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Why do government projects fail? · Project Podcast

0:14
Welcome to the APM podcast. APM is the chartered body for
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the project profession. My name is Emma Devita.
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I'm the editor of Project, APM's quarterly journal and your host
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in this podcast. I'm speaking to Jonathan
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Simcock, a highly experienced and respected project leader in
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the UK who has held executive roles in oil and gas, energy,
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utilities and telecommunications sectors.
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He has been involved in the largest UK government project
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since 2007, when he took over what became the Infrastructure
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and Projects Authority and is now the National Infrastructure
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and Service Transformation Authority, or NISTA.
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Until last year he was chair with the Submarine Delivery
0:54
Agency in the MOD. His book, The Delivery Gap, Why
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Government Projects Really Fail and What can be done about it,
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comes out later this month and is available for pre-order now.
1:06
When the UK is facing low growth, poor productivity, an
1:10
increasingly insecure world and climate change, closing the
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delivery gap is an imperative, as important as any of the other
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challenges of statesmanship, he argues.
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So we at the APM Podcast couldn't wait to get him into
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the studio and ask him what he's learnt about delivering
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government projects, whether they're all doomed to fail, and
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what it takes to deliver some of the largest and most complex
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projects successfully. Welcome Jonathan.
1:36
Thanks for joining us at the APM Podcast.
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How are you? I'm very well.
1:40
Thank you ever so much for inviting me.
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No, it's a pleasure. I would like to begin by asking
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you briefly about your career and what you're doing now.
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So I spent the 1st 2/3 of my career probably in oil and gas.
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We didn't always call when I was doing projects in those days,
2:01
but they were really big maintenance projects.
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We would call them now capital projects.
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I did quite a lot of mergers and acquisitions and then I did
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quite a lot of transformation, internal transformation in oil
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and gas businesses. But then relevant to this
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conversation, in 2007 by a series of accidents, I ended up
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as the major projects director in something was called the
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Office of Government Commerce, which as you say, turned into
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the Major Projects Authority, then the Infrastructure Projects
2:35
Authority, and has now been merged into the new body.
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Mr I have to say in 2007 I was spectacularly under qualified
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for that job. I think I we got it because no
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civil servant of the right grade had had applied.
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But since then I've been leading, governing, advising,
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assuring on great big government projects one way or another.
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As you say, I was chair of the Submarine Delivery Authority
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until last year and earlier this year I stepped away from the
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board of Sellafield, the nuclear site in, in the Northwest.
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What I'm doing now, I'm spending quite a lot of time promoting
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the delivery gap and and meanwhile waiting for, yeah,
3:19
waiting for the next challenge, probably in an advisory or a a
3:22
non executive role. Let's talk about your book.
3:26
So it's it's called the delivery gap.
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What do you mean by that? What is?
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What is the delivery gap and and why?
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Why did you want to write the book now?
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So I think that the level of public debate about great big
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projects is terribly shallow, very superficial in the media.
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So if you listen to if you listen as I do, to sort of
3:54
political podcasts or read, read political books, then the reason
4:00
we have problems in big projects, it's all to do is oh,
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because we funny, we had some decent project managers or if
4:07
only politicians were, you know, we had some decent politicians
4:11
or if we sorted out the planning system.
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There is some truth, of course, in all of these things, but they
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betray A superficial understanding of what this is.
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This the the challenges that really go on in great big
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projects. So I, I had in mind to write a
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book of explaining, you know, why is this so hard that my
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first working title was not the delivery gap, it was how hard
4:36
can it be? But then in the wake of the HS2
4:43
failure, I'm going to call it failure.
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I, I realised that in my heart, I'm sometimes for these great
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big projects, expecting them to fail.
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And I'll come back to what I mean by failure in a in a
4:55
minute. And that felt really
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uncomfortable, particularly in the context that you mentioned,
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which is, you know, we're in a we're in a country with no
5:06
growth, with poor productivity, with a desperate need for for
5:11
infrastructure investment, with growing defence threats.
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We need projects. So to stop you to have to have
5:19
this sort of mindset that of course with these things never
5:21
work, that's really unhealthy. So I wanted to get under the
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skin of what really is going on here and I wanted it to be an
5:29
insider's book. You know, there are good project
5:32
management books from academia. There are some quite good public
5:39
sector project books from sort of journalistic view.
