Strategic Consulting Partner

Overview

Thames Tideway Tunnel is the £4.2bn, 16 mile long tunnel running up to 65 metres below the River Thames.

Originally built in the Victorian age in 1865, Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s pioneering sewage system was designed to serve four million people. Fast forward to today and the population of London has close to doubled. Consequently London’s sewers now lack the capacity to meet both the capital’s present and future demands. Tideway aims to deliver significant, enduring change to cope with London’s needs well into the 22nd century.

A multi-disciplinary Deloitte team was embedded within the organisation for 18 months to help Thames Water stand up the infrastructure provider and lead the transition through the programme lifecycle from inception to the start of construction. The team drew together a wide array of technical capabilities leveraging the full breadth of Deloitte’s consulting offering.

How we helped

During the first phase, the Deloitte team helped Thames Water design and implement their Transition Management Plan (TMP) to form a new, stand-alone entity: the Infrastructure Provider (IP). The IP needed to not only have the capabilities to deliver the capital programme, but also manage the needs of multiple external stakeholders, attract potential investors and preserve. Thames Water’s existing operations.

During the second phase of our engagement, a jointly developed Project Controls Transformation programme was undertaken. The Deloitte team adopted an approach which has been tried and tested in similar capital projects (such as Crossrail) and assessed the existing capability against a framework which includes a maturity model for core Project Controls functions. We analysed the outcome to gauge the ‘optimum’ capability model for TTT before designing and implementing the new ways of working in the areas of functional processes, governance and technology. Our programme leadership experts were able to deliver a clearly defined target operating model for the Project Controls function, commensurate to the demands of the main works delivery phase, along with a robustly designed, clearly tested and validated set of capability enhancements, including all detailed supporting documentation such as handbooks, process maps, training materials and governance terms of references.

A specialist team was also asked to help Tideway senior management benchmark the delivery organisation against other capital projects and delivery teams. The comparison between various major capital projects and associated justification of size and required skillsets was not a simple exercise, but our intelligent, tailored approach provided unprecedented value and insight to the benchmarking process, which was recognised by the client as being distinctive, noting it was “head and shoulders” above a competitor’s previous report.

Tideway is due to be delivered by 2023 and our team are proud to have been at the forefront of one of Europe’s largest capital projects.