Recovery & acceleration on a live major programme

A major programme operating against a fixed delivery milestone approximately twelve months away was experiencing increasing schedule pressure. The project already possessed experienced planning and project controls capability. Expertise was not the issue.

The challenge was rapidly interrogating the scale and complexity of the live programme to identify where intervention could deliver the greatest benefit while there was still time to act.

Combining established project controls with advanced technology, we interrogated the live programme and identified programme logic weaknesses across critical and near-critical paths; emerging schedule vulnerability requiring immediate escalation; sequences capable of supporting increased shift patterns; areas where path crashing was achievable; and activities offering the greatest opportunity for schedule recovery.

Rather than producing another retrospective report explaining why slippage had occurred, the team focused on what could still be done to recover the position.

Our practitioners tested the credibility of every finding against the project context before anything was progressed. Targeted recovery and acceleration measures were developed with the project team, assessed against baseline, commercial position and risk, then taken through established project governance and implemented.

• Over a six-month period, Herne mitigated in excess of 12 months of cumulative programme slippage and avoided more than £14 million of cumulative delay-related costs through the implementation of targeted recovery and acceleration measures
• Advanced analysis surfaced the opportunity
• Experienced practitioners tested and validated it
• The project team implemented it and the programme recovered