Optimising capital programme delivery

  • The challenges
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    Many organisations routinely use capital programmes either as their mechanism for delivering new infrastructure to their customers, e.g. a transport organisation building a new rail line or internally internal e.g. an automotive firms building a new plant. Whilst in our experience, time and cost are often well managed through the use of long established and sophisticated tools such as earned value analysis and investment appraisal, the real challenge comes with managing quality and scope.

    Typically capital programmes follow a traditional 'waterfall' methodology i.e. design, build, test and test. Operating this linear sequence over a long duration means that these programmes can often successfully deliver the wrong or out of date infrastructure due to changed external circumstances and a lack of clarity about who the customers are. Whilst re-design phases can and often are introduced when the gap between customer expectation and solution design becomes too large the fact that constant interaction with the customers is not intrinsic to the approach means that failure is common place. 

  • Our approach
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    As well as excellence in managing time and cost we believe improved results can be obtained by better managing quality and scope. This involves thinking differently about the customer and placing them at the heart of the programme. Agile is one such delivery method that, in certain circumstances, is more effective at managing these dimensions than the traditional 'waterfall' approach.

    The following six principles are the foundation of our approach to improving quality and scope management on Capital Programmes:

    1. Customer identification: Gaining greater clarity about the ultimate customers, beneficiaries and losers from the programme
       
    2. Continuous customer feedback: designing the governance process appropriately ensuring that the beneficiaries are appropriately engaged throughout the evolving design and delivery process
       
    3. Customer experience: Efficiently capturing and communicating customer needs and the overarching context
       
    4. Change control: ensuring that all parts of the delivery chain are in the loop when there are the inevitable changes
       
    5. Incremental solutions: Creating incremental infrastructure solutions which are not all or nothing but allow additional features to be added once minimum functionality has been established
       
    6. Leverage external expertise: Utilising all possible external 'knowledge' and experience to improve delivery, ideally getting this early in the programme to maximise impact
       

    Moorhouse has worked with public sector organisations, such as Transport for London, that are routinely grappling with some of the largest and most complex capital infrastructure programmes. Our support can take a number of guises:

    • Introduction of best practice customer centric approaches, such as Agile, to the design and delivery of specific capital programmes
       
    • Introduction and embedding of overarching controls and underpinning methods and tools e.g. STORM (for story boarding the customer experience) to ensure that Capital Programmes are in touch with the changing needs of the customer
       
    • Introduction of “challenge and support” assurance of Capital Programmes by external 'content' experts (usually procured from industry) who have successfully delivered this kind of programme before and who can lend some programme enhancing 'real world' content rich advice to the programme delivery team.

    As an example, at Transport for London we set up the governance and assurance for the £12bn capital investment programme. Our methods and control framework is award winning and is recognised as best in class. 

  • Proof of what we can do
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  • Services we offer
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