CASE HISTORY

Railtrack

Railtrack launched, in May 1997, a £1 billion station regeneration programme to modernise Railtrack's 2,500 stations by the year 2001. To deliver this project in the shortest possible time, Railtrack opted for an "extended arm" contracting approach involving five main contractors. The key features of this approach were:

  • Each contractor is given responsibility and budget for delivering a number of sub packages of work
  • The contractors effectively form part of the Railtrack Properties management team to bring the whole of the works together under a single programme
  • Project timescales are reduced by outsourcing the procurement process to the contracting companies
  • The contracting companies are incentivised by the availability of performance bonuses

Requirement:

The obvious end performance measure is "safe delivery to cost, schedule and quality". However, Railtrack were keen to assure performance targets were met, by identifying and monitoring performance in each of the contributing performance areas and by encouraging the contracting companies to "buy in" to the resulting measurement system.

Approach:

Opteama presented a methodology for establishing the performance framework to Railtrack management and then facilitated them in the identification of five Key Performance Areas.

Five one day workshops were then scheduled (one for each performance area), which were facilitated by Opteama and attended by a representative from each contracting company. The output from the workshops was:

  • A set of performance indicators for each area that were accepted by each contractor
  • A documented process for data collection and reporting for each performance indicator
  • Assigned responsibility report preparation and distribution

Benefits:

There were three key benefits derived from our approach:

  • Through initial involvement in identifying the key performance areas Railtrack could be confident they were only measuring the things that count
  • The contracting companies were able to influence and buy-in to the actual measures
  • Bonus could be awarded as a result of performance across a balanced set of measures
 

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