Project Podcast

Emma meets Jimmy Nguyen, APM’s Project Professional of the Year 2023 and Associate Director at Turner & Townsend. Jimmy worked on the Bromford and Castle Vale flood risk management scheme for the Environment Agency. He was praised by APM’s awards judges for successfully dealing with stakeholder pressure, garnering support from the local MP and forming a high-performing team to deliver the proj...

We take a deep dive into the future of the project profession, with a compilation of some of our favourite insights from the 2024 APM Conference. Held in Coventry in June, the theme for this year’s APM Conference was ‘Navigating Tomorrow: Future Skills for Project Professionals’. The event invited project leaders and experts on future trends to unpack the rapidly changing landscape that projects a...

Emma meets Algy Ayson, Head of Project Delivery Centre of Excellence and Profession at UK Parliament, who works on projects and programmes across both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Emma spoke to him in June, just a few weeks ahead of the UK general election. Algy gives some great advice on how to create culturally competent project teams where diverse perspectives are welcomed and u...

Professor Adam Boddison in conversation Sir Nigel Thrift, Chair of the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management, or CoRWM. CoRWM’s role, as Sir Nigel describes it, is to give independent scientific and technical advice to UK Government on all aspects of the management of radioactive waste. Sir Nigel is one of the world’s leading human geographers and previously served as Vice-Chancellor and Presi...

APM CEO Professor Adam Boddison invites outgoing APM President Sue Kershaw and her successor Yvonne Thompson CBE to hand over the baton. Sue shares her reflections on the biggest project management trends over her time in the hotseat, from managing greater project complexity and going from megaprojects to gigaprojects, to being able to deliver on promises and the need for greater connectivity. Yvo...

Emma meets Thimon de Jong, founder of WHETSTON / strategic foresight, a think tank specialising in future human behaviour and societal change and the implications for leadership and business strategy. The pair discuss where society and all of us are headed in the near future, and what project managers and leaders need to think about when it comes to the people they're managing, the projects th...

What is the true value of the project profession to the UK economy and society? That is the question that APM seeks to answer in its new research report, The Golden Thread . Expanding on research first published in 2019, the new report provides updated data on the contribution of the project profession in the context of the global disruptions of the past five years. In this podcast we share an edi...

Emma meets Steve Gilligan, a programme manager who’s playing a critical role in the world's first decommissioning of a nuclear fusion machine. He works at Culham Campus, just outside Oxford, home to the Joint European Taurus, or JET, a tokamak machine where some of the world’s most important nuclear fusion experiments have taken place. But now JET’s days are over and Gilligan is tasked with ta...

Professor Adam Boddison in conversation with the Head of the Government Property Profession, Lynda Rawsthorne. Sitting within the Cabinet Office, Lynda is responsible for the strategy for the whole government estate, which covers everything from hospitals to courts and offices. She describes her role as engaging, encouraging and motivating the 7,000-plus professionals who make up the property prof...

In the third and final part of our series on the National Trust, Emma is back at Dyrham Park near Bath to meet three project management apprentices who all started at the Trust in October 2022 and are nearing the end of their 18-month apprenticeship programme after sitting APM’s Project Management Qualification. So, what’s it like to be an apprentice in an organisation that puts project management...

In episode 2 of our three-part series on the National Trust, an APM Corporate Partner, Emma finds out about the Trust’s urban programmes and its work in renewables. As well as visiting Stoneford Community Garden in Dagenham, East London, she meets Jo Dmitri, a Senior Programme Manager leading a team of nine project professionals as part of the strategy work the Trust is doing in London to connect...

In our three-part series on the National Trust, an APM Corporate Partner, we find out how the charity has brought project management close to its organisational heart. In episode 1, Emma goes behind the scenes at Dyrham Park, a 17th-century mansion near Bath, which recently underwent a multimillion-pound transformation project. She meets Mike Hudson, Head of Strategic Planning, Project and Program...

