• As the economy has moved from manufacturing to services, productivity-enhancing innovation increasingly comes from projects that upgrade processes, systems and infrastructure. • Although a significant part of UK Government policy is also implemented through projects, they have historically suffered from delivery problems - coming in late, over budget, and failing to deliver the benefits promised.
• The problems found in modern projects are too complex to be solved by research “discoveries”, but research is increasingly important, especially co-designed and co-produced research that deepens the expertise of practitioners and academics.
• The ESRC and Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) support ‘Project X’ - the world’s largest interdisciplinary network, researching how to improve the delivery of major projects.
• Project X brings together academics with field expertise to collaborate with practitioners to deepen understanding of project delivery, manage the ARIs for the Cabinet Office and work on politically sensitive topics with the protection of NDAs.
• This impactful model of interdisciplinary research has inspired new mandated government practice, professional standards and trained a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars – demonstrating the value and importance of field expertise and engaged scholarship.

• As we have moved from manufacturing to services and now an information economy, the role of research - and how impact from research can be delivered - has changed.
• The experiences of a small group of industrial sectors, at a particular point in time, generated a way of thinking about the economic value of research that sees it as a linear process where research generates discoveries that, in turn, can be applied by research users to generate impact. The growing complexity of modern innovation and government services mean that this linear model is increasingly misleading.
• In a modern information economy, innovation in the underlying processes that enable the provision of services is growing in importance. This innovation is research intensive but is too complex to be based on the transfer of discoveries. Instead, impact is more likely to come from the transfer of talented people and collaborative engagement that builds shared stocks of expertise. These deeper stocks of expertise help individuals and organisations make better decisions in a complex and uncertain world.
• These two blogs explain why this kind of collaboration is important and how it can enhance collective expertise and generate impact.

The failure to manage risk in large-scale infrastructure projects has attracted intense debate. Recommendations suggest rigorous planning and once the contract is in place, the narrative of account-giving emphasises constructing audit trails to assure delivery commitments. However, this can lead to blame avoidance and boundary preservation. This paper develops an in-depth case study of the construction of Heathrow Terminal 2 (T2). T2 was a £2.5bn project on the Eastern Campus of Heathrow Airport that successfully opened on time and to budget, despite an initial risk management ethos that emphasised boundary preservation. This is explored through the lens of riskwork, a form of everyday maintenance work that sustained risk management practice. A process methodology revealed a diachronic pattern of riskwork phases from initial concerns about ‘one version of the truth’ to strategising with a ‘dashboard’ to a final ‘golden thread’ engaging suppliers in risk talk. Progress was sustained by paying attention to which ‘residual’ categories of risk were excluded. As the programme progressed, riskwork became less about managing compliance and more about learning from emergence. This paper demonstrates an important relationship between innovation, learning from emergence and an adaptive riskwork infrastructure. It also describes an important role for mediatory instruments such as dashboards, reports and forums in making risks visible and actionable. It has significant implications for policy recommendations that oversimplify the management of risk into a form of accountability management that mitigates risks by demanding compliance. On a theoretical level it reveals the importance of temporality and path dependency in the study of riskwork infrastructures.

The failure to manage risk in large-scale infrastructure projects has attracted intense debate. Recommendations suggest rigorous planning and once the contract is in place, the narrative of account-giving emphasises constructing audit trails to assure delivery commitments. However, this can lead to blame avoidance. This paper develops an in-depth case study of Heathrow Terminal 2 (T2), a £2.5bn construction programme that successfully opened on time and to budget in 2014 despite an initial risk management ethos that emphasised boundary preservation. This is explored through the lens of riskwork, a form of everyday maintenance work that sustained the infrastructure of risk management. A process methodology is adopted to trace the development of the programme into riskwork phases from concerns about ‘one version of the truth’ to strategising with a ‘dashboard’ to a ‘golden thread’ engaging suppliers in interactive risk talk. This paper demonstrates an important relationship between adaptive risk management infrastructures, innovation and the benefits of learning from emergence. It describes a central role for mediatory instruments such as dashboards, reports and forums in making risks visible and actionable. On a theoretical level it reveals the importance of temporality and path dependency in studying the formation of riskwork infrastructures. It also has important practical implications for policy recommendations that oversimplify the management of risk into a form of accountability management that mitigates risks by demanding compliance. On T2 progress was sustained by paying attention to which ‘residual’ categories of risk were excluded from the risk management architecture. As the programme progressed, riskwork became less about managing compliance and more about learning from emergence.

This thesis examines the call for reform in the governance of risk and control within major construction programmes in the UK. Over the next 8 years, Construction 2025 describes aspirations for major improvements in productivity, cost efficiency and delivery lead times. However, the pathway to reform remains unclear. Major infrastructure projects have a history of dissonance where competing value systems can create friction. However, the productive friction from multiple evaluative perspectives can also be a fundamental part of resolving emergent and perplexing problems. Construction 2025 highlights the need to develop stronger delivery relationships with an emphasis on the early engagement of suppliers and “fixing” the front-end of projects through more rigorous procurement strategies. It also notes that “much” of the waste in construction is fundamentally linked to the treatment of risk. Intelligent Clients, such as Heathrow, have been identified as exemplars in developing superior models of risk governance that work “with” suppliers to articulate the nature of value and evaluative purpose (CE, 2009). This thesis is a study of the composition and evolution of control in the construction of Terminal 5 (T5) and the more recent Terminal 2 (T2) at Heathrow.

Terminal 5 is considered a landmark case that challenged traditional self-seeking opportunism with a lean partnering philosophy delivered through integrated teams. A year later Terminal 2 moved away from the partnering with suppliers, engaging a 3rd party integrator managed through an intelligent control system. At the time this raised concerns that T2 represented a relinquishing of the project management capability developed on T5 and a weaker model of integration. However, T2 was a success. This thesis draws on extensive project-based technical data, interviews with industry experts and policy reports to build a comparative picture of the calculative infrastructures. Temporal bracketing is used to trace the patterns of development into “phases of control” as a sequence of evaluative orders. Both cases move the conception of control beyond directive forms of control “over” resources to consider the nature of social integration and the complexity of enrolling allied interests. The findings explore a variety of innovative calculative technologies that translated tensions into productive friction. In both cases Heathrow did not fix the front-end. Instead an adaptive calculative infrastructure mediated collective deliberation, critical inquiry and emergent learning. These findings suggest that the current reform discussion would benefit from more explicit consideration of the importance of architectures of control in making projects valuable, governing risk and shaping conduct towards enterprise and discovery.