Reducing value leakage across the Energy Strategic Infrastructure lifecycle

A newly established infrastructure delivery organisation, formed in April 2023, was tasked with delivering the most ambitious upgrade programme in the UK energy sector for over half a century. Operating in a highly regulated environment, it faced significant challenges from the outset. The organisation was responsible for negotiating, selecting, and mobilising a wide range of partners across the supply chain to deliver on this bold ambition.

Our customer faced an immense challenge – standing up and maturing as a delivery organisation whilst also rapidly mobilising a range of national infrastructure improvement programmes.

This challenge was compounded by both the necessity to meet the regulatory framework and delivery expectations set by OFGEM, whilst also drawing down from a relatively limited supply chain.

Commercial was a core central function supporting the Project and Portfolio teams in their mobilisation and delivery activity and this particular function was very new.

A specific challenge was raised by the Leadership team around ‘value leakage’, and whether the wider organisation was potentially losing value across the project lifecycle unintentionally.

The Leadership team approached Project One to help ascertain if indeed it was possible to identify areas of value leakage across the project lifecycle.

With little time and capacity across the Commercial team, this task required the external support of Project One to mobilise support rapidly and initiate a process of discovery.

Project One adopted a pragmatic approach to identifying value leakage opportunities through a series of stakeholder interviews and primary data analysis. From this, Project One was quickly able to summarise the priority opportunities and gain consensus on their relative importance.

This was specifically challenging as the organisation did not have the capacity to support detailed deep-dive workshops so close to the holiday period, so Project One had to leverage working relationships with the colleagues.

Project One was able to identify a range of potential value leakage opportunities both relating to direct and indirect spend as part of the Discovery process.

In addition, Project One provided a clear set of action plans to enable our customer to pick up and initiate the quantification of opportunity with the right data.

This has enabled the confirmation that the Leadership were right in their assertion that value was being lost across the project lifecycle, but it wasn’t conspicuous where or how. The Commercial team now has the ability to target those areas and generate further benefit for consumers – the end customer.

Project One value Add:

• Our customer needed Project One as they had neither the capacity nor capability to objectively define where value was being eroded across the project lifecycle.
• Project One’s value proposition was clear – we were able to work flexibly around the internal constraints and identify several opportunities for improvement in a matter of weeks, coupled with actionable plans.
• It is this mature but flexible approach which differentiates Project One from its competitors, making a real difference to our customers.