 Mae'r last talk this session, I promise you an eclectic mix today, and our last talk is something of a left field presentation. I hope Emma doesn't mind me saying that, but I recently noticed the report, I noticed it through the government, the report on what government can, through the guardian sorry, the report on what government can learn from the Olympics and Paralympics. Emma, I think, was lead author of that report, I'm correct in saying that, aren't I? Emma joined the Institute for Government in July 2012 as senior researcher in the policy making team. Emma's presentation will examine the success of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. I'm really struggling to get my words out here, I apologise, and we'll explore how lessons from the Games can be applied elsewhere, making the Games what we can learn from London 2012. So, as it has been said, I work for an organisation called the Institute for Government, and I'm going to be talking about a piece of work that we did earlier this year, looking at what can be learnt from the London 2012 Olympics. Now, I'm going to be completely upfront and say that my presentation is not about IT, it's about delivering major projects and what major projects can learn from the delivery of the Olympics. But I hope that you'll all be able to draw the parallels between delivering major projects and IT. And I am going to focus on some of the themes of this conference, so new ways of working, new modes of engagement and new skills sets. But before we get on to the detail of what major projects can learn from the Games, I want to start with a quote from somebody I think you'll all know, Boris Johnson. It was a surprise, wasn't it? There we were, little old us, the country that made such a horlicks of the Millennium Dome, celebrations in 2000, putting on a flawless performance of the most logistically difficult thing you can ask a country to do in peacetime. I want you to remember that feeling of surprise, because that surprise is revealing of our chronic tendency in this country to underestimate what we can do. We now need to learn the lessons of the Olympics and the Paralympics. Now I think it's fair to say that that quote from Boris captures a certain sense of surprise that the Olympics were a success. And I think it's also fair to say that in the UK we're prone to anticipating under-delivery in the public sector and particularly anticipating under-delivery when it comes to major projects. Now the Olympics were no different to that. And although many commentators have said since summer 2012 that the Olympics was a one-off, that it was always going to succeed, at the outset, when we went for the Olympics in the first place, success was far from a foregone conclusion and I just want to briefly revisit why and make the case to you. So we had a long history of unsuccessfully bidding for the games. We'd unsuccessfully bid for Birmingham once and for Manchester twice in the 90s. We also, as Boris mentioned, had quite a mixed track record when it came to delivering major projects. We weren't really perceived as a safe bet when you take into account things like the Millennium Dome, Wembley Stadium and Scottish Parliament, all of which had either met mixed expectations, had come in late or well over budget. The games also were a huge scale. The scale of the games was themselves a huge risk and I've just got a few numbers there to try and really drive home the scale of the games. 4,000 extra games times train services were needed to deliver the Olympics. 15,000 police officers had to be deployed. They were huge. It was an enormous risk. And even once we won, there were still real challenges that could have derailed the project before the summer of 2012. So we, as I'm sure you remember, the day after we won the games, bombs went off in London, which completely transformed the security efforts around the games. There was a change of merility in London, a financial crash and a change of national government, and I'm sure we all know the kind of challenges and risks that financial difficulties and political change represent for major projects. Now, although there's going to be an ongoing debate about the success of the legacy of the games in years to come, I think it's fair to say that in the eyes of the public and the press, the six weeks of games time itself, it was seen as very successful. And it was because of that really strong delivery of such a complex, risky project that the Institute for Government wanted to understand how did this happen? How was the game so successful? And when we started to look at that in a bit more detail and talk to some of the people that were involved in making that happen, so we talked to Tessa Jowell, Hugh Robertson, both Olympic ministers, Sebastian Coe, John Armit, some of the key people who'd been involved in delivering it, we were surprised to find out that the success factors for the games weren't niche, they weren't only relevant to other sporting projects, but they could help lots of parts of the public sector and major projects improve delivery. So how did they do it? I think there were two ways that they did it. First was that they found new ways of working on major projects and secondly found new ways of engaging people in the project. I'm going to start by talking about what new ways of working there were in the games. The first new way of working was around politics. I'm sure as many people in the room will be aware politics is a really important factor in public sector work. It was really important for the games in lots of ways. They needed political leadership to happen in the first place. We'd have never won the bid had it not been for people like Tessa Jowell, Hugh Robertson, Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone. But politics also represents a real risk for public sector projects particularly when there's political change, a change of mayorality or a change of national government. The pet project of one government can become the political football of another. So why didn't that happen on the games? Will politicians work together in a very different way? There was a real openness incorporation between different political parties on the games. The Labour government that bid for the games was really open with the Conservative opposition. They allowed civil servants to provide open briefings about the financial health of the games, about security efforts, about all the detail of how delivery was going to happen. Now that openness between a government in power and the opposition was really unusual and it meant that when the Conservatives came to power they were already on the ball. They knew everything that was happening with the major project and they were able to hit the ground running. So the games transformed one major risk around politics into something that actually enhanced the performance of the project. The second new way of working was around people and skills and skills and capabilities on public projects. Getting them right can often be quite a challenge on major projects and again this was done a bit differently on the games. So government and the games delivery bodies tried to recruit world class experts in finance, IT, construction, project management pretty much every area you can think of and they paid the salaries that went with that. Alongside that they made sure they recruited the best public and civil servants to the government team. So the government team was a mix of really kind of top-notch commercial skills and sectoral knowledge but it combined that with really strong expertise around how you make politics whitehall and the public sector machine work. It was an example of a really strong private public partnership if you like. And the second slightly different way of working around people and skills was instability. People who went and worked on the games in 2005 saw that project through in 2012 in government, in the public sector and in the private sector. They stayed with the project for its whole lifetime. Now as many people who have worked in the civil service will know that's relatively unusual. Staying on a project for that length of time is often not encouraged and often is not even possible. So that's a completely new way of working. Third, a