Agenda item

Presentation by Richard Beckett – Head of Major Projects

 Richard Beckett, Head of Major Projects, gave a presentation to the Committee on the governance structure behind all major projects within Nottingham City Council.  He highlighted the following points:

(a)  A major project is generally a project worth over £1m and / or is considered to be particularly complex. Major projects are then split into two tiers

·  Tier 1 – projects worth over £10m

·  Tier 2 – projects worth less than £10m

(b)  There are currently 15 Tier 1 projects in various stages of development amounting to approximately £400m investment in Nottingham. This is not all Council money, much of it is from grants and private investment, there are a further 6 Tier 1 projects in the initial stages of consideration;

(c)  All projects have to be assessed at the initial stage before work starts, this assessment is done at Corporate Leadership level, allows Corporate Leaders to impose conditions or recommendations/parameters to the development.

(d)  After the project has received support from the Corporate Leadership Team they can progress. Within the lifecycle of the project, there are 2 gateway reviews, one at the initial business case stage, prior to the project receiving formal approval, and the second during the life of the development to give assurance that the project is running efficiently.

(e)  The Gateway review is completed by colleagues who have experience in disciplines the project draws upon but who are not involved in the project being reviewed. They review the project documentation, meet with the project team and then produce a report giving assurance and/or making recommendations. The Project team then respond to the written report and any recommendations with an action plan that is then implemented;

(f)  Each project has a sponsor within the Council who is an officer who champions the project, is accountable for its performance and ensures the correct level of resources are provided to ensure the success of the project;

(g)  The Major Project Team have also formed a Portfolio Management Office that administers the assurance process and reviews monthly monitoring looking at projects.  Monthly monitoring reports consider a number of factors, for example how a project is performing, financial information, risk, programme and change. These monthly monitoring reports are transformed into Dashboards which give a high level overview that is then distributed to relevant officers and members;

(h)  The review process involved people who are able to challenge and test projects at a number of different levels and throughout their life. At the end of each project there is a final process where the project team look at lessons that have been learnt and how these should be fed back to colleagues;

(i)  The Major Projects team maintain a project management handbook available on the intranet which reflects lessons learnt and best practice;

The Committee had a number of questions and comments following the presentation, the following information was highlighted during discussion:

(j)  A number of projects have gone to the CLT initial review stage and have been given the initial go ahead.  Other projects that have been through a review process have been significantly amended following the Review’s conclusions about the strength of the project’s business case.

(k)  Projects have gone through the gateway review stage and issues around risk have been flagged up, these have been addressed and contracts renegotiated and the risk to the Council has been reduced;

(l)  The initial review, Gateway Zero, where the project goes before the Corporate Leadership Team allows CLT to be made aware of grant funding, capital investment and allows the Council to link major projects to City Council aims. This gives a council wide view of each project whereas prior to the introduction of this initial review each project was developed at a department level without the overarching view;

(m)The information from the Portfolio Office feeds into a number of different boards and governance structures within the Council. These include the Capital Monitoring Group which is largely and finance focussed.

(n)  Stress testing is a key aspect of every project as is risk analysis. These issues are considered by the review process  and extensive sensitivity testing is built into business cases at the beginning of each project life cycle. These elements are continually monitored;

(o)  The role for Audit committee in this process is oversight of this process, as a Committee, Audit cannot be involved in the individual assessment of projects;

(p)  There are a number of checks and balances that are in place to ensure that all of the review processes and assessments are carried out to the same standard. The Portfolio Office are proactive in looking for non-compliance and any incidents are escalated up through the various boards to be addressed;

(q)  The review processes outlined have been used on the New Build element of the Housing Revenue Account (HRA), to date this hasn’t been rolled out further across the HRA;

(r)  All project managers within Major Projects are trained with the relevant qualification.

Resolved to take a more detailed look of outcomes of projects and how lessons learned are applied to new projects and their impact at the May 2020 Audit Committee