it happens less often in the private sector than the public
sector. So coming back to my requirement for candour, let's imagine a slightly different world than the one we're in. Let's imagine that the the business case for this project, rather than being buried in bureaucracy in Whitehall is in so far as it could be done from a confidentiality point of view in the public domain. And that the schedule has the name of the, the project director, you know, in the public domain. This is the schedule which I say I can deliver you hold me to
this. And the, you know, the, the, the, the cost estimations in the, in a, in a similar way. And that that person knows that it is, it is, it's going to be viewed by these Office of budget responsibility in genuinely independent people who are reporting to Parliament rather than reporting to, to, to, to governments, say. And then couple that with that, everybody I've just talked about is likely to be in their jobs for four or five years rather than 18 months. So you can't.
So there's, there's much less incentive to sort of just keep your head down and hope and, and hope that it'll all be all right when I leave it. The, the, what we've changed there is the incentives in the system and it's those incentives, just changes in those incentives which would change the behaviours I, I naively assert. Do you think all the attention on data analytics and AI is one of those things that people hopes of project delivery with?
So I'm going to take you back bloody decades because I talked about the Astute programme, the Astute, you know, the is the attack submarines that form up form the, the attack submarine part of the of the Royal Navy's nuclear defence fleet. And, and by the time we finish the Astute programme, there are still a couple of submarines still in the yard.
Those 7 submarines will have taken pretty much exactly twice as long as the previous class of 7 submarines, the Trafalgar class, took back in the sort of 80s and 90s. One of the things people thought right at the beginning of the Stew programme, and I, I recognise I'm talking 25 years ago now, was rather than using warehouses full of draughtsmen with beautiful drafting boards and pens and inks, we're going to use this, this 3D CAD process. It's going to be, you know, much better.
And of course, 3D CAD is much better and it's completely replaced hundreds of draw of draughtsman with, with drawing boards. But at the time it introduced a, a huge delay in the, Oh no, a delay in the programme because the technology wasn't really up to something as complex as a nuclear submarine. You could use it for a simple ship, but it wouldn't do a nuclear submarine and there weren't enough people skilled enough to to use it.
And so design went very much more slowly than it, than it did. My, my suspicion is that that same pattern, they hopefully it'll happen faster. We see some of that pattern with AI and, and, and learning technologies. If you come back in 10 years time, it, they'll have made a huge impact. But we'll, I, I, I fear we'll go down a lot of rabbit holes first
if we're not careful. And and so I'd encourage people to experiment, to try, but not to lose sight of the fundamentals of designing and building complex projects. The kind of prevalent cultural attitude that these projects are deemed to fail. How do you shift that? Is it about finding pockets of success and reminding people about those? The APM salary survey this year showed that there was a great. Distrust. In the successive major project government projects.
So it's kind of entrenched and expected so. Put issues in. Someone who's trying to lead a project, maybe, maybe not a massive scale, but faces this expectation of failure. What on earth do you do to try and make that people you're working with think that no, we can do this? Well, the the. The things. I'm about to mention, you know, anybody that's been living in this world for, for, for 10
years will, will recognise them. So things like, you know, the delivery professions, including prodigy management in government should have the same kind of esteem in government as policy development. Ministers and civil servants should spend longer in their jobs. The challenge of a project should be matched by the capability and and resources that are required to deliver it. You know, this is this is not rocket science. Projects shouldn't be initiated without clarity about what
they're trying to achieve. The estimation, the cost and schedule estimation of projects should genuinely take accountability of uncertainty. Which means that early on you're going to have very wide bounds of of cost estimate and and the tendency will for everybody who wants you to be much much more specific and exact before you know really what you're doing.
