PROJECT MANAGEMENT & BIM
About John Pelton
Pelton previously led the HS2 Efficiency Challenge Programme team, and prior to that led the CH2M HILL UK Government Infrastructure team, focusing on defence.
He spent the first 29 years of his career serving as a Royal Engineer officer in the British Army, with deployments to Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has been a strategic planner for the Army, both in planning operations and in the personnel area. He led a procurement team providing operational infrastructure to deployed troops before finally leading the development of an infrastruc- ture programme for the Army’s UK bases. He left the Army as a Colonel in May 2011 to join CH2M Hill.
Pelton is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a member of its Municipal Engineering Expert Panel. He co-authored the 2013 Transport State of the Nation Report.
Discussing the transition from military engineering to his current role in rail infrastructure, he told RTM: “A lot of what I did in my latter career was pure programme management, often overtly so, particularly in the procurement organisation as well as working on operations.
“There’s a very strong synergy and overlap between the military concept of campaign planning and the infrastructure programme management approach, which I only really appreciated when I was doing some work analysing how the Olympics had been done.
“It’s about the management of people, relationships, collaborative working – that’s key. When you look at a military operation, the complexities of which should be evident even if you don’t understand all the details, and then a major construction site – there are a lot of very similar behaviours and skills to manage. It hasn’t been that difficult a transition!”
At first the central people were needed to work on the legislative and compulsory purchase aspects, then design management, and then from that into construction, and in the coming couple of years the focus will start to shift from tunnelling and civils into railway systems and then operations.
“There are different skills needed at different stages, so the project has to migrate in
and part of the innovation programme is looking at how we can develop BIM so that the whole railway becomes condition managed. Several of the innovation ideas punt at remote condition monitoring of assets. There are two or three involving some form of fibre-optic strain measurement within tunnel linings for example. At the moment, they’re purely tailored to construction, but there are one or two ideas now about making those in-service life monitoring systems. That needs the BIM matrix to be able to report into.”
He said with digital technology, augmented reality becomes possible.
Innovation Programme
Crossrail’s Innovation Strategy was launched in October 2012, with extensive input from Dr Andrew Davies and Dr Samuel MacAulay at Imperial College London.
its organisational construct,” Pelton told us. “That’s a continuous process, and any project that doesn’t take that into account is going to run into a problem at some point. My perspective is that Crossrail has taken a very forward-leaning approach on this, and is trying to adapt. The programme partner approach allows it to do that more easily, as the partner can change the people it provides relatively easily.”
BIM and the ‘Digital Railway’
As explained in RTM’s June/July 2013 edition, Crossrail chief executive Andrew Wolstenholme’s vision is for it to be the “first digital railway”.
Pelton said: “It has a good chance of achieving that. It’s the first project designed and built in the current BIM climate. That makes a huge difference to the way construction has been done. The benefits of the experience we’ve had will mature on projects like HS2 (see page 88), which because of the timing of it, has a better chance of getting up to the Level 3 environment that we might aspire to.
“BIM is a key part of what Crossrail is doing, and the real challenge at the moment is to see how far Crossrail can take BIM in terms of value-added to the in-service management of the railway. The train contract is I believe the first to use condition managed maintenance,
Since developing the strategy, Crossrail and its tier 1 contractors have agreed to provide cash for an innovation fund – helping bring ideas from the front line to fruition and getting them implemented project-wide. After some relatively small ideas were submitted, analysed, approved and eventually funded during the middle of last year, there has since been a much bigger scale and “more significant” innovation investment cycle, Pelton said.
Discussing the programme, he told us: “It’s a unique opportunity. We’ve done some canvassing, and nobody else – with a project of this nature – has been so forward-thinking in terms of promoting and encouraging innovation. It’s almost a case study, and I hope a precedent.
“It’s come from the leadership of Andrew Wolstenholme, without any question. It’s come from his personal experience with Terminal 5, and his strong pedigree in construction. There may be an air of zeitgeist about this, but now Andrew’s leadership has pushed it to the forefront, hopefully there it will stay.”
He called the fund, with funds committed by the tier 1s and matched by Crossrail – “a moderate pot of money we’re able to use to bring innovation to life”.
“In the rail industry, you often hear ‘I’ve had a great idea’ – but if there’s no means for bringing that good idea to reality, of testing it, prototyping it, carrying out a study, then it withers and dies. The management gurus refer to the ‘valley of death’, when an idea happens but nothing happens next.
“So that funding provides some resources, and shows the commitment.”
Continued overleaf > rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 14 | 93
All images ©Crossrail Ltd
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