On time, On Budget - and Fast
The secret to Building things faster lies in how organisations are run
It takes forever to build anything in this country. Everyone agrees about that.
Well, yes, it does.
But it doesn’t have to.
When I joined Chiltern Railways in 2009, the project to connect Oxford to London Marylebone via a new rail chord at Bicester was still a twinkle in Adrian Shooter’s eye.
Six months before I left, in October 2015, the Prime Minister opened the line.
In six years the line was planned, funded, built and opened. Work on the ground took just two.
In doing so, the project team overcame every obstacle the British system can deploy: complex public-private partnerships, the need to build in the Green Belt, Great Crested Newts.
The fact that it was able to be delivered at pace is evidence that the solutions are, so often, not about policy but about how organisations are run.
Bicester Village station
The project
Firstly, a reminder of the project.
Chiltern Railways was unique in having a 20-year franchise. In 2009, the franchise was under water. The franchise terms saw the annual subsidy converted into a premium payment to the Treasury, but Chiltern could barely afford to pay. Unlike most rail franchises, this was a ‘proper’ privatisation: all the revenue risk sat with the franchisee. And the financial crisis of 2008 had seen a collapse in commuting volumes. As a result, Chiltern Railways was losing money.
It was called a 20-year franchise, but to achieve the full franchise term, the business had to make substantial capital investments.
My boss, Adrian Shooter, had a plan. Chiltern Railways would invest in a new rail link from Oxford to London, with a new station at the junction of the A40 and A34 north of Oxford. The new station would make it much quicker to reach London from north Oxford and northern Oxfordshire. The new revenue stream would return the business to profit while the investment would unlock the 20-year franchise, creating time for Chiltern to return some profits.
Conceptually, it was great. There was a lot of detailed work to do.
Leadership
Since working for Adrian, I’ve read a lot of books about great entrepreneurs and I’ve been lucky enough to meet many of them. Adrian shared a key characteristic: absolute clarity on the destination and a rigorous focus on today. He could be a nightmare to work for as he was obsessive about everything that was going on. I’m not 100% sure I believe this story, but I remember being told by a Chiltern Railways driver that he was once at Marylebone when the signal turned green. He wasn’t quite on the ball, and didn’t notice. A few minutes later, he got a call from Adrian demanding to know why he hadn’t left.
But his absolute clarity of long-term vision and constant focus on the here and now was combined with a willingness (indeed, desire) to delegate the detail of how to get from ‘today’ to the ‘destination’. Working for Adrian meant you were expected to pick up the ball and make his vision reality. He wasn’t going to help you - but he certainly wasn’t going to be in your way.
Adrian also hired well (I would say that, wouldn’t I!). When he stepped back from running the business day-to-day, he appointed Rob Brighouse as his MD. Rob was the best boss I ever had (and I say this with apologies to all my other bosses, many of whom were genuinely superb). Rob also passionately believed in assembling the right team and then empowering them to deliver. I’ve seen how well it can work and tried to learn from him.
Empowerment
Empowerment was absolutely key to how much was able to happen in such a short period of time. The guy in charge of converting Adrian’s vision to reality was Graham Cross, Chiltern Railways’ Business Development Director. First of all Graham had to work out how on earth to create a financial structure to enable the investment. Chiltern’s private equity owners had just sold Chiltern to Deutsche Bahn: German state railways. They hadn’t got the desire to make large capital investments, at least not overseas. Network Rail had the investment capacity but this needed to be a Chiltern investment to unlock the franchise term. And costs needed to be rigorously controlled for the business to return to profit. This couldn’t be a Reading footbridge.
I won’t go into detail on how Graham managed to pull it off, but he did. Key to this is that he was able to lead negotiations with the DfT, Network Rail and DB with everyone knowing he spoke with Adrian’s authority. Graham was able to negotiate significant upsides to Chiltern in the event things went well but significant downsides if they went wrong. That created the incentives necessary on all of us, as a leadership team, to ensure they went well. Network Rail wanted a parent company guarantee from DB. DB provided it. This was the perfect example of the benefits of a small firm (agility) and a big firm (financial firepower). But the deal was complex and couldn’t have been done by remote control. The importance of leaders being willing to delegate cannot be emphasised enough.
Clarity of expertise
Preparatory work started in autumn 2013 with substantive work starting in February 2014. Oxford Parkway opened in October 2015.
