Delivering Efficient Projects

National Highways generated annual efficiency reports detailing progress towards the RIS2 efficiency targets. Whilst National Highways worked hard to find innovative ways of working to achieve the efficiency targets, achieving cumulative efficiency milestones, numerous external pressures throughout RIS2 made it challenging to deliver efficiently, including:

• a significant rise in inflation increasing the cost of materials, labour, and other project inputs, creating substantial “unfunded headwinds”.
• disruptions in the supply chain, exacerbated by events like the COVID-19 pandemic, led to schedule delays and cost increases.
• a number of large, complex projects, which inherently carried a higher degree of uncertainty (including delays due to planning decisions and legal challenges).
• numerous scope changes, due in part to an immature understanding of asset data and performance degradation over time, necessitated budget revisions.

The Office of Rail and Road (ORR), in its role as Highways Monitor, played a crucial role in acknowledging the challenges National Highways faced, contributing towards the adjustment of the RIS2 efficiency target to 1.995Bn.

National Highways subsequently established the Delivering Efficient Projects (DEP) Programme to close the funding and efficiencies gap, working smarter and more efficiently in its capital investments and maintenance activities.

Odvantage were invited to independently review a cluster of major projects, at different stages of the delivery lifecycle. Through a series of digital diagnostics, accompanied by guided discovery interviews, we sought to understand project pain points, provide technical scrutiny and counsel, simplify the efficacy of delivery through the elimination of inefficiency and waste, and drive improved Value for Money.

Independent Expert Reviews offer a significant benefit when dealing with complex projects, providing an opportunity to gain diverse perspectives, free from project bias or institutional pressures. With limited historic involvement on the project portfolio, Odvantage were well placed to inject fresh insight into the ‘art of the possible’, bringing to bear decades of design and construction expertise, and lifting the lid on operational data and institutional preferences to reveal opportunities to simplify delivery and improve benefits. We mobilised a fully independent, trusted review team, comprised of individuals with expert domain knowledge of the core project elements (design management, highway geometry, drainage, geotechnics, structures).

We undertook detailed analysis, examining prime areas with the greatest potential to undermine efficient delivery, following up with guided discovery interviews with teams, sponsors and stakeholders to derive agreed improvement plans. Our maturity assessments focused on:

Scope

• validation of consented schemes, including surveys, asset inventory and condition.
• review where ‘minimum viable product’ solutions exceed the brief.
• review coherence and alignment of requirements between stakeholders.

Governance

• validation of pre- and post-consent agreements, including any legal challenges.
• change management, and the efficacy of the governance framework.
• examination of preference, and the efficacy of contractual management.

Design Maturity

• verification of assumptions and availability to facilitate efficient construction.
• validation of agreed pre-construction solutions vs emerging construction solutions.
• digital diagnosis of design optimisation, including inter-disciplinary clash detection.

Technical Configuration

• verification of standards and governance, including status of technical concessions.
• examination of operational requirements and incorporation into solutions.

Construction Verification

• validation of product configurations and productivity, benchmarked against industry best practice, to optimise construction sequencing and cost.
• examination of principal areas of external pressure, including specialist supply chains, material and product availability, and potential mitigations.
• verification or pre-construction with construction teams, including the prevalence and agreement of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) solutions.

By working closely with our partners, we carefully evaluated each project using available data and real-life experience. This helped us uncover opportunities for money-saving and efficiency improvements. Our fair and unbiased reviews enabled us to share best practices for better performance, and we also assisted teams in spotting hidden issues and risks—along with practical solutions to handle them. By focusing on optimizing design and engineering, we achieved several improvements, including:

• improved design management, assuring the technical configuration reflects funding, enabled potential cost pressures to be clarified before decisions were baked in;
• clarification of technical scope, enabling the optimisation of design (i.e. reducing the maintained headroom for overbridge structures with footways from 5.7m to 5.3m);
• survey optimisation, streamlining the processing and interpretation of data to facilitate swifter decisions on value engineering and construction methodology;
• improved cross-pollination of solutions and consistent interpretation of standards, reducing pavement and foundation thickness, saving carbon, cost and time;
• alignment of working hours, material deliveries and site logistics to minimise network disruption and associated costs due to constrained, sensitive access / egress points;
• incentivisation of landscaping and aftercare suppliers to assure establishment of planting ‘right first time’, avoiding rework that could be reasonably foreseen.
• gaining clarity on handback requirements, where project handover coincides with the conclusion of DBFO concession periods, enabling coherence of operational spend.

The outputs from these assessments were discussed and debated with the project teams prior to ‘handshake acceptance’, forming specific project efficiencies. Lessons learnt were shared, enabling the evolution of efficiencies across a wider portfolio.

In conjunction with Arcadis, Expedition Engineering, and the Delivery Partners (Costain, Skanska, Kier, and Balfour Beatty), Odvantage delivered the following outcomes: