Part 1: Introduction & Strategic Planning
Introduction
Building critical economic and social infrastructure is vital to the government’s desire to drive growth and prosperity across the UK. But it won’t come cheap. Ambitions like improving rail connectivity across northern England, creating Great British Energy and improving the country’s healthcare estate require significant investment. While estimated costs vary wildly, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority believes that the country needs £800bn of investment to meet demand – that’s like delivering the London 2012 Olympic Games over 60 times (when accounting for inflation). KPMG's own analysis suggests the actual figure is closer to £2trn.
And money isn’t the only factor. Programmes are often perceived as being plagued with difficulties, unable to deliver their intended benefits on time and budget. The increasing intricacy of major programmes, driven by digital dependence, sustainability targets, and sheer scale, exacerbates this. Added into this mix is a volatile landscape characterised by labour shortages, skills gaps, inflation, lengthy planning processes and supply chain disruptions.
Despite this, traditional models for programme partners (i.e. how external support is brought in to strengthen the client team) have remained largely unchanged for decades, and in practice default into resource augmentation rather than outcome alignment and dynamic adaptation. This ineffectiveness is underlined when you look at delivery. Historically, only 40% of projects are delivered to time and budget targets. This plummets to 0.5% when considering benefits realisation - exacerbating the commonly-held perception that programmes are always overbudget and late.
All this underscores the urgent need for a new approach. The scale of investment, complexity, competing priorities and need for certainty necessitates long-term programme partners who can act as trusted advisors during development and delivery.
A new approach - built on strategic planning, integrated decision-making and dynamic resource deployment – provides just this. It seeks to streamline processes, intelligently and flexibly deploy resources and involve stakeholders from the outset. If successfully employed, it can revolutionise programme partnerships, driving better outcomes in an increasingly uncertain and complex programme ecosystem. This series of three articles explores each of these concepts, beginning with strategic planning.
Strategic planning: Charting the course for success
Strategic planning is the cornerstone of successful delivery. It involves proactive planning and analysis to anticipate challenges and opportunities throughout a programme’s lifecycle. These challenges and opportunities go beyond the traditional focus of time, cost and quality.
Complex programmes require integrated technical and strategic planning to manage the needs of multiple stakeholders. Unfortunately, the current approach is often fragmented, reactive and overlooks the strategic capability required to manage complex systems. This leads to missed opportunities, poor stakeholder alignment and a lack of strategic decision-making.
This is because bottom-up planning pays insufficient attention to operational or stakeholder activities as well as wider regulatory, operational, political and economic considerations.
So, what needs to change? Creating a culture of collaboration, strong decision-making frameworks and technology enablers from the outset are vital.
Aspiring to create this model and realising it are two different things. It won’t happen organically, and without continued input there is a danger of falling back into outdated models.
Therefore, the top-down strategic planning model should:
- Bring together stakeholder considerations: Regardless of their level of involvement, stakeholders must be considered at the outset and factored into the planning process
- Map critical milestones across time horizons: Map critical milestones across six, 12, 18 and 24-month timeframes with consideration to anticipated changes in the wider political, economic and supply chain landscape
- Define a programmatic lifecycle with projects phased and prioritised: View programmes as a series of phases, each with its own unique challenges and opportunities
- Identify key decisions: Determine the critical decisions that need to be made by whom and with what data at each stage of the project (see next article)
- Define project organisation maturity: Assess the maturity required of the project organisation for each milestone, to effectively plan operating model changes and resource deployment
- Enable proactive planning and scenario testing: Facilitate proactive planning and scenario analysis to anticipate and mitigate risks, and maximise opportunities
- Enhance communication: Provide a clear and concise tool for communicating complex information to stakeholders
- Set the foundation for dynamic resource deployment: Ensure resources are focused on the most critical tasks and activities
Under this model, infrastructure projects can achieve better outcomes, improve stakeholder alignment and operate more strategically in an increasingly complex and uncertain environment.
The next article in the series explores integrated decision-making and dynamic resource deployment in more depth.