Turning an improvement idea into real change requires more than good intentions. Depending on the scale and complexity of what you are trying to achieve, using a structured project management approach can help you move from planning to delivery in a clear and controlled way.
Project management is particularly helpful where change involves multiple stakeholders, dependencies, risks, or a defined timeframe. It provides a framework to help you organise activity, manage uncertainty, and stay focused on delivery.
What do we mean by a project?
A project is a temporary, organised piece of work that creates a unique product, service, process, or plan. It has a clear start and end point, agreed objectives, and planned activities that sit outside day to day operational work.
Projects differ from routine work because they are time limited, purpose driven, and designed to deliver change.
Why project management matters for improvement
Quality improvement is fundamentally about change. Without change, there can be no improvement, although not all change leads to improvement.
Experience across the NHS suggests that quality improvement projects can struggle when basic project management disciplines are missing. This can lead to unclear scope, lack of ownership, unmanaged risks, and drift over time.
Using a project management approach provides a structure within which to deliver a change and a framework to help ensure that the change is successful. Project management complements the delivery of quality improvement but in itself cannot guarantee the success of the improvement project.
Download two templates that can help you as you plan your project: the A3 template and the Project Charter.
Before you start: getting ready
Time spent getting ready is one of the strongest predictors of successful delivery.
Getting ready is about building shared understanding, assessing readiness, and creating the foundations needed for effective change. Skipping this stage often leads to delays, resistance, or rework later. The key activities are around scoping and planning the project.
- Agree project objectives, scope and deliverables. Create project initiation document (including deliverables, resources, risks, governance and so on). Download a Project Charter.
- Identify the project team and sponsor. NB: The sponsor is the person who is responsible for the project to be delivered successfully and therefore has a critical role in the planning and delivery of the project.
You may want to have a checklist of things that need to be completed before launching your project as part of your project plan. Also make a list of risks and issues that could derail your project as you go along.
A fun activity to run at this stage is a Pre-Mortem. Imagine you are at the end of your project and it has failed. Spectacularly. And you know why. Write down all the reasons for failure with others in your team and then use creative problem solving techniques to address them. Find out more in this article.
A project plan sets out the activities that need to be undertaken, the expected timescales and the individual responsible for completing each activity. If the project is very large in scale, additional action plans breaking down smaller tasks might be helpful. The plan should be viewed as a live document and reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that delivery of the improvement is on track. A3 planning (also known as project on a page) is a tool used to summarise your plan. Download an A3 template with prompts.
Planning for people, not just tasks
Experience from large scale improvement programmes like PERIPrem shows that delivery is strongest when planning considers three interconnected elements:
- Processes. What will change in practice, pathways, or workflows?
- Training and education. What do people need to know or be able to do differently?
- Communication and engagement. How will you keep people informed, involved, and motivated?
Thinking through all three enables more coherent and sustainable change.
Launching your project
In this phase you launch your project and get stuck into tests of change and measuring the results. Test and learn as you go, monitor progress and emerging risks, and keep going! Regular reporting through the planned governance channels is important to provide assurance that the project is on track.
Plan for sustainability
Once a project is reliably achieving what it set out to do, there are two key activities: evaluation of how the project did, including capturing any lessons you learned through the process, and transition to business as usual. How do you make sure that when you finish the improvement gains are sustained and embedded?
To remain effective, improvements need to be responsive to changes in the environment (staff changes / structural changes) and the best way to prepare for this is to plan and horizon scan. Use the three elements above (processes, training, communication) to help guide you.
