Establishing the street co-ordination unit at TfL
- OverviewRead more
The Streets organisation in Surface Transport is responsible for maintaining and improving strategic elements of the road network in London. Successful delivery of many of the initiatives within the Streets portfolio requires collaboration of multiple directorates and organisations within and outside of Streets. Whilst many of these stakeholders were sharing a common project methodology, there were challenges in terms of different ways of working at the programme level. Moorhouse was asked to design and put in place a Streets Coordination Unit (SCU) to act as a central coordinator of six key directorate PMOs which were involved in delivery of the Streets portfolio. We worked with the PMO Heads and other stakeholders to develop a range of shared approaches and tools. Our collaborative working approach was critical to success, as was our ability to think beyond reactive solutions to resolve underlying causes of issues. We led the client team to take over the SCU and the processes we introduced are key to how the organisation now works.
- Our client's challengeRead more
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.
Successful delivery of many of the initiatives within the Streets portfolio requires collaboration of multiple directorates and organisations within and outside of Streets. For instance, several directorates may have strategic and funding input to a project, wheras other directorates will be responsible for different parts of the delivery lifecycle. Whilst many of these stakeholders were sharing a common project methodology, there were challenges in terms of different ways of working at the programme level.
- Our responseRead more
Moorhouse was asked by the client to design and put in place a Streets Coordination Unit (SCU) to act as a central coordinator of six key directorate PMOs which were involved in delivery of the Streets portfolio.
In doing so, our consultants worked with the PMO Heads and other stakeholders to develop a range of shared approaches and tools to programme management across the organisational boundaries, such as:
- Chairing of a new fortnightly PMO forum to increase collaborative working;
- Facilitation of annual programme planning exercises; and
- Development of a shared process and governance for programme change control.
The key elements of our success were a collaborative working approach which sought to ensure everyone kept focused on the benefits of working together and an ability to think beyond reactive solutions to look at more underlying causes of coordination issues. A key example of this was originating and implementing the first-ever pan-directorate portal for programme data (the TLRN Programme Database), which provided shared visibility of the programme. Ultimately, our team led on the recruitment of strong candidates to take over SCU professionally, and provided a full capability transfer to ensure continued effectiveness.
- The value to our clientRead more
SCU represented a significant investment by the client in moving past 'silo'd' approaches to adopt joint ways of working between directorates during programme planning and delivery. The processes and forums introduced by Moorhouse are key to how the organisation now works - the TLRN Programme Database in particular has been so successful that it is being deployed to over 200 additional frontline users beyond what was originally envisioned.
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