Tools, Models And Reorienting Our Profession: Lessons For Major Projects From International Development

With a unique insight from his work delivering projects in Nepal, Tanzania and Bangladesh for over a decade, Harry Jones, Freeports Programme Director at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, considers why we must apply the same tools, principles and mindset to our Major Project delivery as those used in International Development projects.

How would your major project be faring, if it wasn’t for all those difficult stakeholders to manage? Would things be on track if you weren’t spending all of your time responding to the latest unexpected development or ‘black swan’ event? Or perhaps it would be straightforward if only the messy landscape you were operating in had some central ‘guiding mind’?

These are challenges that a great many Major Projects face, but many project managers’ training has not set them up to deal with them. But rather than seeing these as incidental, atypical or unscientific problems, nowadays we know better. This is about project complexity, and there are things we can do about it.

I led and delivered International Development projects for more than a decade in Nepal, Tanzania and Bangladesh before moving to the Department for Levelling Up to lead Major Projects. Having recently joining the excellent Major Projects Leadership Academy it’s reassuring there is a focus on managing complexity, but I can say with confidence there’s a lot that can be learned in the world of Major Projects from International Development, which has been grappling with highly complex projects across the sector for decades.

Tools and models from international development for major projects

In the first instance there are tools to borrow. Political Economy Analysis (PEA) is a framework that can help major projects dealing with tricky stakeholders and messy landscapes, looking at how interest and incentives, formal institutions and informal norms, shape behaviour and outcomes. Central challenges of major project delivery stem from the strength of their political and economic interests, so PEA, focused on understanding the interaction of political and economic forces, has great promise.

PEA can be integrated and honed to help projects understand the landscape they work in, to enable them to better navigate and deliver lasting results. Readers could start with a simple framework for everyday use, or this beginner’s guide. This post is a great introduction and glossary for further reading, while this topic guide is also a great catalogue. Alternatively, you could dive straight in with FCDO’s most up-to-date guidance, USAID’s guide, DFAT’s well-regarded take on it, or this book with extensive examples from the World Bank.

Secondly, the development sector is home to great innovation and advances in adaptive programming – this should help for major projects facing uncertainty or novelty. It has become almost mainstream in development, and there have been extensive efforts to codify approaches and share knowledge and good practice.

I would advise major project managers look at some of the great toolkits to help projects test and iterate their strategies, or toolkits for a problem-solving approach that also builds capability. There are excellent briefs and books, a toolkit and library of resources from USAID, or you could begin by browsing through some of the reams of commentary and research.

There is strong evidence to suggest these tools will make a difference for Major Project delivery, as they fit like a glove to the majority of our key success factors (see Proof of relevance? box below). Moreover, the experience from applying these tools and principles on major projects and infrastructure in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Nepal has shown great results – the ‘facility model’  may be directly applicable by national stakeholders with a remit for improving major project delivery.

We will also need to adapt tools and test ways to integrate them in major project delivery models – but experience in the development sector is an asset because it goes further than what we have elsewhere, and should provide helpful insight. While ‘agile’ approaches are well-established for IT projects, we are at an early stage for major projects (e.g. this recent session on ‘failing fast’ was promising). But in development there is experience applying these principles e.g. in transport, civil aviation, telecoms and tax, or in rural livelihoods, illegal logging, and citizen empowerment, and lessons from across DFID’s experience with adaptive management.

Proof of relevance?

There are really strong reasons to think PEA and adaptive programming will be helpful for major projects. The biggest and best systematic review to date of research on megaprojects looked across 6,007 sources, distilling 18 causes of poor performance and 54 associated solutions. More than half of these success factors are best understood by PEA, including: how the institutional setup checks and challenges dysfunctional decision-making behaviour; how projects are able to manage fragmented stakeholders, institutional contexts, and communities; how sponsors, clients, owners and operators are set up for productive collaboration given their power, incentives, relationships and governance; how leaders and teams build coalitions avoid silos and manage conflicts; and how commercial incentives are best aligned with deliver in the supply chain. I’d argue another third relate to adaptive management, dealing with risk and uncertainty, and building teams and organisations that are flexible and responsive. Formal project management systems and tools barely feature.

Deeper lessons: shifts in our mindset and our profession

Taking a step back to consider the lessons from both development and major projects, the most fundamental message is about how we see project delivery and project management. The tendency is to see the complexity of delivering major projects as the exception and rational, linear, self-contained projects the rule, but a global view challenges this: the majority of projects are complex! This should enable us to grow and recognise project management talent much more efficiently and effectively.

Rather than bringing people up to learn how to deliver projects in a “controlled environment”, and then later seeing if they can tackle different types of projects requiring different kinds of skills, what if we integrated the tools and competencies needed to operate in complex environments from the start? Accreditation and professional development should teach project managers from junior levels that relationship management and an ability to work with uncertainty are key skills to succeed. MPLA and some other courses do this, but it should be more widespread. And it might enable us to have a more inclusive profession – many individuals I met in Nepal and Tanzania did not have recognised qualifications but have exceptional skills as project leaders, demonstrated by their ability to succeed in these environments.

This would avoid a good deal of wasted time and effort. Working on complexity early in my career I saw many practitioners understood complexity and had ways of dealing with it, but it was ignored or suppressed by agencies that saw it as unscientific. Effort is wasted as project managers invest time maintaining a false image that suits their funders’ perspective, and project managers’ performance and talent is obscured. The experience of agencies continuing to brush complexity under the carpet and focus on predictable, ‘transactional’ projects suggests that this shift does rest on us as a profession, providing leadership to define the task of major project delivery and shape the departments and agencies we work with.

The world needs people who can work in imperfect systems, who can run projects to tackle complex problems: climate change, ‘levelling up’, the energy transition etc. The sooner we recognise that delivering projects is typically complex, the better progress we will make on these critical missions.