please empty your brain below
A couple of months after it's up and running, most of us will have forgotten about it's delay and just be using it day-to-day.
But the knock on effect is sorting out the additional costs and could we see years of political delay before projects like Crossrail 2, Bakerloo ext. and HS2 Northern ever, if ever, get off the ground.
There seemed very few people (albeit at the more technical junior/middle management who I dealt with) who could see or understand the bigger picture. They had so many process driven, technocrat programme managers who were obsessed with keeping the Gantt chart updated, internal governance and setting out a project plan; ironic really considering all the delays.
I always felt Crossrail being an independent entity within TfL didn’t help. There was very little accountability and relationships between senior TfL officials and Crossrail executives strained or often non-existent.
I left before the delays came out but if there had been issues my team should have known (based on the work we were doing) so it was a pretty well kept secret that they were running so far beyond; of course a lot of people suspected issues!
Some projects, even some involving software, do get completed on time. Most do not. Perhaps we should be looking at the ones that do, to figure out how they manage it.
This reflects very poorly on TfL and isn't great for Sadiq really, for either not asking the right questions or for too easily being fobbed off by the answers he wanted to hear
Looks like fragmentation of the national rail network could be >considered< to be the cause of the problem:
"Crossrail Ltd was a separate entity, the lessons are numerous. By splitting the construction work into 36 separate contracts, it meant there was no co-ordination and no one at the Department for Transport offering oversight."
20 years on no-one remembers that the Jubilee Line Extension was 3 years late and massively over budget.
It’ll be worth it in the end.
The project suffered from a number of the same problems:
- Initial programme activity periods and logic being based on time available rather than the time required, thus the set completion date drove the durations and the logic and not the other way round.
- Isolation from reality e.g. lack of respect for TfL standards.
- Reluctance of upstream manangement to accept that actual delays in day to day progress must impact the final completion date, in fact the response to repeated site delays was to shorten remaining time available durations and so bring the end date back on track.
- Lack of co-ordinating of cross-project contracts with station specific contracts which meant that our station could not be sure when the cross-project contractor would be available to work for us.
- Lack of a cross-project Commissioning Programme tying in all the stations and the line wide installations.
In view of all of that I can fully appreciate how the project "suddenly" went into delay. What I cannot understand is why, given the obviously incomplete state of a number of the stations, it was so late in the day. Nor can I understand why the delays are continuing to increase.
The other difficulty I have is with the ever increasing costs, i.e. the extra money to be paid to the contractors. Whilst a certain proportiion of this will be for delays caused by the project, for which TfL are responsible, some of it will be for delays caused by other contractors / suppliers from whom recovery should be sought. Another reasons is that the extra is for the actual costs of Provisional Sums (we have no idea what this will cost, but let us say £X and when we have designed it we will agree how much we will pay) but given that the project was almost finished(!) most of these should have been resolved. Again, it could be the extra costs have arisen from additional works being instructed but, as above, the project was almost finished.
There is however the elephant in the room, as in DG's table:
Canary Wharf Aug 2019 "Upgraded all the fire protection"
Not the words "Upgraded" and "all"
Why are they upgrading all the fire protection at the new Canary Wharf station before the place opens? Should we read a Grenfell-related concern there?
dg writes: No.
The ring-fencing was by government edict (ta, Mrs T & co - I still despise you all), on the basis that the Underground cost too much, took too long and still didn't get it right. Hence the tunnel collapse at Southwark. That was foreseeable, as was the same at Heathrow, using 'NATM' on clay subsoils...
After the North Greenwich mess where the "biggest hole in Europe" almost fell in, 'we' gained mandatory control over JLEP and surprise - things began being done properly.
Exactly the same with CrossRail - no lessons learned. Everything still designed on a narrow perspective cost:benefit minimum return of 1:1.3. No surprise it's late, and all other major projects for London will be too, unless philosophies radically alter.
They should all be locked up.
"The 1994 Heathrow Airport tunnel collapse led to questions about the safety of the NATM. However, the subsequent trial blamed the collapse on poor workmanship and flaws in construction management, rather than on the NATM"
but once it became apparent that the whole project was delayed, there was no point paying overtime to get the central section stations finished ... might as well save a few bob and spread out the work.
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