Paolo Quattrone

Dealing with unknown unknowns

“Paolo, in major programme management we do not know what we do not know”. This is what a programme manager in the Oil & Gas industry stated during a class I was giving on accounting for the unknown.

Major Programme Management is a particularly interesting locus to challenge conventional management and its taken-for-granted assumptions and even more what people normally think accounting and management control is about. Why? Because if one does not know what one does not know, that is, if one is in the realms of unknown-unknowns what is accounting there to represent and management to control? Uncertainty is everywhere but in programme management is so blatantly everywhere that one cannot pretend it does not exists, it can be tamed, decision making processes and change is linear and stable.

Programmes have multiple objectives, which often cannot be aligned and still have to be managed concurrently, stakeholders are emerging, data is never given but subject to political, strategic and intrinsic misrepresentation. Programme managers find themselves in a perfect ‘garbage can’ model of decision making where, to paraphrase Jim March, many things happen at once, with people, technologies, problems and solutions only loosely linked to each other (if at all), with people wandering in and out of decision making arenas and policies are often designed but not implemented.

In this context, major programme management represent an ideal theoretical and empirical space where to explore cutting edge reporting, governance and leadership issues. I do so in collaboration with various private and public research partners.

Through an ESRC accelerated impact grant, I collaborate with the Infrastructure and Project Authority (IPA) of the UK Cabinet to conduct research on how to improve the quality of decision making in Major programmes (see details on IPA Project X). I am also a member of their Major Programme Leadership Academy run by Oxford and the IPA, which has trained a now substantial amount of SROs and PDs of the UK civil servants involved in managing and overseeing UK government’s programme portfolio. I have also served on the Australian Major Project Leadership Academy, a collaboration between the University of Oxford, EY and the Federal Australian Government.  

My research has been successfully applied both in the public and private sector, leading to the development of substantial impact and saving as recognised in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) Impact Case assessment. For example, the adoption of the Maieutic Machine, in full or in some of its components, has lead to some substantial impact on the following programmes and organizations:

• Ministry of Defence Submarine Renewal Programme: contributing to saving GBP3bn in 10-year costs and delivering efficiency savings across the programmes of circa GBP900m.
• Home Office Collective Capital Bid: helping to secure cGBP 250m p/a of capital funding over the spending review period.
• Arcadis: enabling the company to implement an ‘action-oriented’ governance system which identified and reduces uncertainty.

Full details on the 2021 REF Impact Case can be found here.

At the University of Manchester, with the support of the Infrastructure and Project Authority, the University of Manchester Innovation Factory and the ESRC, we have developed a Maieutic Index, a tool to assess the quality and maturity of decision-making in major programmes. The Maieutic Index evaluates and scores the quality of four key processes that define Major Programmes’ success or failure, i.e. governance, communication, mediation and engagement.