One of the reasons it was able to proceed so quickly is that the deal Graham had done ensured that everyone played to their strengths. The extension was largely a rebuilding of an existing railway. The deal saw Chiltern Railways take over the operation of the railway from Oxford to Bicester Town station. This was then closed and completely rebuilt, with a quarter-mile chord extension built to connect this line with the Chiltern mainline as it passed through Bicester.
Given that most of the work was rebuilding an existing Network Rail route, Network Rail was given the delivery role. But reporting to a client board which Graham chaired. As the people closest to the customer, our role was to specify the outputs and make sure we were getting what we needed.
The other reason things went so well is that Chiltern’s in-house project engineer Stephen Barker had been quietly working on iterating the project for a decade; iterating, refining, improving - even though, back then, it was not even certain it would actually happen.
In their landmark book How Big Things Get Done, published last year, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner describe the key to delivering projects on time and on budget as to “think slow and act fast”. Ten years before the book was published, this was exactly the approach that Chiltern Railways took. A decade of quiet iteration: then delivery with pace.
Accountability
My role in all this was Commercial Director. I was in charge of making sure that the extension delivered the necessary revenue. That meant that I specified the customer service proposition, fares structure, timetable, etc, to be delivered by colleagues. If I got this wrong, we’d have spent a load of money in order to extend the length of the franchise - in order to lose money in every subsequent year. That would have been career-limiting.
So every detail of the extension was filtered through the prism of making it as attractive to potential customers as possible. (This is also one of the How Big Things Get Done principles: be absolutely clear why you’re building a project. We were).
One of my jobs was specifying the stations. I chaired a monthly meeting at which we agreed the station design.
These meetings were a great illustration of how we were able to get things done so quickly. In the meeting we had myself, Jenny (the customer service director), Mark (the station manager delegate for when the stations opened), Stephen Barker (Graham’s project engineer), the project lead from Network Rail and the architects.
I was able to set out a vision for what I wanted the station experience to be. My customer service colleagues were able to challenge and refine to make sure it was deliverable in reality. The architect was able to feed in what would and wouldn’t be possible within the budget we’d set and come up with design ideas in the room. The various project folk were aware of all the discussions that had taken place. Stephen, who’d lived this project for a decade, made sure everything that was agreed made sense.
As a result, we were able to make huge progress in a couple of hours. Each time there was an issue, we were able to get it into that room and resolve it rapidly.
Now, here’s the most important thing. I was in charge of that meeting and I had total confidence that any decision I made in that meeting was the final decision. I had all the right colleagues in the room and I understood the parameters. What I knew would NOT happen was that my boss, Rob Brighouse, would overrule me afterwards.
Having also worked in an organisation like Transport for London in which the expectation is that decisions are passed up the hierarchy, I cannot emphasise what a crucial component of getting things done quickly this is. If everyone knows that this is the room where the decisions are made, all the right people show up. They are mentally alert. The conversation is productive. And, crucially, without further sign-off being needed, people can leave the room and immediately get on with delivery.
Had Rob said to me, just once, “Thomas, after the station design meetings, can you just give me a read-out for my approval”, the whole house of cards would have collapsed. Suddenly the key decision-maker would have been someone who’s not really engaged in the process. People would have stopped coming to the station design meetings. They’d have switched their focus to Rob. But Rob was busy and wouldn’t have given it his full attention. And he’d have thought I was still in charge - in his head, it would still have been delegated to me. But I’d have lost the authority without Rob picking up the accountability.
Obviously, designs would have emerged. And the stations would have been built. But as quickly? I doubt it.
I know Rob well enough to know that his decision not to say those words wasn’t fluke - it was wisdom. But it’s a rare wisdom. Most bossess I’ve known would have said them. And, worst of all, most would have thought they were doing their job in doing so.
Design and decisions
One of our principles at Chiltern Railways was that we didn’t use consultants to tell us what to do. Being honest, I didn’t realise that was one of our principles until I realised how other organisations work. To us it was just how we did things. At Chiltern Railways, we didn’t talk about “consultants”: we talked about experts. If there was a specific task that required expertise we didn’t have, we hired someone for that expertise for that task. But we didn’t hire consultants to validate decisions that we were capable of making.
This meant scheme design was very quick. We knew what we were trying to achieve:
1) A park-and-ride station for north Oxfordshire to London
2) A direct connection to Bicester Village
3) Competition with GWR from Oxford station
And we knew why: to attract customers to Chiltern Railways who would otherwise have gone with GWR or by road in order to grow market share and restore profitability.
