Case study: Primary Colours® toolkit – Major Projects Leadership Academy
Using our toolkit on the Oxford Saïd leadership programme to demonstrate impact
Background
In 2012, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (the IPA, part of the Cabinet Office) commissioned the Major Projects Leadership Academy (MPLA) – an academy that builds the skills of senior project leaders across government – to equip senior leaders to handle the challenges they face in delivering the UK Government Major Project Portfolio, currently representing a whole life cost of over £800 billion. Oxford Said Business School (OSBS) invited Edgecumbe to support its successful bid when the programme was retendered in 2022.
I have seen the application of these ideas enable individuals and teams from around the world to understand what they need to do, and why, and align their personal and collective efforts to work together effectively and deliver results in a way they found astonishing.
Our approach
OSBS partnered with Edgecumbe to define the leadership behaviours required for success, embed these in a 360 degree feedback tool, and teach the core leadership day on the year-long programme. Edgecumbe redeveloped the 360 tool in 2024 in line with the new competency framework published by the IPA.
A combination of the NEO personality questionnaire and pre- and post-programme 360 feedback exercises enables participants to enhance their self-awareness, focus their development plans on those aspects of leadership most amenable to sustained change, track progress and inform an evaluation of the programme’s impacts.
Results
Over 1,300 people have completed the programme to date, resulting in the formation of a new professional stream in government and significant improvements in both leadership effectiveness and government programme delivery performance, saving £ billions of public money.
How feedback tools support participants, the client and the business school
MPLA participants are senior leaders, mostly in the role of Programme Director (PD) or Senior Responsible Owner (SRO), with responsibility for the delivery of critical UK Government policies. Their scope encompasses infrastructure (e.g. HS2, New Hospitals, Prisons, Flood Defences), military capability, IT, social policy and government transformation programmes, with a total whole life cost of over £800Bn. The programme has also been adopted by governments in Hong Kong and Australia.
Prior to joining the year-long programme, participants complete the NEO personality questionnaire and an initial 360 feedback exercise via Edgecumbe’s Assessment Hub, where they also access their reports and supporting materials. These include a mapping report in which the bespoke content of the MPLA 360 is mapped to Edgecumbe’s Primary Colours® model of leadership and a Leadership Strengths Matrix based on the same model. The latter combines data from the NEO and 360 to help identify participants’ natural strengths (to develop further), fragile strengths (to maintain), potential strengths (to realise) and likely resistant limitations (to identify ways to work around, often by collaboration with others who complement them). This equips participants to focus their developmental efforts on those aspects most amenable to sustained development, rather than ‘filling the gaps’, an approach which our research shows yields an approximately 5% improvement in overall impact on leadership effectiveness.
The first taught day of the programme (taught by Edgecumbe) is focused on leadership and the concept of the incomplete leader. This is followed by a 121 debrief of participants’ reports to help them prepare their development plan.
Participants work in impact groups over the course of the programme to support their development, using the reports to inform their focus in these groups. Participants complete a second 360 feedback exercise at the end of the programme and this report, together with their first 360, development plan (updated to report progress) and written assignments are submitted to a panel for review in preparation for the participants’ panel session, at which their development over the course of the programme and their fitness to lead UK Government Major Projects is assessed.
The 360 data are analysed to identify the impacts of the programme at individual participant, cohort and overall profession levels, and the insights used to inform the IPA’s evaluation of the Return on Investment in the programme and to drive refinements and improvements in the programme to enhance its impacts.
