End-to-end: Why the destination for major projects must be full integration

Major projects are growing more complex. Yet our fragmented industry is ill-placed to overcome increasingly demanding, multifaceted projects. Instead, we need cross-functional, through-lifecycle expertise that encourages accountability across all partners, both horizontally and vertically. Across the world, our experience shows the groundbreaking results that integration can unlock. 

Climate change, digital innovation and urbanisation: each of these megatrends is accelerating. As their impact on society grows, so too does the pressure on infrastructure to help society meet the demands that these challenges pose. Taken in isolation, confronting any one of these trends would be daunting. Yet they’re unfolding simultaneously, influencing each other in myriad ways, and the resulting complexity can be debilitating. The rail sector is being tasked with rapid transformation, but the very nature of the problems confronting us appears to render rapid progress improbable.

Increasing complexity does more than just slow our sector’s progress. It manifests in conflicting priorities. The needs of passengers, for example, are not necessarily aligned with reducing carbon emissions. Budget constraints clash with maximising potential. Evaluating these competing priorities is critical, but in the rush to win funding and get projects started, they’re often left unaddressed. By bringing together the global rail industry, InnoTrans 2024 offers us a chance to assess these priorities and discuss how best to approach them. 

Globally, the specific conditions vary region by region. However, they tend to pose variations of the same challenges. In countries like the UK, where rail is mature, infrastructure desperately needs updating. In other countries, rail has a less established footprint with new infrastructure being conceived and delivered. Either way, the complexity is daunting. Existing assets are ageing,and are difficult to integrate with modern technology; but new assets are held to higher standards than ever, and must be connected to legacy systems. Either way, mixing new assets with the old risks a reliability gap, adding more pressure to our sector’s push for rapid change.

So far, so daunting. Unfortunately, these unprecedented challenges are unlikely to inspire sympathy and patience with rail. Neither does rail’s importance insulate it from waning interest. Political will and public faith is not a given. Rail infrastructure doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but among public priorities competing for increasingly-scarce funding. Geopolitical instability, increasing healthcare demand, and clean energy requirements are all urgent. Securing funding for railway projects is harder, especially if outcomes are deemed to be uncertain. And, as the majority of rail projects require some degree of subsidy, and are usually delivered in the full glare of the public eye with huge expectations, it’s vital to show that we can deliver solutions that positively impact society and add value from the earliest operation. To continue winning the investment race, we must prove that we’re worthy of it. The consequences of failure - disruption, disappointment, missed deadlines - are significant and long lasting. Less investability will hamper momentum, preventing our societies from developing the rapid, clean, and equitable transport systems we so desperately need.

Integration is both the goal and the path towards that goal. It’s the process that enables us to overcome complexity, and the outcome that we want our processes to achieve. By replacing linear legacy ways of working with holistic ones, integrated delivery reduces programme risk, expediting major projects towards their desired goals. And by enabling the incorporation of the diverse needs of different stakeholders early on, integration helps secure the diverse social benefits upon which major projects are judged. 

However, the principle of integration goes beyond delivering the explicit benefits stated in the use case. Integration should also enable major projects to connect seamlessly with existing solutions, so that they do not misalign. A major project could succeed on its own terms, but if it fails to fit with the existing built environment, it will generate further problems, potentially harming rail’s reputation among investors, passengers, and public. Instead, their scoe must reach beyond the project lifecycle, across existing and adjacent infrastructure, maximising the value of new and existing assets alike. 

Much of this is known. Yet even now, we tend to fragment construction and systems from operations and use. Those facets are not as connected as they should be, and as a result assets are not as connected, maintainable, and usable as purported in the business case. Often, this results in reduced performance. For example, design is frequently not focussed on optimising operations, which leads to lower availability, increased cost, or more burdensome maintenance obligations. Alternatively, if specifications are sub-optimised to solely emphasise easier maintenance and operations, the scheme potential is limited by embedding lower performance and higher CAPEX. Either way, outcomes are unnecessarily impeded. 

Integration helps us to avoid these issues by considering rail infrastructure as a whole. For example, fully automated rail systems have a highly efficient operational footprint. Yet reducing visible front-line staff has the potential that insufficient resources are available to resolve or respond to incidents and issues. Response times can be worse than legacy rail systems, as there can be too few staff in the right area to resolve challenges when they do arise. In turn, this lowers reliability, operability, and availability, in a system that promised to maximise all three. If a system’s recovery from perturbations is poor, its general reliability is quickly forgotten - timeliness is easily ignored, but people remember failures, especially when they’re disproportionately long. Finding balance between operating costs and resilience is key.

As complexity increases, so too must resilience. Resilience ensures that you can operate in a degraded mode in a smooth fashion, anticipating technical issues and their likely impact, so that the system is fixed and repaired automatically. Resilience should also go beyond technical assurance. Expectations of passengers around ticketing, access, timetabling, and wayfinding must be well thought through, so that they’re properly integrated with existing assets, so that faults and incidents are overcome with as little disruption to the whole as possible. 

It’s all connected

Finally, delivering better outcomes means improving our relationship with the wider world. Fragmentation is blamed for reducing collaboration within our sector, but what’s less understood is how it hampers our industry from more productive engagement with the wider world. Business cases must now do more to address the inherent uncertainty in demand. Reappraising the required services, and calibrating the value proposition according to differing scenarios, should influence the business plan so that rail’s affordability is assured. The pandemic’s suppression of commuter demand has been offset to a large extent by leisure travel, in the short term at least. In regions where freight forms the bulk of rail usage, the question is about how to create more viable passenger networks to satisfy this demand for clean, efficient affordable transportation alongside the existing assets.

Similarly, staffing and procurement plans should be cognisant of the broader economic context. We can see that stimulus in the US will draw more resource to North America, potentially impacting availability and price elsewhere. While this should eventually spur greater competition and innovation, it will ripple through the industry’s supply chain. Instead of planning in isolation, we must anticipate the effects and prepare accordingly, or else incur the delays and disappointments that shortages inevitably entail. 

It’s daunting, but rail is not being asked to solve the complex megatrends or global issues. Instead, we’re being challenged to consciously address them, by properly informing our projects so that they’re fit for a turbulent future. If we choose to reassess our workstreams rather than defend them, if we confront complexity rather than circumvent it, we can deliver resilient, reliable, and responsible rail systems that allow societies to connect, move, and accelerate.