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But I wanted to spend time and I have spent time talking with the
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ministers, the ex ministers, typically senior officials, the
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delivery leaders, civil servants, the supply chain to,
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to get a more of an insider's view about what really is going
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on here. And, and I think my conclusion
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out of all of that is good people are struggling in a, in a
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system that's failing. And it's to do with the
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incentive structures that Dr tendencies and behaviours that
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lead to failure. And then, and if we only think
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about improving the process and sorting out the planning system
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and so on, then when we're, we're not going to get to grips
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with the with the root causes here the book, the book is
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structured with 7 case studies at the beginning.
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Which case studies do you cover in the book?
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So I cover Crossrail, the Elizabeth line, I cover the
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Palace of Westminster Restoration and renewal project,
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I cover the Universal Credit project, completely different
6:59
kind of of project. I cover the smart metre
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implementation programme, of which I'm definitely one of the
7:09
guilty. I cover the the huge project for
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privatising the management of all of our nuclear legacy sites,
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including Sellafield where I was on the board.
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I cover the national programme for IT and the health service,
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massive top down rewiring and the health service and I cover
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the, the programme for the Astute tax submarines.
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So you'll, you'll, you'll notice from these that I'm talking
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about huge projects. You know, most of these projects
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are 10 billion plus. And that's, that's really the,
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the, the light, the, the light I'm trying to shine is on that
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kind of huge endeavour. So that's, that's what motivated
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me to, to, to write the book. You asked me what I mean by the
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delivery gap. Yeah.
8:05
Success and failure of projects is not a simple subject.
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Actually, it's worth the conversation in its own right.
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But in in context of this book, what I really mean is as simple
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as, did we do what we said we were going to do on the day we
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said we were going to do it for the amount of money that we
8:23
promised? Did we do what it says on the
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tin? A successful project will kind
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of meet its promise. What if that promise gets
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redefined over many many years? So I think if the promise is
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redefined, so if if we're halfway through something and we
8:44
say, look, we don't really want a blue one, we've decided we now
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want a red one. And the project says, well, OK,
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if you want a red one, that's fine, but it's going to cost 2
8:58
billion more and arrive 5, five years later and everyone says,
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yes, we still want to do it. That can still be a successful
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project. However, as you know as well as
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I do, Emma, any, any experienced project professional will tell
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you that the best way to kill a project is to change your mind
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halfway through about what you're trying to achieve.
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So the, so the worst thing a project leader can do is to not
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face up to the realities of what change means, not force, if I
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can use that word. The stakeholders, the sponsors,
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the the funders of the project to the consequences of the
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change they want to make and fudge it to pretend that while
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we can sort of still do a blue 1 and it might be a little bit
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more expensive, but it probably won't because that's what
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everybody wants to hear. So there's so there's something,
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there's something really important about professional
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confidence and candour. Candour.
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So actually you're describing some behaviours there that I
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wanted to circle background to because you referred to
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incentives and behaviours and perhaps the wrong behaviours are
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being encouraged and perhaps not having candour is one of those
10:17
behaviours. So could you tell us a bit more
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about that? I spoke to a leader of a project
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that everybody or almost everybody listening to this
10:27
project will have will have heard of who described the, the,
10:34
the systemic pressure on them to undercook their estimates.
10:41
You know, now, now he was absolutely clear that he wasn't
10:45
going to do that, but he was also, he was also honest enough
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to say you shouldn't underestimate the, the ability
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to sort of get yourself to believe what you need to believe
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in order to get to where you want to get to.
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And, and, and so the, the example that he's using, I'm,
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I'm keeping it very anonymous here.
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He said, well, if you know, I'm, I'm going to say that it's, you
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know, X billion and, and X years.
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And I know in I know that if I said it was X + 4 billion and
11:15
years plus three, that, that I, that I wouldn't get next year's
11:19
funding and without necessarily funding out no project.
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So he's, he's it's, so he's not lying.
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But those pressures exist in the system.
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And it's somebody else described to me this tendency as limbo
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dancing that that's kind of what we do in in developing a big
11:39
government projects. Why do these pressures exist in
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the 1st place and is it because of poor estimation, lack of
11:48
clarity over the purpose of the project, political desires and
11:53
ambition, and but compounded with this kind of
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miscommunication and lack of trust because people don't stick
12:01
around long enough? What would stop this happening
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in the first place? All of the above, all of the
12:08
above. So if if a strong minister.
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So I'm now thinking about the case of Universal Credit, a
12:15
strong minister with very strong vision, determined to overcome
12:24
any barrier to get going and to make this project survive and
12:27
to, to get it, to get it going. Nobody in the system was strong
12:32
enough to to stand up to that. Not, not by saying, well, you
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know, your project plan says this.
