Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
At the EVA conference in London in March, I had the pleasure of listening to Gary Hill, Co-chair of PsACE, the Public Sector Advisory Community for Estimating. He was talking about the importance of estimating and how the community helps shape the professional estimating done on public sector projects in the UK.
The purpose of the group is to simplify, standardise, systemise and professional project estimating process and capability across the public sector. He shared their vision, which is to bring together experts across government and client organisations to promote leading practice in estimating, underpinned by an ethos of trust and collaboration. I like how he talked about leading practice instead of ‘best practice’ because as we all know, there isn’t one definitive best practice for pretty much anything in project management.
He talked about how the community started in April 2019 when someone reached out to him and asked for help with something. “It started over coffee and turned into a beer,” he joked. The community sets out to address the problem that many project managers have in all aspects of our work: where do you go for advice, how do you know if that advice is any good and who says it’s good anyway?
To find out where good practice was in the public sector the community carried out a benchmark of 7 government departments where they measured good practice. Surprise, surprise, no department was good at everything.
Today, the community is sponsored by IPA, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, which Gary said gives the community’s work more weight and more chance of making things stick. They really started to gain traction when they were mentioned in a government select community discussion, and membership started to grow.
It’s a volunteer-led community and Gary shared the common problem that many volunteer-led communities have: everyone wants to get involved because it’s a good idea, but everyone has a day job to do so it’s hard to get people to take on jobs.
Next up on the agenda for PsACE is to write to each permanent secretary in the UK government and ask them to support the community’s work, so that’s a large piece of stakeholder engagement to do.
In terms of what they actually do, Gary explained that PsACE was involved in providing input to the IPA estimating guide, and was represented on the committee preparing British Standard 202002 for Project Controls.
There are current workstreams covering:
- People capability: creating a course on estimating
- Data platform: collating data for benchmarking
- An advisory panel: to provide deep dive reviews of papers and initiatives
- Guidance for Senior Responsible Owners: to help SROs understand estimating
- Group conference: to bring together the community for a conference
- Leading practice: to identify leading practice and launch a maturity assessment.
I found it really interesting to see what a grass roots effort could do, and how powerful it is when experts come together with a common goal of simply wanting to share knowledge and do things better.
Gary shared his vision for the community, and I think it seems hugely realistic given the momentum behind PsACE at the moment. He talked about how the long-term goal is to align policy, data and expertise to encourage informed decision making to achieve more predictable outcomes. That’s something worth striving for, don’t you think?
Do you have a community like this where you work, in your industry? Let us know in the comments!
Posted on: May 10, 2022 04:00 AM |
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