Rachel Baldwin is Head of Programme and Project Delivery at the BBC, where she leads a team of 115 people tasked with a huge variety of IT and technology programmes – including a brand‑new home for the Beeb in Birmingham and creating the largest orchestral recording space in Europe in East London. But while Rachel is now a seasoned project professional, she started her career as a documentary film...

What’s it like to deliver life-changing medical research projects that address health problems facing communities, change health options and outcomes for patients, and improve the lives of people living with disease? That’s the remit of Dr Karen Skinner, Chief Project and Portfolio Officer at not-for-profit Life Arc. Join us as she sits down with Professor Adam Boddison, Chief Executive of APM, fo...

Emma meets Dame Inga Beale, portfolio director and former CEO of global insurance giant Lloyd’s of London. Dame Inga was keynote speaker at APM’s 2023 Women in Project Management Conference.  Contact us: apmpodcast@thinkpublishing.co.uk  

Ever wondered how to balance work and family, how to strategise your career and how to network effectively? In this episode, we’ve compiled some of our highlights from APM’s Women in Project Management Conference 2023. These sessions focused on how project professionals – women in particular – can take their career to the next level. Contact us: apmpodcast@thinkpublishing.co.uk  

Professor Adam Boddison meets Baroness Valentine. Having started out working in corporate finance in the City in the 1980s, in recent years Baroness Valentine has had what she describes as a “portfolio career”. Her current roles include Chair of Heathrow Southern Railway and Co-Director of Place at Business in the Community. As of 2005, she also sits in the House of Lords as a cross-bench member,...

We look back at our favourite moments from the podcast in 2023.  It’s been another action-packed year in which we’ve welcomed guests from across the international project management community. We kicked off 2023 with an episode on bringing empathy into the workplace, and since then we’ve covered topics ranging from the rise of artificial intelligence to the can-do mindset of Icelandic project mana...

In this episode, Emma meets three project professionals with a deep interest in artificial intelligence (AI) to consider what impact this technology is having right now on projects, what it might hold for the future and what project managers should be doing to adapt to this brave new world. Joining Emma are: Professor Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, Founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and au...

In this episode, Emma is joined once again by Professor Darren Dalcher of the University of Lancaster. Few people have studied project management as closely or for as long as Darren. In a career spanning more than 25 years, he has become very interested in the reasons for project failure. When it comes to agile, Darren was there from the start when it was being experimented with in software develo...

Emma meets three women to talk about menopause in the workplace. Two of them are project professionals – Rachel Jackson of Anglo American and Jo Roberts of the DfT – while the third, Aly Dilks of Simply Menopausal, is a nurse specialising in menopause. The guests share experience and advice for those wanting to find out how to best deal with being menopausal, and how to support colleagues going th...

Professor Adam Boddison meets Martina Blake of the UK Space Agency. Martina heads up the agency’s Office for Project and Programme Management, which she set up in November 2021. She explains that you don’t have to be an astronaut or scientist to work in the space sector – there is a huge variety of roles in project delivery and beyond. And as with other government departments, the UK Space Agency...

Professor Adam Boddison (APM Chief Executive) in conversation with Kris Baldy, Army Portfolio Director at the UK Ministry of Defence. Kris shares his journey through the ranks of the civil service, including his rise from admin assistant to portfolio director, and how he, in his own words, "stumbled into project management". Projects and programmes, Kris says, are central to tackling the...

Emma meets Peter Simon, a Director at Lucidus Consulting and a member of the APM Risk SIG Committee. He is co-author of a new APM report looking into opportunity management as part of the overall project risk management process. The findings reveal notable areas where what is defined in textbooks and standards do not match what’s happening in practice.  Contact: apmpodcast@thinkpublishing.co.uk  

In June, APM held its annual conference in Birmingham under the heading of ‘Change Changes’. The event explored how the project profession must adapt to the changing nature of change itself in a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity. It emphasised the enormous contribution that projects can, and do, make to forging a cleaner, safer, more prosperous and more inclusive society.  In this pod...