Published
At the recent Major Projects Association Prestige Lecture, Dame Kate Bingham and Nick Elliott CB, MBE, kept the audience enthralled with the story of the Vaccines Task Force. And what an amazing story it is.
The resultant vaccines have been an answer to Covid 19, whether you look at it from a health perspective, or an economic or political one.
The Task Force has achieved this against the odds:
- no vaccine had ever been successfully developed for human Coronavirus
- the impact of Covid 19 on the human body was only partially understood and has continued to change as we learn more and as the virus mutates
- their task involved developing and testing, manufacturing and delivering a safe vaccine, at scale and against the clock
to do all this, they:
- worked with people from across industry, the Civil Service, the military and consultancy to build a major project team of 200 from scratch
- adopted a portfolio approach to risk and to management which allowed them to ride multiple horses, until an effective vaccine got over the finish line; unsure whether any of the candidates would actually last the course
- managed human, clinical, technical and logistical complexity, all within an understandable but exceptional spotlight of public interest
- focused both on the immediate requirement for an effective vaccine and its delivery, whilst never losing sight of the longer term requirement of increasing our readiness for the next pandemic.
This was a programme that displayed many of the elements only occasionally associated with major project delivery, such as agile governance and speedy decision-making, and an imaginative approach to stakeholder engagement to mobilize those organizations essential for the delivery, over whom they had no direct power.
There is a temptation to read the story and say that, because their success was driven by the burning platform and the unique set of circumstances that gave rise to the programme, many of their lessons are inappropriate or impossible to apply on other, less ‘seat of the pants’ projects.
That is one way of looking at it. But what if we looked at that from the opposite point of view? Major projects of every hue, and the context behind them, have changed completely over the last short period. The Covid 19 lockdown has brought into sharp focus the need for a new approach and a new urgency to everything we do.
The threat of a myriad of strategic risks: pandemic, the climate emergency, political or social unrest mean that all projects are subject to continual change. What would happen to project performance and success rates if we treated every major project – even the longest, largest and most cumbersome – with the same kind of outcome focused, agile approach that the Task Force needed to adopt; not least as a way of reducing the pressure on our portfolio and reducing the ‘work in progress’ resources (human and financial) that might be released for other essential activity?
Prestige Lecture 2021 Recording (Members Only)