This one's for the 'lone nuts' - revisiting AI-led forecasting and risk management on the Transpennine Route Upgrade: Part II

A few months ago now, nPlan hosted a webinar spotlighting the £10.7 billion Transpennine Route Upgrade (TRU) - one of the most ambitious rail upgrade programmes undertaken in the UK in recent decades. Our generous guests for the webinar were Richard Palczynski and Mike Ellis, Chief of Staff and PMO Head of Risk at TRU respectively. 

The webinar was one of the most successful we’ve ever run, with nearly 200 project professionals joining the live stream, and many more catching up via our on-demand service in the weeks after the recording was made. Furthermore, feedback on the conversation from the project controls community was almost universally positive. 

In part I of this two-part blog miniseries, I began a review of the highlights from that webinar, covering TRU's approach to delivering value, the schedule-driven nature of the works, and the delivery team's use of AI-SRA (AI-led schedule risk analysis) to assure and de-risk the programme. As I explained in my original post, whereas a traditional QSRA for a large programme can take up to 6 months to complete, inevitably ends up focusing more on quantifying than mitigating risk, and is hopelessly hamstrung by human biases, AI-SRA uses AI and a large dataset of past projects to perform quantification in minutes, neutralising the influence of bias and enabling the project team to focus on proactive risk mitigation. 

In this post I'm going to pick up my review of the highlights from the webinar where I left off--on the subject of AI-SRA--but in the context of an important feature of all large rail upgrade programmes: track possessions.

Contractualising the use of AI-SRA for assuring track possessions

Webinar host (and nPlan CEO) Dev Amratia asked Richard and Mike how they prepared for crucial track possessions given the penalties for failing to start and/or finish these potentially disruptive track takeovers on time. Here's what they said:

So we now say to our supply chain, you shall provide an nPlan generated AI-SRA that assesses the confidence of you starting any major blockage on time. And you know that that’s a new requirement that has never been stipulated before on a railway programme, as far as I’m aware.

A game-changing project controls AI agent

Richard and Mike also had kind words to say about Barry, nPlan’s project controls AI agent. Barry is capable of querying schedules and risk registers, summarising the outputs of analysis, creating graphs, producing reports, drafting emails and much more besides. Here’s what Richard and Mike had to say about him: 

The ability to write in plain English into a computer and ask for it to do something and for it to instantly generate something back - that to me was next level. Because you've got the very technical outputs from the solution but ultimately what you're really trying to do is communicate messages back to other people who are not as technical as the people who did the analysis. You're trying to provide a tool for people to use who are not necessarily risk specialists or schedule specialists.

Cultural challenges and the need for a lone nut

Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing; as Richard reminds us in this final clip - there are cultural challenges which must be overcome when you’re trying to get project delivery organisations to adopt AI solutions. And to overcome those challenges, you might just have to take on the role of ‘lone nut’:

It doesn’t matter where you might be, you’re going to run into this cultural challenge of people not really understanding or wanting to support something because they don’t intrinsically understand how it works.

Now go and watch the whole thing

Richard and Mike talking about what they’d like nPlan to build next, a discussion of the business case for TRU, how Richard’s experiences on Crossrail influenced his decision to make the case for nPlan - there were so many great moments in the webinar I don’t have room to clip here. As I said earlier, I urge you to go and catch up on them for yourself by watching the full webinar start to finish right here.  

Oh, and watch this space for my recap of our December event with Anglian Water’s Euan Black - another conversation, like this one, which was stuffed with memorable moments. 

Until next time 👋