In our recent Major Projects group, we were delighted to hear from Alistair Awcock, Infrastructure Director at Heathrow, about the delivery of projects in complex environments. Heathrow has a good track record of delivering in a difficult operating environment, enabling Alistair to share tips and strategies with the group.
Heathrow as a Complex Environment
Heathrow faces a number of challenges in delivering projects across the organisation, least of all the many passengers that travel through the airport each year. However, its not just about the passengers, there’s a huge city that sits behind Heathrow as airport.
Some of the challenges faced by organisation include:
- its the largest private water network in Europe
- home to over 44 tunnels
- there’s a team of over 80,000 people across Heathrow
- the sustainability challenge is the same for all other aviation organisations, however, Heathrow was the first airport to fly 100% SAF fuels (sustainable aviation fuels).
Programmatic Approach to Delivery
H7 is Heathrow’s current regulatory period agreed with the regulator and airlines. Heathrow have now changed to a more programmatic approach for H7 to set out longer term projects, over 5-10 years. There’s currently over £4 billion of investment underway across the airport, split over 6 areas:
- Next generation security
- T2 baggage
- Carbon and sustainability
- Commercial revenue
- Asset management and compliance
- Efficient airport
Delivery Model
Delivering in a live environment requires close working with partners, therefore, it’s important to map out suppliers and work in an integrated way. Mapping out the capability of partners, as well as the pipeline of work, ensures an oversight of capability, demands and potential shortfalls.
On any large project, particularly those within a complex environment, strategic relationships with the organisations that you work, and have commercial arrangements, with is crucial. There may be some organisations, i.e. product providers, who are not used to working in strategic relationships. This can be a challenge but taking this journey with them will enable benefits across the entire delivery ecosystem.
On large projects, finding a single partner to deliver a certain aspect i.e. MMC is not possible so its important to make them part of the programme rather than a standalone provider. This enables all partners to understand the capabilities they need to deliver and for what purpose, as well as the values of the organisation, allowing all parties to be on the same page.
Heathrow has wide network of relationships and strategic partners beyond just delivery. Its also about how the airport operates. E.G utilities, security, services. Ensuring that Heathrow as business looks beyond purely construction, enable more strategic partner relationships and develops efficiency and collaboration across the whole of the organisation and its supply chain.
‘managing a programme integration is about building the ‘right teams’’
Alistair Awcock, Heathrow
Delivering in a Complex Environment: The Challenges
There are numerous challenges in delivering in a live environment, particularly:
- High risk environment
- Need to maintain the business’ operations & logistics
- Need to bring the supply chain in
However, rather than looking at these as a problem, they can be seen as opportunities to…
- Transform the way projects are commissioned, procured and delivered by leveraging collaboration and innovation.
- Develop mutually beneficial, long term enterprise relationships and contracting arrangements with a strong and capable supply chain
- Secure continuous productivity improvements through MMC adoption
- Improve project outcomes including H&S, carbon and quality and reduce labour requirements, errors and waste
Digital Model
Heathrow plan to work towards a digital model over the next ‘Horizon’ phases:
- Horizon 1: Capital delivery. Leveraging Heathrow’s foundation in capital delivery
- Horizon 2: Operations and maintenance. How assets are managed in a better way
- Horizon 3: Digital. How can data be leveraged in critical decisions.
Capital delivery + operations and maintenance= Digital Heathrow.
Lessons learned
- Collaborative relationships are essential- ‘Build the right team’
- Ensuring consistency and efficiency from solution development to delivery- clients need to take charge and devote time and effort to project tools and strategies.
- Design- ‘get the design right the first time’– acknowledge the scale and complexity of delivering in the operational context
- Delivery- engage with operational people – this drives improved Performance
- Logistics– operational excellence ‘now and future’ needs
- Digital enablement- protect and leverage the value of Digital Asset Information, digital approach to rehearsals are key to de-risk and unlock productivity
- Create an environment where everyone can flourish.
Get Involved
If you enjoyed reading about our last Major Projects meeting, why not get in touch to find more about the group and their next session? Or take a look at our events page to find out what other insightful and engaging events we’ve got coming up.
