Crossrail – 3 Lessons Major Projects Can’t Ignore

Last week at the Annual IMechE rail luncheon, Crossrail CEO Mark Wild took to the stage as the keynote speaker and delivered some harsh truths about how Crossrail has been managed.

He began by celebrating several successes over the past year, including the completion of the tunnel fit-out, how all of the radio systems are now commissioned and that the signalling systems are not too far off delivery.

And after a quip about his speech being delivered in a window of 10-20 minutes (topical!), he committed to Crossrail being up and running by summer 2021.

But amongst the good news, Wild discussed what he considered to be three major learning curves that major projects could and should take away from Crossrail.

1.    Major projects should operate as technology businesses

2.    Modularity

3.    The voice of the engineer

What do these things mean for the future of transport and infrastructure projects?

1. Major projects are technology businesses

What Mark Wild said:

Whatever business you think you’re in, you’re actually in a technology business.

One thing that Crossrail got horribly wrong was that we never defined a minimum viable product. The minimum that needed to be delivered to get going.

So, as a result we’ve been trying to deliver this monumental project all in one go and it’s not possible in a tech business.

What we should have done was to decide at the very beginning what the minimum is and scale the technology out of that.

What this means for future projects:

If you consider this in terms of an iPhone, Apple didn’t spend 20 years perfecting the iPhone only to release all the features that could possibly be imagined in one fell swoop. Apple delivered a basic product and worked its way up to the iPhone 417.

So, it seems logical to suggest we apply this to major projects as well. We saw this a bit with the Jubilee Line Upgrade whereas much was done as possible with the project in order to have an operational line by the delivery deadline. Further upgrades were subsequently completed afterwards.

This means the line was bringing in valuable revenue while it was being finished up.

However, for this to work for future major projects, communication will be absolutely vital to manage expectations and avoid a raft of complaints from the British public about service disruptions.

For instance, if HS2 were to adopt this strategy, they would need to give clear guidelines about what will be delivered, when it will be delivered and what the timeline is for upgrades and improvements after the service is in operation.

2. Modularity

What Mark Wild said:

There are 16.5 million assurable signatures to get on Crossrail, 250 million individual elements in the system and around 200,00 documents to complete.

What Crossrail got wrong was that we had no modularity.

Everything should have been plug and play. Think about your Sky TV dish and your DVD, in Crossrail we’ve wired the DVD to the Sky Box and the TV gets it power supply from the satellite dish. We’ve made it immensely complex.

What this means for future projects:

Bringing modularity to major projects offers the opportunity to really streamline the process and make it significantly more efficient. For example, if Crossrail had of adopted one design for each of its individual components and applied that across the whole line it would have offered huge economies of scale in terms of cost and learning curve.

Crossrail isn’t the first project to come to this conclusion. The Great Western Electrification project was notoriously mismanaged when it came to integrating the catenary systems, with each section having its own designs and systems.

Collaboration between organisations will be the key to getting modularity to work. There were 67 major construction contracts over the lifetime of the rail project so communication and cooperation between contractors, consultants and suppliers is the only way to get this to work successfully.

3. The Voice of the engineer

What Mark Wild said:

The voice of the engineer and the engineer as a leader is very, very important because in 2018 when this project really got in to a lot of difficulty the project people were driving towards an unrealistic date and the engineers really weren’t listened to – whether it was in the supply chain, within Crossrail or partner organisations.

What this means for future projects:

Historically, major projects are often run by civil engineers, and while Mark Wild may be slightly biased being an electrical engineer, he is suggesting that the systems engineers were overlooked early on in this project.

Something worth taking away from Crossrail’s setbacks is that having substantial engineering representation on the project board is critical to getting a balanced view of how the project is progressing and what is realistically achievable.

It could be that we see a lot more systems engineers taking on the helm of major projects going forward as the technology becomes increasingly more complex.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, so it is all well and good to look back at where Crossrail went wrong and cast aspersions. What is important is that the transport and infrastructure sectors learn from mistakes, and apply recommendations from people who have been in the thick of it, to future projects.

As Mark Wild said, “we need confidence back in Major Projects”.

What other lessons do you think could be learnt from Crossrail and where do you see the future of major projects going?

I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please do get in touch.