The range of credible options was limited. Our own people could work with Network Rail’s people to plan the track layout and signalling design to achieve those objectives. Many organisations would have hired a whole army of engineering consultants to cost up a series of nonsense options, simply to show they’d all been considered. And they would then have hired another engineering consultant to (re)design the design that finally emerged. All the time, racking up cost and spending time.
Chiltern Railways people were trusted (expected!) to make judgements and trusted (expected!) to know their limits. That saves a lot of time and money.
Green Belt, Bats, Badgers and Newts
Anyone who’s been close to the story about Britain’s inability to build will have heard the stories about projects stymied by the green belt or endangered species.
Our Oxford extension faced many of the same challenges. The line contained the usual collection of endangered species. The alignment included Great Crested Newts and Badger sets: a crucial tunnel turned out to be used by bats. In order to get agreement from Natural England that the line could be built, we had to prove that we’d found every endangered species on the route and mitigated the risks to them. This process took years. One of the main reasons why the line was able to open on time was that we took a pragmatic decision to start work building new badgers sets and moving badgers while the deal was still being negotiated. The total cost was less than a hundred grand: fractional in the cost of the whole scheme. But if the deal had not been done, it would have been wasted. In many organisations, getting agreement for this ‘at risk’ expenditure would have been so complex and time-consuming that it would have negated the time benefits of doing it. Being able to spend this money shifting badgers, however, was essential to getting the job done on time.
An old tunnel - used by bats. Graham Cross, Chiltern Railways then Business Development Director, is on the right
The other thing that was crucial was… sorry, it’s the same old story: empowerment. There was a public enquiry. All our plans for bats and newts were challenged in court. NIMBYs turned up to challenge them. They didn’t care about bats. They cared about their house prices. But they knew that bats were legally protected and their house prices were not. Becuase Graham was able to actually make actual decisions in real time, he could negotiate with objectors in real-time both in court and out of it. The fact that the objectors knew they were talking to the decision-maker sped up the process of getting the issues resolved enormously.
It was the same story with the Green Belt. It’s not impossible to build on the Green Belt. We did it. But it helped that the person making the case was the person who’d created the plans. And the person who had the authority to amend the plans in real time as it became clear what would and would not be acceptable.
“The main thing is that the main thing is the main thing”
I love this quote from management guru Stephen Covey.
But it’s an important point.
The project was designed to earn us revenue by building market share on journeys between north Oxfordshire and London.
That meant that things that helped us achieve this were the focus of determined effort. Things that didn’t were not.
As an illustration, for the additional capacity required, we kept it simple.
Chiltern Railways already operated a fleet of trains from the Bombardier (now Alstom) Turbostar family, so we just leased some more of the same, second-hand.
But the crucial morning peak arrival into London Marylebone needed to be as attractive as possible. That meant that the 0830 arrival into London Marylebone needed to be one of our “Silver” mainline trains. Counterintuitively, these were actually the oldest vehicles we operated: old 1970s mk3 intercity coaches, though pulled by a modern locomotive. But they’d been refurbished to a very high standard with table seats, plug points, WiFi and an on-board Business Zone. The need to get a Silver train onto this particular diagram caused our timetable planners a lot of pain and misery. I won’t go into details why it was hard but it was hard. But they did it. They had to.
Another example was Bicester Village station. One of the key commercial objectives of the new line was to provide a direct connection to the shopping outlet at Bicester Village. For those who haven’t been there, this place is a phenomenon. I don’t know if it is still doing so well but back in 2015 it had the highest revenue per square foot of any shopping centre in the country. People would literally fly over to the UK from China in order to go shopping at Bicester Village. In terms of growth, Bicester Village was our most important destination after London, and this new rail line gave the opportunity for a station on the site.
From a project point of view, it wasn’t a new station. It was the old Bicester Town station relocated.
From a customer point of view, it was a new station. It was on a new site with a new structure serving new destinations.
I was insistent that the new station was called Bicester Village. Why? Because that’s where the vast majority of people arriving at the station wished to go. For the same reason that Wembley Stadium station is called Wembley Stadium station.
If you’re a Chinese visitor, a station called Bicester Village is clear. A station called Bicester Town (which is actually at Bicester Village) is ridiculous.
But it was comically difficult to get the name “changed”. (In my head it wasn’t a change. But railway systems said it was: the station already existed as Bicester Town in everything from signalling to retail systems). The traditional railway folk were opposed and so were Bicester town council. I had to endure technical meetings with experts in systems I didn’t understand and painful public meetings with Councillors throwing verbal volleys. But I did it because it was essential. I still have a Bicester Village station sign in my home office in recognition of that particular microachievement.
