Highways England (HE) is currently delivering a major national infrastructure upgrade through the Smart Motorways Programme (SMP) on behalf of the UK Government; a £5.7bn investment.
SMP has a commitment to demonstrate £302m of efficiency savings to the Regulator, yet there was only documented evidence of around £10m having been delivered. The Delivery Director for Business Improvement, Change and Efficiency (BICE), knowing that there was a lack of connectivity across the organisation, wanted answers to the apparent £292m performance gap. Curzon worked with the SMP BICE team to address this challenge and develop a productivity improvement strategy.
Our joint ambition was to identify high impact productivity improvements that would create a change in organisational behaviour across SMP and their supply chain partners from budget monitoring ethos to performance driven approach.
Our analysis of existing ways of working and performance management processes and systems challenged the status quo, and the subsequent development and deployment of practical approaches, tools and methods has unlocked the potential for further performance gains where it matters; at the point of project delivery.
Following our work, SMP is forecast to deliver in excess of £500m efficiencies, surpassing their regulatory target by £210m. A more holistic and accurate view of performance is providing the platform to find and bank further efficiencies, and with greater levels of management visibility and control the organisation can make a step-change in how it delivers the Government’s vision for Smart Motorways.