What Irish Rail's overruns can teach every public sector project team

Could Irish Rail have saved the State €16.5 million, and got a working traffic management system, if its project had been managed differently?

Today, guest James Louttit — Founder and Lead Trainer at Impactful Project Management — argues that successful projects come down to some surprisingly simple disciplines: focus on value, prioritise needs, make risk visible, force governance to make decisions, and adapt rather than blindly following a plan-for-plans-sake.

So, could applying those principles earlier have changed the outcome at Irish Rail?

That’s one of the questions we’re asking today on Transform Gov.

James takes us inside:

🔹How to get a project funded: focus on how many citizens benefit, how much time is saved, and how much risk is taken out

🔹Why MoSCoW can collapse into chaos: when everything becomes a “must”, nothing is really prioritised, and force-ranking is a better way to make hard choices

🔹Stopping project risk becoming tomorrow’s headline: The risk-specific contingency method for putting a real cost on what could go wrong before it happens

🔹Pawpaws versus prickly pears: a brilliantly simple way to spot the work that delivers big value for little effort, and the work that eats time, money and energy for very little return

🔹When an AI sceptic changed his mind: how a civil servant, given a real task and Microsoft Copilot, turned resistance into enthusiasm in a matter of minutes

🎧 Transform Gov is part of the Ireland eGovernment Awards, brought to you in partnership with Accenture.

📅 The Ireland eGovernment Awards and Leadership Summit take place 24 September at O'Reilly Hall, UCD. Find out more at digitalgovawards.com