Programme Recovery & Transformation

Overview

Crossrail will deliver the Elizabeth Line – London’s new high frequency railway connecting Maidenhead and Heathrow in the West to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the East. Upon commencement, Crossrail was Europe's largest civil engineering construction project with a total budget of £18bn and up to 14,000 people needed by the project's supply chain at the peak of construction. It is an immensely complex project comprised of 14 miles of new ‘twin’ rail tunnels beneath London, connecting 40 stations across the capital, of which 10 are new Central London stations. It will be the first wholly digital railway in the UK with increased complexity of multiple systems and innovative network infrastructure.

How we helped

Deloitte was first engaged by Crossrail during its early civil construction phase in 2010-12 to establish the Programme Controls capability and meet associated regulatory requirements. When implemented, the National Audit Office reviewed Crossrail as a programme with excellent financial controls.

Fast forward to today, Crossrail is pivoting to a fully operational railway.

Announced in summer 2018, the Programme had to admit it was significantly behind the schedule and over budget. As a result, Sponsors appointed a new leadership team to recover the programme.

Sponsors and the public had lost trust in the Programme. Deloitte helped the new leadership team identify critical remediation activities and develop a recovery plan. The key focus was on re- establishing a robust governance process and assurance regime involving independent assessment due to pre- mature demobilisation of Crossrail Ltd. An integrated assurance and approvals plan was developed. To support leadership decision making and alignment, an enterprise risk framework was developed to identify and manage key strategic risks.

With a new Programme Strategy in place focussing on handover of the “build” into “operate”, Deloitte supported development of a new schedule as a baseline for the Programme going forward. To support a new mandate of the Programme Controls capability, a team of 25+ specialists across cost, risk, reporting, planning and leadership disciplines were deployed.

Applying our Capital Delivery Maturity Model we assessed Crossrail capability in Programme Controls and delivered a “Match Fit” programme to raise capabilities to the right level for completing the programme.

To address the overall lack of capability to transition from civil construction phase to operational railway, Deloitte also run a diagnostic of the capability gaps and implemented a new operating model. Deloitte Capital Programme’s team designed a staffing model and supported transition to BAU including workforce planning analytics.

Finally, to support operational readiness, Deloitte helped to establish a new function responsible for the handover of assets from construction to the infrastructure managers. This supported the end to end strategic planning of the transition to a fully operational railway across five opening phases of the Programme, including revisiting operating model as the organisation is progressing through the key Programme milestones and inflexion points.