Risk appetite
I remember a few months before we were due to open being a bit… worried. The stations looked like building sites. No, sorry, the stations were building sites. In fact, the day before we opened, the stations were building sites.
Not yet ready to open…
And it wasn’t just the stations. The service opened on October 25th 2015. The track was only handed over on the 5th October 2015.
It wasn’t just that the revenue line depended on the service starting on time (though it did). We’d booked the Prime Minister to come and open the station. And he was coming to open the station. This wasn’t one of those ‘formal openings’ that VIPs host after the thing’s been going for months. He was going to open the station on its very first day.
This was deliberate. We needed a big PR bang. A soft opening followed by a hard launch gives you two bites of the media cherry but both are rather squishy bites (has that broken the metaphor? Neither would actually be big news stories - that’s what I’m trying to say). Having the PM open on the station on the trains started running guaranteed good coverage.
So 25th October 2015 was fixed.
I remember our Board meetings through the summer. We debated whether to defer the opening. It certainly wasn’t guaranteed that the schedule could be pulled back. But we decided to stick with it.
(I should here, by the way, give a huge shout-out to Graham Cross for his astonishing calm through this period. I’m quite sure that he had some sleepless nights but as the guy responsible, he was able to exude reassurance without ever offering false certainty).
Now this was a risk. But it was a measured risk.
After all, let’s imagine that Graham was wrong and the line had opened late. It really did go to the wire, so this scenario was not impossible.
Well, it would have been embarrassing. We’d have had to cancel the Prime Minister. I’d doubt that Downing Street would have given us the chance to book him again, so we’d have missed an opportunity. We’d have had to publicise a delay. We’d have had to refund some early advance ticket sales. We’d have had to roll back the timetable. It would have been awkward and unpleasant and we’d have preferred to avoid it.
But it wasn’t the end of the world.
Given how close to the wire the project was going, I can imagine a lot of organisations saying “We can’t be sure: best to announce a delay now rather than wait until the last minute.” But, actually, the thing that ensured we weren’t late was our willingness to tell our (late-running) builders that we were opening on October 25th - come what may - so they’d better speed up. It’s not impossible they deliberately ran slowly over the summer to stimulate a delay. These things happen.
We knew that cutting it ludicrously fine was far from optimal. But it wasn’t a disaster. And the benefits of keeping the date were significant.
Sometimes organisations seek to mitigate risks that, actually, aren’t that bad if they materialise. The less good option isn’t necessarily a disaster. When taking a decision about risk, it’s often worth working through the reasonable worst case scenario and deciding if it’s actually that bad.
The day before the track was handed over. With four weeks to opening date!
Passion
It’s also worth noting that this sense of mission (“we’ve got THREE WEEKS to open a railway!”) creates an organisation-wide passion.
It was somewhat terrifying only getting the track less than a month before the line opened, but it stimulated the whole company. Train drivers have a reputation for being difficult. But the Chiltern drivers really stepped up to the mission. With three weeks to train the entire driving team, they needed to be super-flexible and do very long training shifts. They did it.
With days to go, two driver training trains pass each other
I remember the celeb we got along to do a speech on opening day alongside the PM (unlike David Cameron, this one was still a celeb a year later…) marvelling at the way the drivers’ Trade Union reps were guests of honour at the opening ceremony. They deserved it. But that culture didn’t happen overnight - it was the result of many years of treating the company’s missions as shared endeavour.
Conclusion
The line from Oxford to London via Bicester was the first new rail link to London from any major British city for over 100 years. (the previous, by the way, was the line from Birmingham to London, also via Bicester).
When people talk about speeding up delivery of infrastructure projects, they often talk about civil engineering. Generally composites.
Now, I love composites - especially when forming the base to the Very Light Rail in Coventry.
But the answer to getting things done more quickly isn’t found in the engineer’s workshop: it’s found in the stuff of management: in clarity of accountability, good delegation, clarity of focus and sensible attitudes to risk.
Take action!
Entrepreneurial organisations are biased to action.
If you’re a leader:
Consider whether your people are expected to use their judgement and to know their limits. If not, tell them they are
Consider whether your people are properly empowered. Do you ever unintentionally undermine that empowerment - even when trying to help. Maybe ask your people that question?
Think through the time spent validating decisions. Could any (all?) of this be saved?
Consider hiring me to help you optimise your leadership for faster results. That’s what I do.
If you’re a team member:
Discuss with your boss areas that you can agree to ring-fence as your accountability. Agree it, define it, and guard it
