Improving project throughput at a major transport authority

The challenge

The Streets organisation in Surface Transport is responsible for maintaining and improving strategic elements of the road network in London, including acting as highway authority for the Transport for London Road Network (TLRN) and maintaining the traffic signals for all of London’s roads. In carrying out these responsibilities, Streets delivers a large portion of the £2.4bn pa Surface Transport Investment Programme.

As part of their routine delivery planning activities, Streets Directors and other key stakeholders within the organisation were conscious that they had no way to assess the capacity requirements for proposed portfolios of initiatives, and therefore were at risk of overpromising and under-delivering.

Our approach

Moorhouse Consulting worked with the client to develop a solution which allowed the organisation to:

• identify its most strategic resources;
• forecast the demand for use of these resources from various initiatives;
• quantify any gaps in supply and demand which might lead to ‘bottlenecks’ to delivery; and
• mitigate those gaps, particularly through project prioritisation.

In managing Project CARP (Capacity and Resource Planning), our consultants were able to ensure a successful outcome through working collaboratively with a wide range of directorates and business areas. The project board was composed of ten Directors /Heads from around the organisation, and the project team included the client managers PMO teams.

Moorhouse was able to ensure that the output from CARP analysis was viewed as accurate and thorough through involving a broad range of other stakeholders, including engineers and project managers, in workshops to develop the inputs and thinking behind the solution.

In order to avoid ‘over-engineering’ the CARP tool and processes, we worked with the client to keep a focus on the development of a pragmatic and transparent solution which could be transferred to the client’s own staff.

How did this deliver value to the client?

Project CARP provided this large organisation with its first high-level capability to actively identify and address capacity shortfalls in the advanced planning process and it therefore substantially reduced a key risk to delivery.

Furthermore, the work has led to a change of culture where capacity is viewed as critical in terms of any high-level planning activities, and constrained strategic resources are treated as a ‘second currency’ to be allocated out in parallel to the traditional budget allocation approach.

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If you would like to talk to us call on the number below. Alternatively, click on the consultants email address, provide us with your details and we will call you back. We look forward to speaking to you. Contact: Email: Tel: Dom Moorhouse dommoorhouse@moorhouseconsulting.com +44 (0) 1225 446 313