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.
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