Making a difference? Evaluating an innovative approach to the project management Centre of Excellence in a UK government department

The UK Government has introduced measures in recent years aimed at improving project delivery capability in government departments, including the establishment of departmental Centres of Excellence (CoE) of Project and Programme Management (PPM) – ‘super programme offices’ charged with ‘embedding best practice’.This paper presents a case study of an innovative approach to the introduction of a CoE for IT-enabled change projects that includes a central team of highly skilled, experienced managers to intervene directly as required in problematic projects. The positive impact of this approach is compared with that of a previous conventional CoE focused mainly on ‘best practice’ process implementation, where no direct impact could be seen.Taken together with research literature from a number of disciplines, the case study supports the view that the conventional CoE approach of embedding ‘best practice’ control processes may have little success in improving project delivery. It highlights the importance of direct intervention using experience-based, context-sensitive skills in improving project performance, and points to the essential role of organisational power, politics and rhetoric in ‘making a difference’.