I founded Projecting Success in March 2014. My vision was always to leverage the rich experience that we capture within projects and then use it to avoid the avoidable. My first foray into this world was via the route of knowledge management.  

At the same time as founding Projecting Success, I also co-founder of another business that I exited in 2016. Within this business, we employed 2 knowledge managers. My initial observation was that we weren’t doing enough as a profession to collect, curate, connect and leverage our knowledge from projects. I was convinced that knowledge management was the way forward.  

Pioneering Initiatives in Project Delivery

Along the journey I realised that knowledge management was failing to deliver. In times of organisational stress, knowledge managers were always an easy target. I had seen countless instances where organisations had invested in knowledge management, but when the champion left, the progress stalled or went into reverse. The pendulum often swung violently.  

In parallel I wanted to understand how project based organisations were leveraging their vast databases of lessons learned and whether there was a better way of curating this knowledge. I tried to get hold of these lessons learned, but repeatedly struggled. So I resorted to the only mechanism available to me; the Freedom of Information process.  

I knew that this would create issues and I discussed the implications at length with my team and mentors. But I knew that it was the right thing to do. I collated over 20,000 lessons learned and the insights from this work shaped my thinking considerably. I concluded that the process was fundamentally broken and we were approaching it the wrong way. 

That took me deeper into the world of data. I reached out to several large organisations to share the insights we had gathered, but they simply weren’t ready for it, plus they were often stuck in the challenges of the here and now. I saw that rather than try and change the profession alone, we should do it together, so in 2017 I established the Project Data Analytics community. It has since expanded to over 10,000 members.  

The following year we joined forces with Sir Robert McAlpine, via Gareth Parkes and Grant Findlay, and Microsoft to launch Project:Hack. A community hackathon with the objective of solving problems that we have in common, inspiring thousands of people along the way. On 11-12 June 2024 we are running our 20^th event. 

In 2020 I reached out to a number of kindred spirits who shared a passion for making a difference. They agreed to join me on the mission and together we founded the Project Data Analytics Task Force. The Task Force has written a white paper, manifesto and a guide to getting started in project data. A body of work that has helped to raise the profile of project data analytics across the profession.  

In 2020 we also launched the Project Data Academy, funded by the government apprenticeship levy. It was apparent to us that if we want to move the dial on project delivery we will need a small army of people with the depth of knowledge to deliver it. The pioneers, the people with a passion for data driven projects, those who aspire to re-imagine the way we work. We have trained up hundreds of people, many of whom have carved out new and exciting careers. New roles have emerged and some of our alumni have gone on to achieve some amazing things. 

Impactful Collaborations and Partnerships

In 2021 we worked with some visionary people to found the Construction Data Trust, a world first, with a mission to pool the data from construction projects. A quest to codify, collate and curate our collective hard won project delivery experience that is codified in data. We were proud to see it featuring centre stage in the Private Sector Productivity Playbook in 2022. The Construction Data Trust, Projecting Success and other key organisations also had a significant input into the report on Measuring Construction Site Productivity. 

In 2022 we were appointed as the lead developer for the Offshore Energy Data Trust. Collaborating with 7 other organisations to securely pool data to drive down the £45 billion cost of decommissioning 4000 wells in the North Sea. Another world first, with the objective of pooling data on projects to avoid the avoidable, drive up investment certainty, optimise and drive a portfolio level approach. In parallel, we also worked with the Project Data Analytics Task Force to release a Manifesto for Data Driven Project Delivery. A seminal document that established a collaborative approach.  

Community Engagement

In 2023 we launched Marvin, a community chatbot trained on over 1000 documents, including copyrighted books. Another part of our community endeavours. We also released our ChPP wizard, helping project professionals with their applications to become a Chartered Project Professional. Not to game the system, but to level the playing field for those who may not have the level of mentoring support of the larger corporates.  

In 2024 we published our book on Next Generation PMOs, open sourcing it for the benefit of all. Mapping out how we can reimagine PMOs by taking a data driven approach. The first in a series of books we are working on to fundamentally reimagine project delivery.    

As we celebrate our first decade, we're proud to have hosted 19 hackathons, with our exciting 20th hackathon on the horizon. Additionally, through our collective efforts, we've raised £11,000 for our chosen charities, further demonstrating our commitment to making a positive impact.  

