Is the UK Water Sector ready to make a step change towards major-project delivery?

I first started my career in projects within the UK water sector. I joined Southern Water (A private utility company)? in AMP4 (Asset Management Plan 4) as a PMO analyst within the Capital Delivery Directorate. I loved it. Not only was I surrounded by brilliant project professionals, whom I am still in touch with today, but I also had an “overview” of the entire Capital Delivery Programme and the types of projects that Southern Water delivered - namely small/medium in size, highly repeating assets/projects, with low-medium complexity (of course this is my opinion) and delivered by an experienced delivery organisation, familiar with its delivery ecosystem and environment - basically a great set-up to deliver projects.?

Since leaving Southern Water, I have been lucky enough to work in and be involved in UK Government Major Projects & Programmes. During this time, a consistent theme is that major projects behave differently from regular projects - often, they will behave badly! There is an excellent body of knowledge available on the key issues, and challenges of major projects, and no doubt the sector has a good understanding of these challenges, but whether they have adequate learning and exposure to how a major project differs from a normal, repeatable project.?

Because through the newly established RAPID (Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development) framework, the water sector will be delivering, 18 “major projects” with a potential total value of c￡14bn . This is a once-in-a-generation and much-needed project investment by the water sector, funded through the bill payer (customer utility bills), to protect the UK water supply under threat due to climate change.

A number of these major projects are reservoirs.? No doubt, we have all visited a reservoir and you would feel that these are ubiquitous assets. However, the last time the UK built a potable reservoir was in 1991, Carsington, over 32 years ago. This poses a number of challenges, there will be limited data, insight, expertise, and experience for both pulling together a robust business case, but also the construction of these new assets. It is worth noting that the sector does have deep expertise in maintaining these assets.

The last point to note in this section is that through RAPID the sector is looking to build multiple reservoirs and large new networks at the same time, potentially impacting the supply chain's ability and capacity to deliver within the proposed deliverables. This will need to be considered by the sector.

A key issue in UK Government projects is optimism (and best endeavors), often leading to cost and schedule overruns. Quickly diving into the OGP dataset for reservoir and large earthwork projects (see below), we see an average cost and schedule overrun of 27% (cost) and 33% (schedule) for European projects.??

Therefore, I think it is important for RAPID delivery teams to? pause, reflect, and consider some key questions as they embark on their a journey to become a major project client/delivery team:?

• Are we ready to deliver a major project?
• What type of major project client are we going to be??
• Do we have the right people in the right roles??
• What can we learn (good and bad) from the UK Government's major projects and programmes? (See early blog on key project document)
• Are we set up for success??
• Are we informed? Do we have the right tools, systems, reports, and data to make the right decisions? And how do they differ between a project and a major project? Ie risk/cost/ management.
• Given the types of projects, should we look at/consider data,? insights, and lessons learned from large international water projects? How should they be treated??
• How can we best create a “delivery system and envelope” that drives project performance and collaboration??

Lastly, before I do my obligatory plug on how Oxford Global Projects can help you with the above (including international data and benchmarks), I want to highlight the opportunity for collaboration. Given that there will be multiple reservoirs and large network projects within RAPID, then how can the regulator encourage better collaboration across the sector??

One way is to create a “knowledge-sharing platform” as seen in the transport sector for the RAPID schemes. This could allow the sharing and pooling of data, insights, innovation, and reports (technical/design) between RAPID schemes. Potentially saving projects both time and money by repurposing material and insight, and also creating a platform where projects and delivery teams learn from each other and accelerate along the “learning curve”, and providing insight and data to improve project decision-making. We have seen in our data that there is a learning premium for novel projects, both novel to the sector, but also novel to the organisation, and this impacts project performance. This “premium cost" can be reduced through the dissemination of data, learning, and insights across these schemes, ensuring costly mistakes are not repeated, that insight and reports are procured once and shared, innovation risk and benefits are shared across the portfolio of RAPID and lastly, through sharing of data/insights/lessons, re-establishing the “repeatability” factor for the sector, ultimately benefiting the sector and the water bill customer. ?

If you like to know more about how OGP can help you with the challenges, reflections, and opportunities raised above, then please feel free to reach out. We hold the largest academic-quality datasets on project performance in the world and our more than 17,000 projects worth three trillion USD across all the key sectors, including projects on key RAPID water sector assets such as reservoirs and water transmission networks. We also develop bespoke major project leadership training programmes for delivery organisations to upskill project leaders.?

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