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Well, my project plan says that because it was too early for a
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project plan. There was, you know, we haven't
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got a project yet. We don't know how we're going to
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do it and the incentives in the system don't encourage anybody
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to to stand up. What, what can we, what can we
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do about these things? When I started writing, after a
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little while, I felt I'd not really, I'd not really satisfied
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with this. And I realised that what, what
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was happening was I've spent so many years writing gateway
13:09
reviews or structured advice for senior officials or for
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ministers that, that I was cramping myself into a sort of a
13:20
style of writing which where I was continually hedging and
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thinking, well, how will that read to a minister?
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And what will, how realistic will that be in the political
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context into which I'm delivering it?
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And could I rephrase this in a way which makes it gentler?
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And, and I had a, a conversation with a, a literary agent in the
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process of trying to get a publisher.
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And he said that's, that's really not what you're trying to
13:45
do here. You're not trying to say to,
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you're not trying to produce a sort of a set of simple
13:50
recommendations which are bound to be easily applicable in the
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environment you're talking to. You're trying to advance the
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debate. You're trying to get people
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thinking about things in a different way.
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And suddenly I found myself much freer to to to, to think about
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things which, yeah, I wouldn't look particularly easy if they
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landed on on the desk in Mr the Day after Tomorrow.
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But. But I came into that
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conversation because you asked me, what can we do about this?
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One of the things I feel more and more strongly about is that
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the players in this game, with the probable exception of the
14:33
politicians there should be, we should be subject to a kind of a
14:38
duty of candour. Now it it, it, it, it shouldn't
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be OK to allow a business case to go forward with estimates
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that are under cooked where everyone sort of knows they're
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under cooked. But you know, this is what we
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need in order to get the project going.
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And I, and I'm that this isn't a criticism of individual project
15:00
people, let's say it is to do with the system.
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And so one of the things I, I think we need is rather than the
15:10
mountain of project assurance, which which any big project in
15:14
government gets drowned by, I think there should be something
15:18
that is genuinely independent that the, that the, that the
15:23
professional knows is going to be exposed, you know, but to
15:30
people to, to a, to a small group of experienced people who
15:34
can, who can hold them to account.
15:37
No, that doesn't exist at the moment.
15:39
You know, the National Audit Office is a wonderful
15:41
institution and full of wisdom that nobody particularly takes
15:44
much notice of. But it's auditing, it's backward
15:47
looking. I'm talking about something that
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would feel a bit more like a kind of project equivalent of
15:53
the Office of Budget Responsibility.
15:58
Consequently, everybody will hate this idea.
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But do you see what I mean? Is that not part of Nistor's
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role? I'm sure it is.
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And you know, you can follow that thread right back to, to my
16:10
time in in #1 Horse Gas Rd in the Treasury.
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But Nistor's not independent. You know, every everybody
16:20
involved in that is that decision making works for the
16:23
Prime Minister. It's, it's so it's, it's, yeah.
16:27
It's just not independent. Yeah, completely outside of
16:31
that, what were you going to say about Crossroad?
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I think, I don't know if I mentioned this earlier on, but
16:38
everyone I guess remembers this, that first of all, though, just
16:44
to be completely clear, Crossrail is a fantastic piece
16:48
of infrastructure, You know, one that the nation should be proud
16:51
of and the people that built it should be proud of and is, you
16:55
know, delivering above its above its volumes and its and its
17:00
passenger numbers and so on. And the, and the early phases of
17:06
the Cross Road project went brilliantly well.
17:08
The civil phases were a were a miracle.
17:12
However, in August 2018, the project was still saying that it
17:22
was going to open the central section of the of the railway in
17:27
December 2018, four, four in four months time.
17:31
And at that point the underlying problems became undeniable and
17:35
serviced publicly and the the overall railway was not fully
17:40
opened until 2023. Billions of pounds more spent
17:44
and yet years more consumed. And yes, it's a wonderful
17:49
railway, but that is not OK. So the people leading that
17:55
programme, some of them knew but weren't prepared to say.
18:00
And some of them, you know, had managed to convince themselves
18:03
that they that they didn't know. That isn't that is not all
18:06
right. That's the kind of, that's the
18:10
kind of behaviours, if you like the tendencies, which we've got
18:15
to, we've got to overcome. I use it as an extreme example
18:19
and, but, but just to be clear, this is absolutely not a unique
18:24
situation. I have sits at around so many
18:26
tables where everybody kind of knows that the schedule that
18:31
they're looking at is not a realistic 1.