We’ve always been driven by our vision to transform project delivery by leveraging the power of data and AI. To make major projects more invest-able, improve delivery confidence and drive change across society. To enable and accelerate the energy transition, drive economic growth and make the world a better place. By joining forces, we believe we can achieve more, faster, and reach further than we ever could on our own. 

Reflecting on our first decade, it's heartwarming to recap the achievements and the ripple effects we've ignited – and the best part? We're just warming up. As we embark on the journey ahead, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to all our staff, learners, collaborators, and partners. Your unwavering support and dedication have been instrumental in our success over the past 10 years. Here's to the incredible journey we've shared and the exciting road ahead.

Thank you for being an integral part of our story.

How do we judge how good a project professional is at their job? Is it by the way they follow process? Or as Jeff Bezos reported “I want people who are right most of the time?” How do we measure how right someone has been?

We’ve been giving a lot of thought to this recently and believe that there is a lot that we can bring to the debate through advanced data analytics.

• Estimators. How good were you at estimating something compared to your peers? What is the difference between forecast and out-turn? How do we normalise this based around project complexity or emergence?
• Risk managers. How good were you at pre-empting risk? How effectively was the risk budget invested? How many issues sprang up out of the blue?
• Stakeholder managers. How much delay was created by challenges with stakeholder management and how does this compare with other benchmarks.
• Change managers. How much of the change could have been anticipated and tackled earlier? On a scale, how proactively is change managed? What is the impact of tackling change late? Are the change managers plugged into the lead indicators and picking up change at the earliest point possible?

This is the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot we can do. But is this just another set of KPIs that no-one is interested in?

By surfacing it we can help to move away from turning the handle on process and pivot towards a more evidence driven approach.

Formula 1 works on very fine margins. Every member of the pitlane and engineering team are measured against a set of KPIs. The driver’s performance is measured against every metre of the road and compared against their peers. But in project delivery we don’t even measure what these margins are or how we can optimise them.

This situation is no longer acceptable and change is coming. Only then will we really drive transformational change.

We work with >60 different organisations and have a deep grasp of where they are struggling and where others are outperforming them. We’ve boiled it down to the following key factors:

• Vision, strategy and ambition. They have a clear understanding where they want to get to and how quickly.
• Senior commitment. They have board level support who show an interest in driving through change. Having a nod from the board is very different to having clear support.
• Governance. Senior members of the organisation are involved with driving progress, unblocking obstacles and holding people to account. They tackle the cross organisational issues that often drag transformational projects down.
• Understanding of constraints. They have a good understanding of their constraints. But they don’t get suffocated by them. They work around them, use the evidence of impact to influence others and build momentum.
• Transformation. They understand that this isn’t the job of ‘someone in the data team’. It requires a data culture that runs deep into the heart of the project delivery organisation. As such, the organisation treats it as a transformation project rather than a bolt on. The organisation has a good understanding of the various strands of activity that need to be developed in parallel.
• Iterative approach. We’ve seen some organisations who try and tackle the challenge of data in a massive programme of change. But they often get bogged down in organisational design, consultation and much more beyond. Those organisations who are pulling away are running pilots and driving change in rapid spirals rather than a big bang.
• Developing talent. They recognise that some members of their project teams will become increasingly obsolete as new methods gain traction. Rather than trying to find data talent within an overheated market they invest in developing their own people. Step 1 is to highlight the need for change and the opportunities that it presents. Step 2 is to inspire them, create a fear of missing out, show them a path. Then sign them up to the Project Data Academy.
• Open source. The organisations who are making rapid progress tend to be those who are working on open source solutions. Clients are beginning to understand the opportunities that this provides, leaving them with solutions that they can iterate and build on for collective benefit.
• Data. The more advanced organisations are also beginning to understand that the data they collect and the problems that they aspire to solve aren’t always aligned. They are beginning to get to grips with how they close these gaps.

Most interesting, there are clearly organisations out there who are working within a walled garden, developing products and services to sell or differentiate themselves from others. But our sense is that those who work collaboratively will outperform their peers. Particularly those who are agile and responsive. They’ll move more quickly together than alon