by Thomas Ableman’s perspective on how Chiltern Railways delivered a major project, and what others could learn from it
The highly experienced public transport leader Thomas Ableman has produced an interesting blogpost on how Chiltern Railways delivered their Oxford-Bicester construction project which enabled a new Oxford-London service.
This was aka ‘Evergreen 3’ to those of us who were around back then. Thomas was on that project team as Commercial Director, so he saw it from the inside.
Posting on his resurrected ‘Freewheeling’ blog, he suggests (using that project as evidence) that the secret to building things faster lies in how organisations are run.
His conclusion is that “the answer to getting things done more quickly isn’t found in the engineer’s workshop: it’s found in the stuff of management: in clarity of accountability, good delegation, clarity of focus and sensible attitudes to risk.”
Thomas has kindly clarified what he meant by this: the innovative engineering solutions do have a part but he is emphasising the often-neglected importance of leadership and management.
I’d certainly agree about those factors (which also apply to the engineering as much as to anything else). And there’s a lot of other food for thought in his piece.
The headline timeline is that the line was planned, funded, built and opened in just six years[1]. In fact Chiltern had been “quietly working on iterating the project for a decade; iterating, refining, improving – even though, back then, it was not even certain it would actually happen“[2] and Thomas credits this as one of the reasons the project went well. I think that’s a great example of the importance of doing the planning to get the project right, rather than rushing in prematurely and having to backpedal.
He sees the company’s management style as a key part of the speed once the project was definitely going ahead. The managers responsible for each part of the business were empowered not just to negotiate but to make decisions. Thomas comments: “If everyone knows that this is the room where the decisions are made, all the right people show up… The conversation is productive. And, crucially, without further sign-off being needed, people can leave the room and immediately get on with delivery.”
Not every organisation will be able to get quite the speed of decision-making (in themselves or their funders) that Chiltern managed. In local authority schemes, for example, realistically the democratic process requirements of Committee approvals and public consultations will always take time. But the management and leadership point always applies. From my perspective developing projects for the public sector, they tend go best when the client team either has the decision-makers at the table, or is well-tuned-in to what the decision-makers are wanting and thinking. ‘No surprises’ is a good goal.
A couple of other things particularly resonated with me.
Thomas mentions ‘clarity of focus’, and certainly I’ve always found that projects with clear objectives – and which can stick to them – have better chances than those without. If the objectives are not clear, time spent teasing them out at the start is immensely valuable. And if there are several stated objectives, sometimes it can help to tease out the one or two that really matter the most – the ones that ought to drive the decisions the most.
And finally, he has are some really interesting points on risk appetite and risk mitigation, which (like the entire post) are well worth reading.
(Hat-tip to London Reconnections for alerting me to this, via their Monday round-up)
[1] Thomas has kindly clarified that this starts from 2009 and the prep work for the January 2010 TWA application, and finishes with opening as far as Oxford Parkway in October 2015. The continuation to Oxford (not seen as the core part of the project’s rationale) opened later, in December 2016.
[2] Adrian Shooter’s book Chiltern Railways: the Inside Story summarises those early planning stages. He says he first decided to establish an Oxford link in 1993, and they started looking at options in earnest in 1997. An early plan was to run to a parkway station at Aston Rowant. Later they decided to go into Oxford. Leading options for this were the Bicester route and an alternative via Thame and an M40 parkway. Both options both featured in the company’s 2002 franchise agreement under the aspiration to run a new route to Oxford. I remember material at the time (some of which is reproduced in Shooter’s book) showing the Thame option.
