Orienteering in Major Projects: How can you navigate to where you want if you don’t know where you are?

Understanding where you are in your delivery is one of the fundamentals of any major projects and yet, recent experience has shown, this is far more difficult and nuanced than the schedule might success.

At the Crossrail Learning Legacy event in April, Mark Wild explained how the Crossrail team lost sight of where they actually were. The success of the civil engineering elements of the project lead them to believe that they were 95% finished, whereas as the subsequent stages of the project now show, they were only one third completed.

The sheer complexity of the UK’s first digital railway would mean that fit out, integration and testing between them represented two-thirds of the time in the schedule. The lesson for Mark was that understanding exactly where you are in an infrastructure project and avoiding the risk of underestimating the work to completion means using multiple perspectives to take a bearing of where you in terms of construction, certainly, but also where you are in terms of the time schedule overall.

In the latest in our series of webinars in association with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority we explored what orienteering and navigation means in the huge, fast-changing complex projects of today and heard from those leading the field on the techniques they are adopting to track and communicate progress.

This webinar was held on 12 September 2023. Programme details and presentation slides can be found on the event page.

 

With thanks to the speakers Lisa Kelvey, Partner at KPMG LLP, Beth West, Managing Director of East West Rail Company, Mark Wild, Chief Executive Officer at SGN, Jo Ellman-Brown, Deputy Director – Transport at the Infrastructure and Projects Authority and to the Chair, Lucien Uwayo, Consultant at Accenture.