The PPD Project Office provides management and delivery expertise to the wider UK particle physics community with the goals of reducing risk and cost, and increasing stakeholder confidence in project delivery, whilst maintaining engagement with the community as a whole. The Project Office team provides:
- Qualified and experienced project managers and support team to directly manage projects following a standardised method and lifecycle we are devising.
- Management processes as services for any project managers/principal investigators for tracking, controlling, reporting and decision-making; ensuring standardization, high quality, efficiency and economy of scale.
- Planning assistance to projects prior to funding applications. Assuring projects and implementing learning from past projects, acting as a `corporate’ project knowledge base.
- Training and education, either pointing individuals in the right direction for appropriate `generic' project-focused training, providing advice or our own training for the peculiarities associated with particle physics/collaborative projects.
We follow closely and promote the approach and qualifications/training framework of the UK Association for Project Management. We are developing our own bespoke project delivery framework/method alongside a project lifecycle/maturity model which will encourage a phased approach to projects, useful when applying for funding and reducing overall project risk. The office is special in its ability to understand and manage the enormous and often nebulous collaborative nature of these projects combined with their extreme technical and scientific nature.
The office is a new venture for PPD and is growing quickly: we are actively managing the LBNF/DUNE and CMS projects (valued at around £95M with 24 contributing institutions) and with a watching brief over the AIT, LHCb, SwiftHEP, AION, Hyper-K projects as we grow.