So these these are all really well known unanticipated pressures on cost and schedule should be brought out into the open and acknowledged and dealt with as you go along. We've been talking. Mostly in this in this conversation about why these underlying things prevent these well known things being being addressed. We talked about duty of candour. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Let me talk about two others. The first is, if you're that project leader, place a really
high value on simplicity. You know, try to. Avoid the tenders, the pressures in the system which will lead you to more and more complexity. I'm going to give. You give you, again I'll be brief, an example that I unfortunately know a lot about, which is the smart metering programme where in pursuit of theoretical perfection. We developed a. Complex solution which became functionally undeliverable, at least in the context of the time scales that the government wanted to deliver.
So rather than finishing the project in 2020, you know, it'll be that the current timeline says 80% of homes in 2026. But I'm not, I'm not holding my breath. So, so we could have done something much, much simpler. It wouldn't have had all the bells and whistles of benefits, but then it would have been delivered, you know, a decade earlier. And therefore, you know, who knows what we're doing with technology by now.
So, so one really important thing is prioritising simplicity over complexity and the other, which is less in the hands of the project leader perhaps is So I, I, I don't know if you've noticed how many times big projects get announced, you know. The the the. How how many times? The HS2 announced between its first conception in sort of 2009 and an actual formal business decision being made in 2020. Boris Johnson approved phase one in 2020. It must have been announced, you
know, 20 times. So the world takes a huge account of announcements, even though they don't really mean very much and takes almost no account of actual formal commitments, business commitments.
And if I working for a day, I would correct that balance so that I I mentioned before publishing of of business cases formal proper formal announcements of when, when ministers have genuinely made a clear, not not political intent, but an actual investment decision that should be very clear, very explicit and very, very public. But but because you're. Hugely experienced.
I, I wanted to find out from you what, what perhaps have been the most important career lessons, maybe one or two that you've learnt. So either personally as a as a kind of project person. And or related. To projects as well. So if you could pass on any advice, wisdom to project professionals out there who perhaps aren't as senior as you, maybe something you would have told a younger version of yourself, well.
I guess the first. Thing I'd say is, you know, stick with it. You know, they, these are, these are fantastic careers being involved in, in these huge endeavours, world scale projects, you know, don't let old grumpy grey haired men like me put you, put you off, you know, still stick with it. That's the that's the first message. The second is I think so professionalism, we've come such a long way with professionalism in the last in the last 20 years.
But professionalism is more than a collection of sort of niche technical capabilities, scheduling or cost estimating or risk management or whatever. I. Talked before about. Parity of esteem in, in, in a public sector context, parity of esteem with the sort of the policy and what, what one of my project friends used to call policy La La land. So that that parity of esteem starts with you if you're a project professional, you know.
So, so if, if the if the policy wonk can't explain how what they have written down as the scope of their project is really going to deliver what they think it will, you have to call them out on it. If the minister is unrealistic, and I know it's easy to say and it's hard to do, you have to step up and say so. So there's an element of. Courage. That I would encourage people to
adopt. And the final thing I would say is so, you know, be sceptical from time to time when you need to be, but don't ever let yourself drift into cynicism. Cynicism kills big projects. And in a way, it's kind of why I wanted to write the book, because I could feel that tendency in myself, the sort of this will never work tendency. And that we, we can't afford that as a, as a country, we can't afford it. And it is there are things that we can do and we have to do to do better.
Jonathan, that's. A great way to end the podcast. I mean, it just leaves me to say thank you for your time and for such a thoughtful conversation and obviously wish you the best of luck with your book. So thank you very much. It's a. It's a. Great pleasure. Thanks ever so much. And I'm sorry we meandered around a little bit. No, that's the. That's the fun of it. I think that's I expect that. So I plan for that some contingency, contingency planning involved. Well, that's what we. Need.
That's what we need. So thanks again for Jonathan for joining us and to you for listening to the APM podcast. Just to mention again that his book, The Delivery Gap, Why Government Projects Really Fail, and What Can be Done about it, publishes in September 2025. Don't forget to look out for more episodes or to rate and reviews. Wherever you get your podcasts, we'd welcome you to get in touch with your comments, feedback and suggestions by emailing us at
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