ENGINEERING EPIPHANY

Working in the true spirit of collaboration has been an enlightening experience for Carillion’s JOHN FITZPATRICK and COLIN WEALLANS, reports STEFANIE FOSTER

Oxford station. More than 6.5 million passengers a year, three train operators, and a host of daily freight services. Add to that the close proximity of housing and you have a recipe for a challenging worksite on the railway. But between July 21 and 31, it was the scene of a nine-day blockade to enable several hundred metres of plain line track renewal and the installation of nine switches and crossings.

Part of Network Rail’s Oxford remodelling work, the blockade was a vital piece of a very big jigsaw to facilitate a further 16-day blockade next year for commissioning of the works. More than that, those nine days raised the bar for collaboration on these types of projects.

John Fitzpatrick is a senior project manager for Carillion (a principal contractor on the works). A former Navy man, he joined the rail industry because he wanted to find the same kind of team spirit he was used to in the Forces, and 28 years later, he’s never looked back.

For Fitzpatrick, his team is everything - an ethos which runs through the entire company: “We worked as a team, and I like to say ‘a team’ because that’s what it was on this project - us, NR and our suppliers. The ‘one team’ approach all working together is a bit of a cliché, but that’s what it was.” What made this job different? “The team had worked together on other big projects. They did all the track works on the Reading station redevelopment. We’ve always had that collaborative approach and we’ve won awards for it. The foundations for this were laid following our Reading works.”

Fitzpatrick reports to Colin Weallans, operations director on Crossrail West, Western and Wales. He takes up the story: “As a result of the team working together before, we worked with NR and other contractors as one. For me, that’s the success. We don’t see ourselves as a Carillion project and a Siemens project and NR as the client. We just see ourselves as one team, one project. We’re all equal, so it’s very collaborative.”

The Oxford blockade was a step above the works at Reading though. A robust planning and review process made this job “the smoothest” Fitzpatrick has worked on in recent years. He is convinced that robust planning was key to the success of the work - being clear about the scope from day one and not making several late additions that put the programme at risk. Planning started at the end of 2014 and the scope of the works was defined at an early stage.

This extends to contingency planning to take into account any problems during the works. There were times during the blockade when the programme was five or six hours behind schedule, but close collaboration between Carillion, the other suppliers and NR meant that the project finished half an hour before the deadline. How was this achieved?

Says Fitzpatrick: “There was no panic. The biggest thing for me was the pre-planning and management throughout the blockade. Wherever we were in the programme, ourselves and the client were always in control of where we were. People work a lot better when they’re not under pressure. They can make mistakes otherwise. There was no pointing of fingers or accusing people of doing things wrong. It was a very calm, co-ordinated way of managing the programme, which is a testament to everyone involved in managing the blockade.”

Weallans continues: “It’s the same people that have stayed together, which is great because on some of the other contracts you don’t have the opportunity to build the same sort of relationships. We understand the good, the bad and the ugly in everybody. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. Because we know that, we can help each other. For me, that goes into the engineering

element as well. We can look at each other’s resources and say ‘rather than me book another crane, can I use your crane’? We don’t do it contractually, we just do it. We had a big Kirow crane on site. Siemens would borrow it and our supervision to do their work for an hour or two. [Lifts using the Kirow crane were planned by the Volker crew, manning the crane in consultation with Siemens and Carillion]. It reduces risk in the project because everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It was planned to maximise everyone’s utilisation to make it very cost-effective, as well as safer.”

This was a really important factor - maintaining the safety of the workforce. Carillion encourages staff to use a logging system called ‘Don’t walk by’, by which anyone on a job can highlight potential safety issues and suggest preventative measures. But for this task, they also implemented something else. NR asked Carillion to take on a principal contractor role, enabling the company to put managers on site for the duration of the blockade whose sole focus was on health and safety.

Says Fitzpatrick: “We focused our HSE team on supporting the delivery of the job in a sort of advisory/guidance role, so if there were any issues they could react and put them right. One of the things you find on these jobs is that people are so focused on delivery that they don’t see what’s going on around them. Having those eyes and ears around on the job enabled us to support and avoid any potential incidents or accidents. If there was an issue, we didn’t have to stop the works, these guys could guide and advise them on whatever the issue was.”

That close working relationship extended into the way everyone involved interacted with the general public. Oxford station is right on the boundaries of a residential area, so the potential for public complaints was very high. Amazingly, not a single complaint was made. Fitzpatrick puts this down to how the NR managed communications with local residents from a very early stage, with support from everyone else on the project.

“Residents are not shy in coming forward when there’s a problem! But because they understood what was happening, it became easier. While they all understood what we were trying to achieve, when there’s a machine banging away outside their windows at three o’clock in the morning, you can understand why they might be upset! But we got buy-in from them. We’ve done a lot of work over the last 18 months on community engagement.”

The work doesn’t stop there though. With a further blockade to prepare for next year, there is still a programme of follow-up works to complete. Because of the contingency built into this year’s blockade, between 75 and 80% of the follow-up works were completed during the initial possession, meaning that the planned eight weekend works before next year has been reduced to three weekends, saving Carillion and NR time and money.

Weallans is clear about how this was achieved: “Everybody looked out for each other, irrespective of their job function, or the company they worked for. I mean that sincerely. People say they work collaboratively but they don’t really. Here though, we really did.”

Fitzpatrick agrees: “The integration of the client and the other suppliers within this package of works - it wouldn’t have happened without that.”