Our report examined how projects achieve value to see what lessons there are for other projects. By value, we mean the difference projects make to citizens, service users or the environment.
We set out seven high level lessons with recommendations on what the government can do now so that it will better prevent fraud and maintain standards during an emergency.
Our report provides updates on the government’s evolving approach to national resilience and risk management.
This report examines whether government has mechanisms in place to understand and encourage competition in public procurement, and how government departments can make their use of competition more effective.
This report draws on insights from our previous work to set out what effective cross-government working looks like and highlights some of the barriers.
This report brings together our learning and identifies eight areas for government departments and national regulators to consider when designing, delivering and improving regulation involving local regulatory delivery.
This report uses our experience of auditing programmes to draw together insights to help decision-makers determine whether they should reset a programme and how to increase the chances of a reset succeeding.
Insights to help decision-makers determine when or how a programme should be delivered at speed.
This report sets out the lessons for government and departments to learn from the experience of implementing digital change.
This report identifies key issues government will need to consider when attempting to increase its efficiency.
This report provides our initial thoughts on the learning government can draw from its response to COVID-19 to date.
This report examines lessons from our work on major programmes, including transport, defence and energy programmes.
This report sets out insights for government from its preparations for EU Exit.
It is important that the DWP use the hard lessons it learned from implementing its recent programme of welfare reforms to improve how it manages change and anticipates risk.
Optimism bias in public sector projects is not a new phenomenon. But it is one that persists, frequently undermining projects’ value for money as time and cost are under estimated and benefits over estimated. This report uses our back catalogue to illustrate the consequences of over optimism. In doing so, we have identified some contributory factors – such as project complexity and an organisation’s culture of challenge.