High Speed Two - Collaboration programme

The Challenge

As the Europe’s most ambitious infrastructure initiative, the HS2 programme presents one of the largest and most complex challenges with the scale of the structures, systems and processes. Consequently, the HS2 Senior Leadership Team recognised the need for a new approach to culture and human behaviours to ensure programme success, and to overcome the many challenges they expected across its 30+ year lifespan, such as:

• Coordinating and uniting a multitude of contractors, each with their own culture, processes and interfaces.
• Integrating all parts of the programme delivery effectively
• Managing both expected and unexpected changes to the programme
• Finding and implementing opportunities for efficiency (both human, process and system)
• Ensuring ‘best-for-programme’ decision making

Critically, there needed to be a shift from a traditional transactional ‘client-contractor’ approach to one of longer-term relationship-driven delivery that fostered a ‘partner-partner’ approach supported by a common foundation of collaboration

The Solution

As a collaboration partner of over 7 years, we’ve supported various areas of the programme. Our main goal has been to foster a ‘relationship-first’ approach to operations by working with senior leaders, project teams, joint ventures, alliances, and functional teams to meet their business objectives. We achieved this by:

• Designing and delivering a programme of readiness workshops for HS2 staff prior to commencing works
• Designing and delivering mobilisation programmes for all stakeholders upon commencing works to ensure immediate and enduring programme-wide collaboration
• Facilitating scenario exercises
• Monitoring relationship and team performance (and providing bespoke interventions or support where required)
• Conducting one-on-one coaching to HS2 senior leaders and programme managers