Opportunity

The Reactor Sites division of British Nuclear Group has undergone tremendous change as it responded to government plans to clean-up the UK’s nuclear legacy. From April 2005, all 11 of its nuclear power stations were to be managed as programmes of work under contracts renewed and awarded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).

The NDA aims to get best value for the tax payer by putting out to competition the clean-up work, which it estimated to cost over £40bn. From when bidding started, BNG had to compete hard to retain its existing business. If it lost a contract, it would have had to hand over its operations to a management team from one of its rivals.

Approach

The challenge to create a programmes-based business led Geoff Simms, Programmes Director, to turn to CITI. He knew he needed external programme support to embed superior programme management into each reactor site. He also needed to present the “programme for programme management” in vivid and compelling terms to his executive colleagues. If they were to embrace the disciplines and benefits of programme management, they had to see up-front what it meant for them.

Fortunately, the strategic implementation process (SIP) from CITI starts with the very envisioning process that Geoff needed to engage his fellow directors. By working with CITI’s SIP consultant, Geoff was quickly able to draw some powerful pictures describing programme management for reactor sites.

However, the SIP work did much more than just describe the “To-Be” for programme management. It also set out the tangible benefits that programme management would offer to the Reactor Sites division and the competitive advantage that would be created in relation to the NDA.

Outcome

By using SIP tools and techniques, Geoff and the CITI consultant team were able to identify the impacts that the “programme for programme management” would have to make, the products that would have to be delivered to trigger those impacts and the resultant blueprint for the business. The blueprint showed Geoff’s colleagues how programme management would plug into the reactor sites and transform their ability to meet the expectations of their demanding new customer: the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, working on behalf of the taxpayer.

Opportunity

The correct amount of scheduled maintenance within this offline period, known as ‘outage’, needs to be planned in order to keep unscheduled outages to a minimum. In mid-2004, leading integrated UK energy company RWE npower, which operates and manages flexible, low-cost coal, oil and gas-fired power stations, and a large portfolio of renewable energy generation activities, embarked on an initiative to improve its management of outages.

Approach

Project management was recognised as essential to achieving this objective. By focusing on each downtime as a project, rather than a series of processes, the company ensured a set of management actions existed within the outage strategy to deal with risks and issues.

RWE npower has a tradition of providing best-in-industry development for its people, from the graduate entry-levels up to senior management. As RWE npower became more project oriented in the way it conducted outages, and indeed its business, the need to formalise its approach and project management development became necessary. RWE npower chose CITI to tailor and deliver a suite of project management courses and sponsor briefings with emphasis on driving a consistent, project management based approach to managing outages, to ensure the minimisation of costly downtime.

To this day CITI works closely with RWE npower to understand its business. Our tutors regularly tour power stations to learn not only how they work, but why the outage strategy is so important to the business’ viability. We work in partnership to create and deliver a set of development interventions combining a method-based approach with pragmatic application in specific environments.

Outcome

RWE npower is seeing measurable benefits, with a positive financial impact, as outage times are optimised and further streamlined and, there is a much better understanding – and therefore synergy – between sponsors and their project managers. This mutual success is illustrated by the fact that CITI now provides project management development and sponsorship programmes to the Generation, Renewables and Cogen businesses within RWE npower.

Opportunity

Magnox South Ltd, a company owned by EnergySolutions, is the management and operations contractor currently responsible for defuelling and decommissioning five of the UK’s historic Magnox nuclear reactor sites on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

The sheer scale of this challenge, the diversity of facilities that were built, the different technical specifications used and the fact that much time has passed since implementation, makes each and every clean-up project uniquely challenging.

Andrew Smart, Director of Project Management, said: “the priority for Magnox South is decommissioning the sites we manage in a safe and hazard free manner. This involves complex project management challenges and requires high levels of professionalism. We recognised that we wanted to develop the skills and enhance the competencies of both our project managers and the other professionals working with them on our projects.

“We knew that ‘standard’ project management training courses are readily available but given our unique environment, and the diversity of experience among our workforce, we were not interested in a ‘sheep dip’ approach. We had some experience of this in the recent past and understood its limitations in making sustainable improvement in performance.

“We wanted to better understand development needs across the community before committing investment in project management training. We also realised that we needed to know more about the required competencies of our staff before we could even attempt to bridge the ‘development gap’. Finally we wanted to create a comprehensive development support framework that addressed individuals’ requirements and allowed them to access the necessary development interventions”.
Many organisations are now coming to the same conclusion about developing their project and programme capability. In the past, development needs have been addressed in a ‘scatter gun’ fashion – usually with some mixture of distance and classroom-based learning that are not particularly connected or related to each other.

Approach

More enlightened organisations are now moving toward ‘demand driven’ development, that is the framing of development around a more complex and integrated mix of support interventions – founded on a firm understanding of the demands of the corporate portfolio and what capability and capacity is needed now and in the future to deliver that portfolio of work. This requires a balanced understanding of where capability is now, and just as importantly, where it needs to be tomorrow.

“Following a rigorous supplier process we engaged CITI to assess and establish the ‘gap of performance’ between desired and actual capability, in order to allow us to specify a ’demand-driven’ development framework for the project community including project managers, project control staff and project team members”, said Andrew.

Outcome

In addition to utilising elements of its standard project management profiling toolkit, CITI developed a bespoke set of questionnaires to examine the competencies expected of professionals in different project roles and at different levels within Magnox South. This solution allowed assessment of core competencies in project management as well as the specific technical competences required by professionals within such an exceptional environment. It included self assessment as well as 360 degree feedback, and provided each participant with their individual report as well as population summaries and analysis that informed management discussions about the overall development framework.

The successful implementation of the assessment process over a period of about a month has been a good experience for Magnox South. “The new information we gained about our project community’s development needs is a huge step forward for us” added Andrew. “Now we need to close the capability gaps we found by ensuring that future development interventions give our project community the skills and approaches required to tackle the complex challenges ahead of them.”