RightTrack North West aims to help local government in the North West to improve their project and programme management capability.

The arguments for this are compelling. For example, industry analysis indicates that 30% of projects are cancelled before completion and 88% of projects exceed deadline, budget or both. If councils are to deliver against their strategic objectives over the coming Spending Review period it is clear that they need to be improve their PPM capabilities.

In 2006 NWeGG agreed to fund an initial study into the current level of project and programme management maturity and to create a plan to address the findings of that analysis. The North West Improvement Network (NWIN), appreciating the importance of PPM skills in improvement activities, also backed this work through its communities of practice programme.

The first phase of this work was led by Manchester City Council with support and active engagement from a wide number of other North West councils. The overall aim was to accelerate the growth of maturity in this area and, through collaborative working, create generic solutions as a standard for the region to utilise and tailor further if required.

22 from 46 councils took part in a PPM maturity assessment between April and May 2007. The overall results showed that there is enormous variability in PPM maturity in councils with particular weaknesses in various elements of programme management, particularly:

Dependency management
Performance reporting
Strategic alignment of projects
Benefits realisation

In other words, almost all councils are poor at understanding how many projects they have, their relative priorities and interdependencies and their capacity to deliver them. In addition, 80% of councils requested assistance with capacity building for project and programme managers. We are, however, much better at specific project management.

This work that also highlighted that there are some 10,000 to 15,000 people managing projects in the North West, mostly alongside day jobs.