The UK had a clear business case for action. Politicians and the top of the civil service had had enough of failure to deliver. Therefore we did not have to generate enthusiasm. On the other hand OGC didn’t have carte blanche. OGC said it could help, but we had to deliver something quickly otherwise support would have evaporated. We were very conscious when we put the program into action that we had to deliver the first set of results within six months. And we did so. So OGC didn’t get a blank cheque, it got a blank cheque for a few months to prove a concept which helped make alliances successful. We had the right people involved, we had the head of the civil service literally on the phone every week asking, ‘what’s going on next?’. Politically, we had our Cabinet minister, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Chancellor Brown’s deputy, involved in pushing the concept. So we had political support, we had the top official support. Next, we did not delegate this activity of getting the Gateway program underway to a low level. We ran it at a senior level, senior practitioners wrote the procedures as well as getting the reviews done. That was important. The productivity gain was enormous and we spoke the management language of the people we had to communicate with. Not to delegate too far would be a lesson. Of course we did have an important thing, the right structures, to stick with us long term. This was not a short-term program. We made mistakes, learnt, and adjusted direction. The board that runs this program, the Office of Government Commerce Supervisory Board is chaired by a Cabinet Minister, and has eight Permanent Secretaries. They lived with OGC and this process for all the meetings and took commitments as to what they were going to do next. It is a very good structure. So we had all the building blocks but we still had to produce a product that mattered. So what about the products?
The OGC Gateway product was the first trademarked product, and that’s led to other services. The purpose of a product or service is that it is absolutely repeatable, if you have to do it one thousand times the quality will be consistent a thousand times. We could not invent it each time we did it because the UK is a very large-scale business, We had to have something good, repeatable and high quality. We were pursuing a very simple concept. We said there is a life cycle of a project or a procurement which starts with a strategic assessment, moves through a business case, then you choose a contractor from a long list, you check it is ready for service and you get some benefits, pretty easily. We chose six stages as the stages at which an independent review team would look at the project, during its life cycle (Fig. 1). The process emphasises early intervention. The opportunity to improve a project starts when the project begins, it is almost hopeless half way through to try to rescue it.
The issue was ‘how does one use this as a discipline that is encouraging for the top of the office and for a Minister or anybody else?’. One of the most interesting outcomes of this process when we first used it was the project team sitting down and saying, ‘well, actually I thought we were just about to start this project up’. And somebody else would say, ‘no actually I have not seen a business case yet’. And somebody else would say, ‘I think we’ll let the contract tomorrow’ and somebody else would say, ‘well, actually we have not even agreed a business case or a short list of contractors’. The ability of this sort of diagram and the checklist that goes with it to tell a wide spread number of stakeholders where they actually are was a big win early on. So, using it as a route map just by itself proved very interesting. And then each of these stages had about ten criteria that helped people decide where they should be and what gaps they might have to fill in order to move on.
We thought about how to promote that message to a population who is not used to project management. We decided we wanted this to be a Mars Bar. You know it looked good, it tasted good and my goodness it did you good. It had to deliver every time. So we had no shame in saying, this is a Brand, it is going to be established as a Brand leader and we had a clear strategy to promote it as a Brand from day one. The Brand documentation was purposely world class and is written in plain English which includes no unique project management speak. OGC know it is world class because people have stolen it all over the world. We had high-class multi media promotion to promote the brand because it was not going to promote itself fast enough. And like a Mars Bar, we controlled the quality. We determined the team members, what they did and how they acted. People do not turn up because they are good people. They turn up because they have passed the accreditation test for being allowed to turn up. And that was very important. Now did we win the brand battle? Yes we did. If you flick on the BBC website and listen to the transcripts for the BBC news, you will hear every month a Minister on the radio being asked something like, ‘okay Minister, how do you know this particular defence project is going to work?’. And he will say, ‘because I’ve been working it with OGC Gateway team and they tell me we’re on the right track’. Now that is Brand success. Each Minister has been given one of the Gateway brand management check lists and there’s about 40,000 copies of these have been used. That is what comes of five years of branding. And people now know the term. The Prime Minister will use the term on radio. Ministers will use it. And they actually will understand what they are talking about too, which is even better.
In order to control the quality of this Mars bar, we had to decide on the quality elements. For us it was free at the point of delivery and then meeting the criteria shown in the slide. Because if you have a brand it is important to say how would you recognise it if you fell over it in the street. There are two issues to particularly emphasise (Fig 2). One is independence and the next is an accredited practitioner team. Who turns up is vital, and they are very distinguished people for the big projects. It will be somebody from the Sydney Olympics who does the Gate Zero review of the London Olympics. They have been there before, they are not scared of big decisions and have learnt from their mistakes. These are very impressive people and they are tuned to the projects size and complexity. The teams who turn up will have been there before and will recognise what is going on in minutes. And that is what is impressive. Next, fast delivery–five days maximum for a review, including writing the report. Even for an aircraft carrier project this is doable. It assumes it is an 80/20 process. It is very important to note that an OGC Gateway Review is not an audit and it is not quality assurance – it is an 80/20 top down management process, massively well received as a result of it being a short and focused review. The last thing to mention on criteria is access to stakeholders. That means all stakeholders. If it is a ministerial priority the Minister will be interviewed, they usually want to be interviewed but, if for some reason they are not available, we just simply will not do the review rather than fail to understand the issues. Good advice would be to stick to the elements that matter in the Branding.
You can only get away with all of these process of course if it is based on reality. So it is a fact that the real successes have helped us preserve our position today. The sort of repeat issues that come up at each of these six gate reviews are shown in Figure 3. We know eight or nine things that, if we could stop them going wrong on every project, life would be more successful. At each Gateway review we are limited to ten or twelve points only that the team will be examining. What they will do is rapidly home down on three or four. Typically some of these repeat points, such as leadership, business case, adequate skills and resources will be amongst them. That’s fairly normal and enables OGC to focus project help.
