Tackling Britain’s nuclear legacy is one of the most important and demanding managerial, technical, commercial and environmental challenges facing the UK over the next century.
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.”