Three cheers for Eurostar!

I’d like to congratulate Eurostar on their outstanding success in winning the APM programme of the year award for the High Speed Rail Link (HS1). They were up against impressive opposition. The runners up were Swanwick and West Drayton Air Traffic Control, NATS, and Department for Work and Pensions Internet Protocol and Convergence Programme, BT Global Services.

Project magazine this month made the following observations.

The strategic intent of Eurostar’s High Speed (HS1) project was to become the natural choice for short haul travel between the UK and the continent. Since its launch in November 2007, the HS1 project has delivered on this promise with high levels of punctuality and an increase in traveller numbers by over 21 per cent in the first three months of 2008.

The success of the HS1 programme was largely due to the extensive and dedicated work on stakeholder engagement.

Once all the stakeholders had been identified and analysed, they were grouped into key stakeholders and ‘others’. Each key stakeholder was managed by a dedicated project manager, whilst overall alignment was assured through the introduction of a change manager.

“It’s the culmination of about six years’ hard work and it’s a year ago to the day that we actually moved so it’s a very fitting tribute to what the people in Eurostar have done, not just the project team but everyone in the company,” said Elaine Davies (pictured left), head of the project management team.

“We put a lot of effort into doing it the right way and I think it showed that if you do put a lot of effort in according to the methodology and soft skills, you can actually contribute and achieve what you set out to do,” added Michèle Chopra (pictured right), programme manager.

Michèle gave a presentation at November’s CofEe Club event, highlighting their success. The presentation was well received and generated much discussion.

Eurostar employed many of the best practices that we have discussed at CofEe Club, demonstrating their value. We look forward to other CofEe Club members becoming publicly recognised as centres of excellence in PM3.