Outcomes
- Full programme rolled out to 730 project management professionals across a £23bn infrastructure portfolio
- 5,049 hours of remote learning delivered across 122 people in 9 project teams in the initial phase, covering a combined portfolio value of £3.3bn
- 89% of participants reported increased understanding and confidence in project controls; 86% in commerciality; 84% in project and programme management
- 69.6% increase in participants’ confidence in applying learning directly to their projects
- 64.8% increase in participants’ capability to successfully deliver projects based on programme content
- 100% of participants who completed the behavioural strengths assessment reported they could now play a role in creating a high-performing project team
- Digital Project Management Guidebook launched to 300+ employees, generating 1,000+ unique viewers
- 100,000 hours of on-site experience harvested and made digitally available across the project management community
Background
Inconsistent performance, delivery delays, and scope and budget overruns were endemic across the client’s project portfolio. A deeply siloed organisation meant departments and technical functions lacked collaboration and a shared view of primary objectives. Existing capability development programmes were too theoretical, focused on processes and systems rather than people, and were not translating into improved delivery on the ground. The client needed a fundamentally different approach — one that would shift culture, build genuine capability, and produce measurable improvement in project outcomes across a diverse and complex portfolio.
Curzon Approach
Curzon was engaged to interpret and structure the client’s vision for its Project Performance Accelerator programme into clear deliverables, and to co-create and deliver two products: an Immersive Learning Experience and a Digital Project Management Guidebook.
Immersive Learning Experience — Designed to disrupt conventional programme delivery, the learner journey took project teams through 16 hours of pre-learning, a behavioural strengths assessment, personalised coaching, a five-day immersive learning week, and two bespoke checkpoint workshops to embed knowledge. The curriculum was built around the full project lifecycle and adapted to different learning styles, covering project controls, commercial acumen, contractor management, risk, and ways of working. When the Covid-19 pandemic made in-person delivery impossible, Curzon rapidly redesigned the entire programme for remote delivery — without compromising learning outcomes or pace of rollout — and successfully completed the full rollout to all 730 target participants.
Digital Project Management Guidebook — A fully interactive digital tool giving the entire project management community on-demand access to practical, hard-earned insight from experienced practitioners. Curzon led content creation alongside the client’s subject matter experts, adopting a divide-and-conquer approach to safeguard client ownership while ensuring consistency and relevance across programmes. The Guidebook deliberately avoided duplicating existing manuals — instead curating the best available material into a single, accessible resource validated with senior stakeholders across the organisation.
A “working better together” model underpinned both products, driving a fundamental shift in how individuals interact, take ownership of overlapping workstreams, and solve problems collaboratively — moving the focus from systems and processes to people.