18:34
And then, and then the project leaders will look at each other
18:37
and say, well, you know, if we rebaseline now and and say it's
18:41
going to take another year, then in a year we'll have lost all of
18:45
that float and we'll be back to say to rebaseline it again.
18:48
There's this fear of facing reality.
18:52
To ask an obvious question and the fear of facing that reality
18:56
is the fear of what? What are the consequences
18:59
they're seeking to avoid? There is a genuine concern
19:04
around project leadership tables in a situation where the
19:10
schedule is under real pressure and where it's likelihood of
19:14
delivery has become very low or even non existence.
19:21
There is a genuine concern around that table that if you
19:24
acknowledge that reality and say to use the Crossrail example,
19:29
it's not going to be 2018, it's going to be 2020.
19:33
There is, there is a concern around that table that a year
19:38
later all of that new float, all of that new schedule contingency
19:43
would have got swallowed up and that we'll be facing exactly the
19:46
same situation again. And then it won't be 2020, it'll
19:49
be 20. And that is, there is, there is
19:52
some truth in that line and it is a, it is a, it's a genuine
19:56
tension in a big project to say at what point is the right point
19:59
to rebaseline the schedule. It's a, It's a It's a valuable
20:03
and important conversation, however.
20:06
There is something else going on with that around that table and
20:09
that is if I acknowledge this isn't going to get delivered,
20:14
then I have to go and tell the sponsor this isn't going to get
20:18
delivered. He has to then go and tell the
20:20
minister, or in this case the the mayor, that he isn't going
20:23
to get delivered. We'll end up with a, a team of
20:27
outsiders will be sent in to work out why we've done such a
20:30
bad job and what we should do differently.
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That's going to distract us for, for six months and I might lose
20:36
my job. And, and, and so, so these
20:41
subtler tendencies, the subtler incentives, encourage the
20:49
delusion, encourage the obfuscation, encourage the
20:52
unreasonable optimism that is endemic in in a lot of
20:57
government projects. You know this is known about,
21:02
isn't it, that people have this optimism bias?
21:06
Why does this still happen? What fundamentally needs to
21:11
change then? Yeah.
21:14
So I, I love the phrase optimism dies bias.
21:17
It sounds, doesn't it? It sounds like a kind of a, a
21:21
very human sort of tendency to look on the bright side.
21:25
You know, it's quite a warm thing, you know, optimistic.
21:29
It sounds nice, doesn't it, what we're talking about in these
21:32
kind of situations, and I'm going to, I'm going to use a
21:36
deliberately nasty way of describing it.
21:38
It's a kind of a collective conspiracy to delude ourselves
21:42
and not only ourselves, but our sort of stakeholders and, and
21:46
funders. And that's why I think this
21:48
happens a lot less in the private sector than it does in
21:52
the still happens in the private sector, just to be clear, but it
21:56
happens less often in the private sector than the public
21:58
sector. So coming back to my requirement
22:02
for candour, let's imagine a slightly different world than
22:05
the one we're in. Let's imagine that the the
22:09
business case for this project, rather than being buried in
22:14
bureaucracy in Whitehall is in so far as it could be done from
22:18
a confidentiality point of view in the public domain.
22:22
And that the schedule has the name of the, the project
22:26
director, you know, in the public domain.
22:29
This is the schedule which I say I can deliver you hold me to
22:32
this. And the, you know, the, the,
22:35
the, the cost estimations in the, in a, in a similar way.
22:39
And that that person knows that it is, it is, it's going to be
22:44
viewed by these Office of budget responsibility in genuinely
22:48
independent people who are reporting to Parliament rather
22:51
than reporting to, to, to, to governments, say.
22:56
And then couple that with that, everybody I've just talked about
23:01
is likely to be in their jobs for four or five years rather
23:04
than 18 months. So you can't.
23:06
So there's, there's much less incentive to sort of just keep
23:08
your head down and hope and, and hope that it'll all be all right
23:11
when I leave it. The, the, what we've changed
23:14
there is the incentives in the system and it's those
23:17
incentives, just changes in those incentives which would
23:20
change the behaviours I, I naively assert.
23:25
Do you think all the attention on data analytics and AI is one
23:30
of those things that people hopes of project delivery with?
