The Delivery Podcast

Projects are all about storytelling; enabling us to make sense of the world around us and to organise socially to change it. Brin Hodgskiss, Emer O'Donovan and Donnie MacNicol explain exactly how and why stories are significant in project delivery and how the advent of AI will make human storytelling even more important in the future. In a wide-ranging discussion, they explain:

• the critical skill of managing the narrative of yo...

Three very different applications of data and analytics feature in this podcast episode. James Lea from Project Science talks about predictive analytics, Sarah Crawley from Symterra explores progress reporting and performance, and Donnie MacNicol of Team Animation introduces the concept of human-centric data. 

The common themes in each approach are the growing democratization of data; with data and information available to and for ...

How do the human aspects of decision making play out in practice in the complex and uncertain environment of large projects? What are the biases (cognitive, gender, status and so on) which undermine our best attempts to work together collaboratively and to deliver challenging outcomes?

Ruth Murray-Webster, IJ Samuel and Mary Gregory explore the reality of bias, in all its forms and talk candidly about the impact on them, their care...

Resilience is now recognised as one of the defining requirements of any big project, whether that is expressed in terms of the infrastructure asset, the organisation or system behind the project, or the network of individuals that make up the project delivery team and the wider stakeholders.

Our three contributors to the Delivery Podcast episode on this theme (Kristen MacAskill, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge; E...

What's the one thing that can secure you and everything you are working on from the worst that change and uncertainty can throw at you? It's got to be learning and just-in-time learning at that.

The team behind QUBE: Professor Eddie Obeng, Tammy Watchorn and David Lomas explain why 'in the world after midnight', learning socially, in-the-moment and applying the learning as you go is as much a part of the skillset for project delive...

For our second episode, we've turned our focus onto the governance of big projects; the set of rules that we use to help us decide which strategy to adopt in the first place and then, having adopted it, that frame how we should behave collaboratively to deliver it.

Terry Cooke-Davies opens with a challenge around the 'crisis of governance', the seeds of which he can trace back to enlightenment thinking. Our expert panel, David Hanc...

What if we looked at major projects as grand experiments, or considered managing change as harnessing a force of nature, or thought of project managers as theatre directors, foresters or even, minecrafters. 

In this first ever episode, five leading thinkers: Julie Black (Director of Missions and Capability at the UK Space Agency), Donnie MacNicol (owner of Team Animation and founder of the Delivery Club), Helen Bevan (Strategic Hea...