How can parliament support the project profession?

Today is the first day back in the office after three weeks ‘on the road’ for APM’s policy and public affairs team, networking and influencing at the major UK political party conferences.

This year, APM elected to attend the Liberal Democrat, Labour and Conservative party conferences, the three largest nationwide political parties, a decision taken long before the General Election was called.

Why should APM bother to attend? Well, every politician is interested in projects, we see on social media how they give their support to projects within their constituencies almost daily, yet not every politician firmly understands projects. That is where APM comes in, with our charitable object to advance the science and understanding of project management.

At each conference, we combined APM representatives, politicians and academic experts with the aim being to build that link between those developing project management theory and those charged with delivering policy. I’d love for us to be joined by practitioners in future years as well.

At the Liberal Democrat conference, we asked; is the UK ready to build? Dr Amgad Badewi and our CEO Prof. Adam Boddison OBE covered ideas around stakeholder involvement vs stakeholder engagement, benefits realisation and accountability. Former project manager Victoria Collins MP put the emphasis on the need for vision and strategy to build confidence.

At the Labour conference, we asked; how can we make the Labour manifesto a reality? Prof. Martina Huemann spoke of the need for projects to be seen as investments, not costs, with much greater understanding of benefits, that we should dare to question if they are the best solutions, and also question the capability of project owners and sponsors. Our President Yvonne Thompson CBE DL outlined the real need for skills development, to build the pipeline of young project managers entering the profession.

At the Conservative conference, we asked; are we too quick to call failure on Government project delivery? The Rt Hon John Glen MP was able to give his perspective of working in Government, how politicians in general can be ill-informed on the complexities of project delivery, the problems of a lack of accountability and the value of decent leadership. Dr Efrosyni Konstantinou thought about the knowledge gap in project management studies — it’s a relatively new profession and it needs many more years of projects before we can really decide what constitutes a failure.

There was a rich discussion at each conference — far too many insights for me to share in a blog. But what they all did was to help us build awareness of the project profession within political circles. My thanks to everyone who joined us and helped make our fringe events a success.

So what next? The 2024 election delivered far more project managers than ever before to the green benches so we now have a greater opportunity to scrutinise Government approaches to project management than ever before.

And there is much to do. Our own manifesto asks of respond, reinvent, reform still need to be implemented. We have seen some movement around the first, but the second and third will require serious work.

We must capitalise on the Government’s missions and manifesto commitments. They all need to be delivered effectively and efficiently, using a project mentality — more support for project professionals within Government is therefore a must. And the opposition parties are there to hold them to account. Taken together, all must ensure that Government projects are delivered well, that taxpayer’s money is well spent, and that benefits are realised.

 

You may also be interested in:

• Life in parliament
• Leading the government property profession
• What is project management?