Since 1863, when the world's first underground railway began service between Paddington and Farringdon Street in London, the city has relied on its subterranean arteries. The expanded network today makes more than three million passenger journeys per day, over 253 miles of track connecting 275 stations.
As London's Tube has developed over the past 140 years it has become inextricably linked to the city's psyche. Its underground stations gave shelter to Londoners and their leaders during both world wars, and it has tied together many outlying villages and new suburbs into today's thriving metropolis.
The arrival of PPP
But as the Tube entered its third century, the government realised it needed to change the way upgrades and maintenance are managed. Instead of managing renewal of the ageing infrastructure itself, the government sought to bring private sector expertise to the table in the form of public-private partnership (PPP) agreements. Under these agreements, the network was split into several groups of lines, and consortiums of leading construction and maintenance companies were invited to bid for 30-year franchises on Tube operations.
The TLG Consortium
In December 2002, the consortium known as Tube Lines Group (TLG) won the bid for the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines and became responsible for maintenance, renewals and upgrades of the infrastructure, including track, trains, signals and stations. The TLG consortium comprises U.S. engineering giant Bechtel Group, Inc. and European firms Jarvis and Amey.
"Although we have equal stakes in TLG, Bechtel is actually responsible for about 55 percent of actual value of work done on the lines," says David Lane, a planning and scheduling manager at Bechtel who has been dedicated to TLG. "We look after the capital expenditure side of the contract."
And the amount of capital expenditure involved is not insignificant - more than $3.5 billion in the first seven-and-a-half year period. This money is being invested in areas such as track renewal and a new state-of-the-art system for monitoring track condition, as well as new signaling networks for the Jubilee and Northern lines. This is expected to significantly improve reliability and allow for a higher frequency of services.
Managing complexity
But, achieving these high-level goals is going to require successful delivery of hundreds of projects. "Of the 330 individual projects, most are carrying the seven-and-a-half-year budget, but some projects are spread over the other three periods that make up the 30-year franchise," says Lane. "Within the database we currently have about 70,000 activities representing work for the first period."
To manage this complexity, TLG turned to Primavera Systems, established project management software developers, with whom Bechtel already had a long-standing relationship. The company had originally been looking at using Primavera's main tool for the enterprise (called P3e) but when the signing of the contract was delayed, it was able to take advantage of the newly-released specialist tool, Primavera Enterprise for Construction (P3e/c) in November 2002, and made plans to implement this instead.
"P3e/c is a much more dynamic solution than anything else available," says Lane. "But to start with, we're not doing anything fancy. After implementing the system we went through an extensive data input stage, importing previous schedules and doing some conversions. We've started to use it for reports, but plan to be using some of the more powerful reporting functionality soon."
One example of where P3e/c will prove its worth is on special projects, which often involve many delivery teams. For instance, the addition of an extra car to the Jubilee Line requires work not only on the rolling stock itself, but also the track, stations and signaling. P3e/c enables individual teams and planners to develop, cost load, monitor and control their particular programs, which can then be brought together and reported as one project.
New business, new processes
2004 has been a busy time for TLG as it continues to transition management processes and the 2,400 staff it inherited from London Underground, the public sector company responsible for overseeing the infrastructure franchises.
Having P3e/c handle project management across the enterprise is helping to spread best practices throughout TLG, and is also complementing other technology infrastructure projects. Among these is the implementation of a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system supported by a new database that also drives P3e/c.
By moving to an Oracle database for both systems, TLG hopes to shorten the amount of time it takes to upload scheduling information to London Underground. The ERP system will also be based on components from Oracle, but for contract management, Lane says that Primavera provides much better functionality, so it was integrated into the ERP suite.
Although the full ERP system didn't go live until mid-2004, TLG had already implemented Primavera software for contract management in its track delivery team and continues to roll it out across the business.
The value of earned value
Looking ahead to the second year on the job (2005), Lane says TLG will continue to benefit from more sophisticated management processes enabled by Primavera technology. "We're evaluating Cost Manager as one of the front-ends to the ERP system, and are also interested in the flexibility afforded by running P3e/c on PDAs for our mobile staff," he explains. "But the thing that will have the biggest impact is educating our work force and our contractors about earned value."
Progress on projects is increasingly measured through a standard methodology called earned-value, a built-in monitoring system that assesses what percentage of the project is completed ie. literally how much of the value of the project has been earned. This is not very widespread in UK project management circles, although it is gradually gaining acceptance for the improved analysis and projections it can provide. Bechtel, through TLG, is playing a role in expanding this acceptance and plans to lead by example.
"Because we have such a large job, there is a lot of work to manage on a periodic basis - be it daily, weekly, monthly or yearly," says Lane. "We don't want to have to open schedules and go through them activity-by-activity to get a picture of where we are. We want to start with cost and schedule performance indexes and drill down from there, so this level of detail is being included in all new contracts."
As well as spreading the earned value message, TLG is now enforcing the London Underground requirement that all contractors do their reporting with Primavera. Some have seen the benefits that TLG has begun to achieve, and also decided to implement P3e/c. "This is great for us," says Lane. "It means that our contractors are going to manage their work even better and also that all of their data can be fed directly into our system to streamline our analysis and reporting."
Obviously, this is a benefit for the TLG consortium. But ultimately, Primavera technology combined with earned-value methodology helps support a wider benefit - a safer, more efficient transport network for London.
