In 2017, the Department for Transport (DfT) and family organisations (FO) (Highways England, Network Rail, TFL, Crossrail, HS2) developed the Transport Infrastructure Efficiency Strategy (TIES). This strategy shared a vision to cascade best practice, drive improvements in the way infrastructure is designed, delivered and maintained, and inform
decision making to optimise capital investments.
A key enabler was the ambition to establish a benchmarking capability across the DfT FO: “Our investment decisions need access to high-quality performance data from similar, comparable domestic and global projects. Accurate and complete project performance information provides better assurance of what projects are likely to cost and helps identify drivers of cost in individual projects, which in turn can highlight best practice
and drive innovation.”
The DfT FO’s commissioned a project to ‘prove the concept’ that benchmarking could inform better decision making. Project challenges included:
- Prove the concept – build, test and demonstrate a new accessible platform thatenables sharing/ interpretation of information/ data;
- Establish metrics that inform infrastructure;
- Provide a basis for effectively sharing best practice between transport clients;Turner & Townsend was appointed to define, design and deliver the BenchmarkingFramework (covering how to build a common benchmarking capability) and a prototype (todemonstrate the art of possible, based on real data).
Turner & Townsend identified three major components which would be
critical tosuccessfully building a capability to inform investment decisions:
A – Consistent and Common Approach
B – Accessible insight and information
C – Data collection, management, processing and analysis solution
