Published
The Major Projects Association was established over 40 years ago following research from Oxford Centre for Management Studies (later Oxford Said) that explored the shared experience that was common to people working on complex projects. In my six and a half years at the Association, one of the recurring messages I have heard at Association seminars and from the people I have met is about the importance of shared values.
Values one of the four elements covered in the 2018 APM Research Study: Project Leadership – skills, behaviours, knowledge and values. In their conclusions, the researchers reflected on a number of questions: the aspiring project leader’s credibility, their ‘match’ to any given project, whether good project managers make good project leaders and finally, the differences between male and female project leaders. Questions which, appropriately, can only be answered in part or in whole by looking at the values of the person in question.
The four project learning legacies all look at the role and significance that organisational values play in project delivery. In 2012, following the arrival of the new Chief Executive (Andrew Wostenholme), Crossrail embarked on a programme to set their values:
“The aim was for everyone who worked on Crossrail, regardless of employer, to feel part of something special, summarised in the following statement: Whatever role we do, wherever we work, whoever we work for, we are all part of the same project, sharing common values and working towards the same goals.
Their 2013 Big Dig employee survey underlined the significance of this approach in terms of employee satisfaction, loyalty, motivation and pride.
| Measure | Score |
| Satisfied with my job | 86% |
| Satisfied with Crossrail as a place to work | 90% |
| Loyal to Crossrail | 95% |
| Motivated | 91% |
| Proud to work on Crossrail | 96% |
Results of the 2013 Crossrail Big Dig Employee Survey
The Thameslink Learning Legacy shone the spotlight on the role of values in driving organisational resilience, diversity and inclusion, as well as employee engagement.
The HS2 Learning Legacy tells the story of how the Exception Performance Awards have been used to disseminate and embed the organisation’s core values.
- It reinforced that this was one Integrated Project Team working towards the same collective goals and objectives.
- It gave all members of the IPT an opportunity to highlight successes from within their operating environments and instilled a sense of belonging and recognition for all.
- It reinforced the collective values and provided demonstrable examples of working in line with them.
A major project is an expression of values
From it’s earliest planning, every major project is an expression of values because every major project represents a choice. How the Government of the day chooses to invest what will always be a finite pot of public money signals what we hold to be important and valued.
Values underpin the value any project is able to deliver since the extent to which users are engaged and motivated to change their behaviour – whether that be in terms of abandoning their car for public transport, replacing their old boiler with a heat pump or embracing new ways of hybrid working – depends on to what extent they value what is being asked of them.
Understanding and sharing (or at least respecting) the values of others is what enables collaboration and builds trust, confidence and resilience in any project organisation and its supply chain.
Values are as important as assurance
We talk a lot about the importance of governance and assurance in helping deliver the right projects in the right way. Perhaps we should talk more about values: why is this project worth doing? It’s difficult to get excited by project efficiency or effectiveness, other than intellectually. On the other hand, values and worth, reflect how we are working, who we are working with and how we feel about the eventual outcome of the project and our contribution towards that outcome.
Against the context of an increasingly challenging economic, social and natural environment, our values are important for addressing the ethics of our choices, building confidence in those choices and engaging everyone, whether project delivery specialist or stakeholder in the importance of the outcomes.
Wearing your values
World Values Day is an annual campaign to increase the awareness and practice of values around the world; a real opportunity for
individuals and organisations to wear their values on their metaphorical sleeves and take a deeper dive into what it means to be human and what it means to deliver some of the most complex projects.
Jonathan Norman,
Knowledge Manager