On track for success

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HIGH SPEED 1 is the UK's first high-speed rail line linking London to the European network - it is also the first new British railway in 100 years and is the UK's largest ever single construction project. 

The programme had 80 work-streams at its peak, but the real complexity came from the delicate balances of political, and corporate and environment; moving services across London; building and moving to a new depot; and, not least, a non-negotiable, very public, end date.

Eurostar programme office manager Elaine Davies says the success of the programme lay in the appreciation of the importance of, and the persistent management by Eurostar's senior management and programme management teams, of six critical areas.

Visible senior management support

Eurostar chief executive officer Richard Brown not only championed the programme throughout, he also insisted that project management at Eurostar was 'professionalised' before HS1 commenced. ''We worked with CITI to review and strengthen our project management capability" he said. "The impact of this work focused us on performance and delivery, and created a ‘profession’ within the project management community. This was invaluable in helping us open services on HS1 from the new station at St Pancras International exactly on time and to a high standard."

Appropriate authority was sensibly and confidently delegated to the programme director - reducing bureaucratic delays, and HS1 was an agenda item at each main board meeting – giving it 'visibility' and underwriting its status as a critical strategic initiative. As well as visibility, design authority was established to ensure the 'big picture' perspective was taken into account when making project decisions. The programme was structured to match business decision-making, ensuring decisions and changes were 'owned by' the business functions.

Planning and stakeholder engagement

The core programme team actively engaged the stakeholders, maintaining ownership of relationships and monitoring persistently. As the stakeholder community spanned three countries, many suppliers and railway companies with multiple languages and cultures, this complex task is often underestimated. Sufficient time was spent to take effective management actions.

When incidents drove work ‘off plan’, management knew, and introduced control actions to bring the programme back to plan. All the projects had proven links, and were demonstrably aligned, to the programme's benefits' strategy – keeping the work focused on the 'end game: On top of this, rigorous portfolio prioritisation techniques were introduced very early in the programme to sequence the projects and achieve the desired benefits, and the programme structure was aligned with its governance, keeping the vision of success firmly in view throughout the programme.

Project management techniques

There was a shared project methodology and common language across the programme, implemented by professional project managers. Every project was managed by maintaining management and governance on the critical success factors or declared impacts or benefits each project had been created to deliver. When it came to facilitating change management, buy-in by staff was a critical factor, driving many management actions.

It was integral to the smooth transition to the new services, that a pragmatic set of management actions were in place to handle the hard core of staff who were antagonistic and unwilling to participate in the programme. A central change management plan covering all aspects and events was also developed by change management professionals who were hired to manage and resource this critical area.

Testing

The programme team got to appreciate the 'customer value proposition' from the paying customers’ viewpoint of the new journey experience by extensive testing. This led directly to the smooth service launch. The importance of testing, whether people aspects, processes, or IT should never be underestimated. Testing to establish what the operational and emotional impact on Eurostar's staff of the changes was also carried out by creating a model 'office' environment and running the new processes, until the impacts were understood and could be managed.

Communication

This was a genuinely complex change environment, and every communication mechanism was considered, and many utilised. The basic communications strategy could be summed up as persistent and consistent'- there can never be 'too much’, but it must not be repetitive - techniques to make the communications 'fun’, engaging different types of audience with different media and different approaches were used, systematically building up communications' traffic to ensure peaks coincided with critical programme events.

We are delighted that the hard work and determination of the programme team paid off. We successfully delivered the largest programme Eurostar has ever run with no disruption to passengers and HS1 services running to schedule from St Pancras from day one.