slightly obvious point perhaps, is around the way that the governance and institutional design of the games work. So I mean when we were doing interviews we talked to a guy called Jeremy Beaton who ran the Government Olympic Executive and what he kept saying to us was it's incredible. People keep asking me who's in charge of London 2012 in government and I have to tell them no one, no one's in charge because responsibility sat across all number of departments, sat across a few different ministers. It was a very complicated governance environment and the delivery bodies for the games for instance the Olympic delivery authority which built the stadium had to be created from scratch. They didn't exist already when we won the bid. So what was done differently in this incredibly risky environment, well for a start there were really clear roles and responsibilities and responsibilities were chunked up to different organisations. Everybody knew what they were doing and secondarily lots of responsibility was placed at arms length from government so learning from some of the challenges around the millennium dome actually delivering the content for the games and delivering the stadium was placed at arms length. Experts were allowed creative control if you like over key parts of the games and just thoroughly looking at delivery and how delivery was done differently. Well the games had some advantages of course the Olympics was the hardest of hard deadlines and that can't be said for all major projects failing to deliver on time was not an option. But some other things were done slightly differently so firstly a scope was set out for the games in 2005 by the Olympic delivery authority and the government Olympic executive and they didn't deviate from that scope. It wasn't changed a year in, it wasn't changed three years in, it's staying the same and the governance structure and the delivery architecture was built in a way that discouraged change for the scope so the scope stayed the same. The government also invested really heavily in expert project management it spent in fact £725 million on a delivery partner CLM who managed the delivery of the project and that created real results and perhaps most interestingly around delivery. Government wasn't afraid of giving away power it delegated authority to where expertise sat so it delegated authority to the Olympic delivery authority to the Department for Transport delegated it to TFL. They were interested in where the expertise was and that's where the authority sat but of course not everything went well when it came to delivering the games and I think it's really important to acknowledge that one of the failures in the games occurred when the organisation wasn't capable of finding new ways of working. Wasn't capable of changing its practices to meet the challenge of the games and I'm sure everybody in the room remembers the G4S failure around security, the failure to provide an adequate number of security personnel for the games. And our analysis when we talk to people who are involved in this is that G4S tried to treat the games as business as usual, it didn't step up its game, it didn't adapt to a new way of working and as a result it failed to deliver. So I said I was also going to talk about new modes of engagement and how that helps this project be delivered. And there are really two things that I wanted to touch on that were done differently when it comes to modes of engagement. The first is around the budget, it's really about transparency. Often in public sector projects government can be quite nervous about putting any figures in public because it might be held to account. It can be nervous about committing itself. That was done very differently on the games. The government adopted a total disclosure approach where it published its accounts every quarter. It proactively engaged with the press and the public on those figures. That helped build a public sense of confidence that the games was going to be delivered to budget. But it also created efficiency. It put a downward pressure on costs by putting those figures in public and adopting a transparent approach. And the second quite different thing was that a really focused engaging vision was created for the games by LOCOG by the London Olympic delivery authority. So there were a whole range of interests in the games. Lots of people wanted them to come to London for different reasons. Ken Livingstone wanted them to come to London because they were going to help regenerate the East End. Others wanted them to come to the UK because they were going to boost regional employment. There wasn't any one reason why people wanted the games to come to London. And all those different agendas could have resulted in conflicts, people working to very narrow, siloed interests. So to combat that, the bid company and then latterly LOCOG in collaboration with government developed one very clear objective that all these other interests had to orbit around. And that clear objective was creating a great games for everyone as they called it. And what they meant by that was that everyone had to focus on creating a successful six weeks in the summer and everything else came after that. They encouraged people to work to that objective, to that vision first and to the silo second. Now finally I said I was going to touch on new skill sets and almost all the lessons I've outlined so far have been quite positive but as I said when talking about G4S not everything has gone well. Now in the games lots of public sector staff developed really new and useful skills around programme delivery, project management, types of issues that are becoming more and more, types of skills that are becoming more and more valued in central government. And they learnt them partly because of the partnership between the private sector and the public sector. Now one of our big questions is what's happening to those skills, to all the new skills that have been created as a result of that partnership. And lots of the civil servants that we spoke to said that once the games came to an end and they were being redeployed, they were being deployed into roles where those new skills were not going to be used, they didn't know how they were going to keep those fresh. And I think that's a really important piece of learning, they felt they had developed new skills that were valuable, these are certainly skills that government thinks are valuable too. So major projects need to make sure that as those skills are being developed they're being redeployed, they're continuing to be used, that they're making the most of them. So I've just got a few of our overarching lessons up here, I'm not going to go through each of them but hopefully they'll resonate based on some of the things I've said about making sure that you're really disciplined around change in time, that you create the environment for cooperation, whether that's between politicians or other major players on projects, that you create a sense of stability amongst personnel, that they stay with the project from start to finish, that you bring people together and really effective and mixed teams. You can see we did develop quite a few lessons, I'm not going to go through each of them. But just to conclude, as I said people are going to say that the games was very different, that it was a major project that was unlike anything that's done before, that it was always going to perform, that it was always going to succeed. And I'm not going to deny that there is a certain amount of Olympic exceptionalism, the hardness of the deadline, the pulling power of the games themselves all provided advantages for this major project that not all projects will have. But I think that our analysis shows that everybody working in the public sector or indeed on other types of major project can take something from the games that is relevant to making their major project deliver more successfully. The game shows the value of being bold, it shows the importance of finding new ways of working in order to deliver. Perhaps most importantly of all, one of my own reflections is that improving delivery on major projects is as much about learning from examples of success as it is about learning from failure. Thank you.