Loving every drop of AI powered project intelligence - a revealing conversation with Anglian Water: part I

The end of last year was a busy one for nPlan customer marketing with senior representatives of both Transpennine Route Upgrade and Anglian Water making the trip to the nPlan ‘studio’ to talk to us about their projects, their travails, and their experiences with AI. 

I recently wrote a pair of blog posts reflecting on our conversation with Richard Palczynski and Mike Ellis of TRU, and I’ve since turned my attention to reviewing the webinar we hosted shortly afterwards, featuring Euan Black, Head of Delivery Portfolio Management at Anglian Water. 

As those in the UK water sector will know, our conversation with Euan took place at a particularly critical time for the industry - when water companies including Anglian Water were deep in their preparations for their next five-year investment cycle (AMP8, commencing April 2025). Crucially, industry regulator Ofwat has responded to public calls to tackle storm overflows by recommending a record £96 billion allocation of public money to sixteen water companies for AMP8 - a significant increase on AMP7’s £51bn outlay (source: New Civil Engineer). This increase–and the pressure on water companies to ramp up expenditure without ramping up waste–hovered in the background of much of Euan’s Q&A with nPlan CEO, Dev Amratia, as will be seen in the remainder of this post.

Once again, I’ve curated a selection of clips from the discussion and shared these highlights along with some commentary of my own. Let’s dive in 👇

“Our customers are driving us to spend the pound better” 

The unprecedented investment committed for the AMP8 investment cycle, and the difficulty of ramping up spend in an efficient manner were brought to the fore in Euan’s response to an early question from Dev regarding the reasons behind Anglian Water’s decision to investigate the potential of AI-led assurance and risk management:

We can’t do the same as we’ve been going. The biggest increase in our portfolio of work is in that million-pound-plus bucket - and that causes challenges. I can’t triple my resources in controls and portfolio managers and the PMO resources here, but we’ve got to use technology, we’ve got to use better ways of thinking, because our customers are driving us to use the pound better.

As we shall see in later clips, Anglian Water has discovered a number of areas–dimensions even–in which AI enables them to run processes and deliver projects more efficiently.

Spinning raw data into time and money 

On the surface, Dev’s next question to Euan was something of a re-run: ‘what problems did you hope nPlan would help you solve’. But Euan’s response was–in a low-key way–a real eye-opener. Have a watch and then I’ll break it down:

At first Euan just reiterates what he said previously: Anglian Water has to answer to the water regulator, and Ofwat will be watching to ensure that their investment is spent ‘wisely’. BUT, he then goes on to give a surprising list of additional ways in which AI-led assurance and risk management is transforming Anglian Water’s approach to delivering AMP8:

• Creating and defending a credible delivery plan for the investment cycle - “the question we got asked in much more detail this time was…how are you going to deliver it…who is doing it and what is the plan?”
• Identifying issues at a project level and tackling them before they delay construction (“Trying to find the insights before the problems occur”)
• Data-driven prioritisation of project and portfolio management work (“Directing ourselves into the best value place”)
• Data-driven investigation of potential issues (“How do we ask the right questions at the right time? How do we ask procurement to go and think of a different way of working from the data we’ve already got?”)
• Accurate long-term forecasting (“we can report what it is today, but how do I know what’s going to happen in three or four years time?”)

And then, towards the end of the clip, Euan says something else - something which–in our experience–is relevant to nearly every project owner and contractor worldwide: 

We are a business with so much data, probably more data than we know what to do with, and finding a way forward to best utilise that data, is a real challenge. And if we don’t bring things and technologies such as nPlan in, we’ve just got all this data, all this rich information, but we’ve got no way of using it.

In other words, nPlan is enabling Anglian Water to unlock the value inherent in the project data it’s accumulated over the years, and turn it into - time (which in the context of major projects is, of course, money). Without nPlan, the majority of this data would just be sitting in a metaphorical filing cabinet, gathering (equally metaphorical) dust.

Going back to the future with the help of past project data

In the next clip I’ve selected, Dev and Euan stay on the subject of Anglian Water’s first-party project data. How was it being used in the pre-AI era? Take a look:

“We’ve got all this data and we can make funky graphs with it. And we can make it colourful. And we can make it user friendly…but what that actually is is what we’ve done; it’s already happened, it’s in the past.”

In Euan’s world backwards-looking data is nice to have - but, to use his phrase, “doesn’t have that richness of information that we actually need to change our decision-making processes.” On the other hand, AI is enabling Anglian Water to look into the future of its projects and portfolios - and thereby make smarter decisions which, simply put, is huge. 

Finding the landmines in a P6 file of 10,000 lines used to take two weeks, now it takes seconds

The final clip I’ve selected brings us round, full circle, to the subject of efficiency - specifically how AI has improved the efficiency of the Anglian Water PMO team’s processes. Take a look:

“My portfolio managers…the ones that are really challenging our contracting organisations to go quicker, faster, better. They've got numerous projects, so if I had to say to them, go through a list of 50 projects and go and find where we might be late in a P6 file of 10,000 lines, they would be there in two weeks. But that information is critical for us as a business to know where we're going to be late. It now happens overnight, within seconds, through the nPlan platform.”

A two-week saving - just on a single task type. Again: that’s huge. And as Euan says, the time the team gets back–time that used to be spent on analysing data to find problems–can now be spent on solving those problems.

And critically, Euan doesn’t see technology (read: AI) as a means of replacing people, but a way to enable them to use their time more productively.

“I don’t see technology replacing people, I see technology in better using people’s time”

Until next time

Honestly, this webinar contained so many fantastic real-world examples of how AI is helping Anglian Water prepare to smash its goals for AMP8, that it was always going to require more than one post to cover everything. Come back to our blog soon for part II, where we’ll be hearing about the value of curiosity, where Euan got pushback from within Anglian Water and how he addressed it, and much, much more… 👋

‍