Water - Delivery Assurance Group (DAG) report: quarter 2 - 2022 to 2023

2.Overview

Year 2 Tier 2 Investment to the end of Q2 2022/23 was £325m made up of planned repair and refurbishment (£197m), enhancement (including flooding) (£97m) and growth (£31m). It includes £31m invested on the delivery of projects that were planned to be completed in the previous period.

This level of Tier 2 investment was £14m above the central forecast (£311m) and we are forecasting that we should be at the top end of our Delivery Plan range of £620m to £690m at year end. Investment in responsive repair and refurbishment of assets and RCC (Tier 1a) for Q2 2022/23 was £100m.

Our key performance indicator (IPOD) remains within the target range.

Outputs/Outcomes

Within the 2022 Annual Return, output information was provided within the G tables, based on a limited dataset of outputs delivered in 2021-22 and output forecasts from projects on the "Committed List". This was on the understanding that development work was required to the data structures within our P3M management system to enable it to capture and report on the revised SR21 outputs approach developed for SR21 Needs and apply it to all our live investment projects.

The development and testing work for the P3M system upgrade is now complete and will be put into production during November 2022. This will enable us to complete the exercise of remapping all live investment projects (with the exception of Completion Projects) to the list of new SR21 Outputs. We are planning to undertake this exercise during November and December, with an initial bulk update of >17,000 output data points to ensure that all of our live projects can report on the updated primary output information. Following this, we will undertake additional data validation work to confirm the reported output information and address any gaps. This will include the capture and update of any missing secondary output information.

Completion of this work will enable us to provide initial output reports for all of our live investment (ARRR, Enhancement, Flooding, Growth) to the next DAGWG meeting in February 2023.

Delivery Risks

We continue to monitor the 3 broad categories of risks that may impact our forecasts.

• Third Party Risk - Potential delays due to third-party issues
• Construction Risk - Unforeseen delays from allowable events or poor performance on site
• Construction Market Conditions

The key risk continues to be Construction Market Conditions as noted below.

Construction Market Conditions - these continue to change and evolve rapidly. Cost pressures and availability of materials, labour, and commodities are challenging. The key areas of note are:

• Price and availability of materials and commodities - our procurement teams monitor all frameworks
• Planning - our delivery teams continue to resequence project design, planning and procurement following the extension of lead times for some projects.

• Resourcing and Skills - our partners are experiencing higher than normal staff turnover levels and shortages.

Capturing Learning to Improve Performance

To achieve our desired outcome of efficient and effective investment delivery it is important that we understand both what went well and what did not go so well in the delivery of capital projects. This requires the learning from both live and completed projects to be made available to the planning and delivery teams in a consistent and easily consumed format. To allow us to better capture knowledge and learnings, we have been working to develop a new Lessons Learnt portal. This new online 'app' enables anyone involved in the delivery of a project to record learnings which are then accessible for others to see and implement where appropriate. Common themes and key learnings are validated, collated and best practise shared in the form of improvements to our Risk/Design libraries and targeted tool-box talks. Learnings currently span multiple directorates with improvements being applied to projects at all stages of the Plan / Prepare / Deliver project lifecycle.

The process has only recently gone live but we are already seeing themes emerging which have included better management of long lead time equipment and improved site drainage management; recent example being learning around traffic management. Rather than using a traditional 4-way traffic management system, a project team used the Lessons Learnt Portal to search for learning from previous projects. The result was a change in the approach to traffic management utilising a road closure rather than the initially planned 4-way traffic light system. This resulted in a reduction of 7 weeks on the programme and unlocked a number of benefits including reduced risk and disruption to the public, lower CO2 emissions due to less time on site and a cost saving to the project.

The Lessons Learnt portal fits within our overall drive to improve Knowledge Management which in turn underpins our ability to achieve reductions in the project lifecycle, increased savings in cost and carbon and improved outcomes for our customers.