Survival of the Fittest

Has our approach of saving every project created a culture of complacency?

We don’t have failed railway projects in the UK. Project don’t fail. They aren’t allowed to – public confidence and taxpayer money is at stake. But that doesn’t stop us overrunning and throwing money at the problem.

In recent years, there has been a trend of becoming a “thin client” and expecting the supply chain to pick up the slack. Based on the idea of not doing the heavy lifting for the supply chain and outsourcing the risk. In my opinion, this model has failed. ?

The suppliers don’t have the resources or capability to manage the highly complex large and mega scale projects which are pursued and there is not a mature culture of adopting a systems engineered approach to managing complexity in either community – meaning they cannot do the heavy lifting asked of them.

Similarly, outsourcing the risk only works if the penalties for failure are higher for the risk owner than the client. In the UK, they are not. It is a small market, with only a few major contractors in it that Network Rail trusts or can deliver what they want and no matter how far the risk is outsourced, the implications never leave NR. If a project fails the commuter will suffer and NR will face the consequences. So, they save every project that struggles.

This is where the problem lies. In saving every project we are preventing the natural selection which occurs when only the fittest survive.

There is no need to adapt because the client will always save bail them out if needed.

To be clear here, I am not advocating for companies to collapse but rather to learn, to adopt and improve. That is what natural selection is all about – adapting to the environment.

Why is Matters

The UK railway is public owned which means public money. Every project that is saved costs more money than it should which means less to go around.

Yet we know that that well engineered, systems-led projects whilst having higher initial investment costs generally come in with fewer overruns and less cost increase thereby saving money for the public in the long run.

We need to get out of the mindset of “thin clients” and start to become “systems authority-clients” where we driver systems engineering through from day one and at a level of maturity that will deliver (and not bail out prematurely because costs go up in the initial phases).

Potential Solutions

There appear to be two potential solutions:

Pre-emptive / Engineered – mandate (maybe even legislate) a fully compliant systems engineering approach to all projects above the industry average turnkey project (anything in excess of ￡10m, say); force the development of fully integrated systems engineering projects which are then able to scale up and create the framework for the delivery of larger projects and programmes where required

Natural Selection – let projects fail and the market learn the hard way.

The question is – do we act now to secure programmes in the future, and how?