Bath Consultancy Group has been developing a strand of work responding to the growing interest in how organisations create the conditions for success for complex projects and programmes.

Wembley Stadium, Airbus A380, Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the Scottish parliament building, the NHS IT programme. The headlines are riddled with examples of major projects failing to deliver their benefits to the time, cost, or quality criteria laid out in the key success criteria used in the initiation of the project.

Project Managers say that the overruns and underperformance are due to poor Project Management, or a lack of it.   But many of these companies and organisations have invested substantial sums of money in highly sophisticated Project management systems, many of which have been independently adjudged to be world class. Yet projects and programmes still run into the same issues...

There is considerable emerging thinking that the mechanical skills, processes and tools of Project Management are absolutely necessary, but not sufficient to deliver projects in today's ever more complex social and political environments. To deliver these projects is not impossible -and there are companies who quietly get on with delivering major projects and change programmes to time, cost and performance.

The important factors of the environment in which projects, programmes, and change agendas are born, constructed, and delivered are every bit as important as the Project management tools, skills, and processes in use.  Good project management needs the right leadership capability, strategic focus and cultural conditions to deliver.

So how do organisations learn fast and effectively about the conditions for success for delivering on complex programmes? Bath Consultancy Group have developed a framework for whole system learning, that points to the conditions - and critically, the relationships between them - for successfully implementation of projects and complex programmes -  in turn enhancing organisation learning and effectiveness. Click here...

We are now in discussions with Gower Publishing to produce and edit a reader which will address the relationship between successful programme management and organisational learning.  It will bring together fresh and live accounts from across the panoply of projects and programmes management - defence, technology, health, and banking - international and often nation critical projects from UK, Europe and around the world.  Contributors will tell their project story - and how their team and organisation learned through its development and delivery - or not!

For further details, contact This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it