Improving project throughput at TFL
- OverviewRead more
The Streets organisation, part of Surface Transport in Transport for London (TfL), is responsible for maintaining and improving strategic elements of the road network in London. This includes acting as highway authority for the Transport for London Road Network (TLRN) and maintaining the traffic signals for all of London's roads. Streets Directors and other key stakeholders within the organisation were conscious that they had no method within their delivery planning activities to assess the capacity requirements for proposed portfolios of initiatives, placing them at risk of overpromising and under-delivering. We worked with key stakeholders to manage Project CARP (Capacity and Resource Planning), identifying the organisation's most strategic resources and forecasting demand for them. This output analysis helped the Streets Directors quantify and address capacity shortfalls in the advanced planning process - ultimately reducing a key risk to their delivery.
- 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 p.a. 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 responseRead more
We 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
- Mitigate gaps, particularly through project prioritisation
We ensured a successful outcome through working collaboratively with a wide range of directorates and business areas. The project board composed of ten Directors /Heads from around the organisation, and the project team included the client managers' PMO teams. We ensured the output from CARP analysis was viewed as accurate and thorough, involving a broad range of other stakeholders, including engineers and project managers via workshops to develop the inputs and thinking behind the solution. To avoid 'over-engineering' the CARP tool and processes, we focused on the development of a pragmatic and transparent solution, which could be transferred to the client's own staff.
- The value to our clientRead more
Project CARP provided this large organisation with its first high-level capability to actively identify and address capacity shortfalls in the advanced planning process, substantially reducing a key risk to delivery.
Furthermore, the work 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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