23:35
So I'm going to take you back bloody decades because I talked
23:40
about the Astute programme, the Astute, you know, the is the
23:43
attack submarines that form up form the, the attack submarine
23:47
part of the of the Royal Navy's nuclear defence fleet.
23:52
And, and by the time we finish the Astute programme, there are
23:57
still a couple of submarines still in the yard.
24:01
Those 7 submarines will have taken pretty much exactly twice
24:07
as long as the previous class of 7 submarines, the Trafalgar
24:11
class, took back in the sort of 80s and 90s.
24:15
One of the things people thought right at the beginning of the
24:20
Stew programme, and I, I recognise I'm talking 25 years
24:23
ago now, was rather than using warehouses full of draughtsmen
24:28
with beautiful drafting boards and pens and inks, we're going
24:32
to use this, this 3D CAD process.
24:35
It's going to be, you know, much better.
24:37
And of course, 3D CAD is much better and it's completely
24:41
replaced hundreds of draw of draughtsman with, with drawing
24:46
boards. But at the time it introduced a,
24:50
a huge delay in the, Oh no, a delay in the programme because
24:54
the technology wasn't really up to something as complex as a
24:56
nuclear submarine. You could use it for a simple
24:58
ship, but it wouldn't do a nuclear submarine and there
25:01
weren't enough people skilled enough to to use it.
25:04
And so design went very much more slowly than it, than it
25:07
did. My, my suspicion is that that
25:10
same pattern, they hopefully it'll happen faster.
25:13
We see some of that pattern with AI and, and, and learning
25:19
technologies. If you come back in 10 years
25:22
time, it, they'll have made a huge impact.
25:25
But we'll, I, I, I fear we'll go down a lot of rabbit holes first
25:30
if we're not careful. And and so I'd encourage people
25:34
to experiment, to try, but not to lose sight of the
25:39
fundamentals of designing and building complex projects.
25:44
The kind of prevalent cultural attitude that these projects are
25:50
deemed to fail. How do you shift that?
25:55
Is it about finding pockets of success and reminding people
26:00
about those? The APM salary survey this year
26:05
showed that there was a great. Distrust.
26:08
In the successive major project government projects.
26:13
So it's kind of entrenched and expected so.
26:19
Put issues in. Someone who's trying to lead a
26:21
project, maybe, maybe not a massive scale, but faces this
26:27
expectation of failure. What on earth do you do to try
26:33
and make that people you're working with think that no, we
26:38
can do this? Well, the the.
26:41
The things. I'm about to mention, you know,
26:44
anybody that's been living in this world for, for, for 10
26:46
years will, will recognise them. So things like, you know, the
26:49
delivery professions, including prodigy management in government
26:53
should have the same kind of esteem in government as policy
26:58
development. Ministers and civil servants
27:01
should spend longer in their jobs.
27:03
The challenge of a project should be matched by the
27:06
capability and and resources that are required to deliver it.
27:12
You know, this is this is not rocket science.
27:15
Projects shouldn't be initiated without clarity about what
27:19
they're trying to achieve. The estimation, the cost and
27:23
schedule estimation of projects should genuinely take
27:27
accountability of uncertainty. Which means that early on you're
27:31
going to have very wide bounds of of cost estimate and and the
27:35
tendency will for everybody who wants you to be much much more
27:38
specific and exact before you know really what you're doing.
27:41
So these these are all really well known unanticipated
27:46
pressures on cost and schedule should be brought out into the
27:48
open and acknowledged and dealt with as you go along.
27:52
We've been talking. Mostly in this in this
27:54
conversation about why these underlying things prevent these
27:59
well known things being being addressed.
28:01
We talked about duty of candour. We don't need to talk about that
28:04
anymore. Let me talk about two others.
28:08
The first is, if you're that project leader, place a really
28:15
high value on simplicity. You know, try to.
28:20
Avoid the tenders, the pressures in the system which will lead
28:27
you to more and more complexity. I'm going to give.
28:32
You give you, again I'll be brief, an example that I
28:36
unfortunately know a lot about, which is the smart metering
28:39
programme where in pursuit of theoretical perfection.
28:47
We developed a. Complex solution which became
28:51
functionally undeliverable, at least in the context of the time
28:56
scales that the government wanted to deliver.
28:58
So rather than finishing the project in 2020, you know, it'll
29:02
be that the current timeline says 80% of homes in 2026.
29:07
But I'm not, I'm not holding my breath.
29:09
So, so we could have done something much, much simpler.
29:14
It wouldn't have had all the bells and whistles of benefits,
29:17
but then it would have been delivered, you know, a decade
29:19
earlier. And therefore, you know, who
29:21
knows what we're doing with technology by now.
29:23
So, so one really important thing is prioritising simplicity
29:30
over complexity and the other, which is less in the hands of
29:36
the project leader perhaps is So I, I, I don't know if you've
29:42
noticed how many times big projects get announced, you
29:47
know. The the the.
29:48
How how many times? The HS2 announced between its
29:51
first conception in sort of 2009 and an actual formal business
29:57
decision being made in 2020. Boris Johnson approved phase one
30:01
in 2020. It must have been announced, you
30:04
know, 20 times. So the world takes a huge
30:10
account of announcements, even though they don't really mean
30:12
very much and takes almost no account of actual formal
30:18
commitments, business commitments.
30:22
And if I working for a day, I would correct that balance so
30:26
that I I mentioned before publishing of of business cases
30:30
formal proper formal announcements of when, when
30:34
ministers have genuinely made a clear, not not political intent,
30:40
but an actual investment decision that should be very
30:45
clear, very explicit and very, very public.
30:48
But but because you're. Hugely experienced.
30:51
I, I wanted to find out from you what, what perhaps have been the
30:55
most important career lessons, maybe one or two that you've
31:00
learnt. So either personally as a as a
31:03
kind of project person. And or related.
31:07
To projects as well. So if you could pass on any
31:10
advice, wisdom to project professionals out there who
31:14
perhaps aren't as senior as you, maybe something you would have
31:17
told a younger version of yourself, well.
31:22
I guess the first. Thing I'd say is, you know,
31:25
stick with it. You know, they, these are, these
31:27
are fantastic careers being involved in, in these huge
31:32
endeavours, world scale projects, you know, don't let
31:37
old grumpy grey haired men like me put you, put you off, you
31:41
know, still stick with it. That's the that's the first
31:44
message. The second is I think so
31:50
professionalism, we've come such a long way with professionalism
31:54
in the last in the last 20 years.
31:56
But professionalism is more than a collection of sort of niche
32:02
technical capabilities, scheduling or cost estimating or
32:06
risk management or whatever. I.
32:10
Talked before about. Parity of esteem in, in, in a
32:13
public sector context, parity of esteem with the sort of the
32:15
policy and what, what one of my project friends used to call
32:19
policy La La land. So that that parity of esteem
32:24
starts with you if you're a project professional, you know.
32:28
So, so if, if the if the policy wonk can't explain how what they
32:36
have written down as the scope of their project is really going
32:38
to deliver what they think it will, you have to call them out
32:43
on it. If the minister is unrealistic,
32:46
and I know it's easy to say and it's hard to do, you have to
32:49
step up and say so. So there's an element of.
32:53
Courage. That I would encourage people to
32:57
adopt. And the final thing I would say
33:00
is so, you know, be sceptical from time to time when you need
33:08
to be, but don't ever let yourself drift into cynicism.
33:15
Cynicism kills big projects. And in a way, it's kind of why I
33:22
wanted to write the book, because I could feel that
33:24
tendency in myself, the sort of this will never work tendency.
33:30
And that we, we can't afford that as a, as a country, we
33:32
can't afford it. And it is there are things that
33:36
we can do and we have to do to do better.
33:39
Jonathan, that's. A great way to end the podcast.
33:42
I mean, it just leaves me to say thank you for your time and for
33:47
such a thoughtful conversation and obviously wish you the best
33:50
of luck with your book. So thank you very much.
33:54
It's a. It's a.
33:55
Great pleasure. Thanks ever so much.
33:56
And I'm sorry we meandered around a little bit.
33:59
No, that's the. That's the fun of it.
34:00
I think that's I expect that. So I plan for that some
34:05
contingency, contingency planning involved.
34:09
Well, that's what we. Need.
34:10
That's what we need. So thanks again for Jonathan for
34:13
joining us and to you for listening to the APM podcast.
34:16
Just to mention again that his book, The Delivery Gap, Why
34:19
Government Projects Really Fail, and What Can be Done about it,
34:22
publishes in September 2025. Don't forget to look out for
34:26
more episodes or to rate and reviews.
34:28
Wherever you get your podcasts, we'd welcome you to get in touch
34:31
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34:35
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34:44
This podcast has been brought to you by APM, the childhood body
34:47
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34:51
visit apm.org.uk.