The Highways Agency

What the Client Said

Good at managing projects and working to tight timescales. Oakland demonstrated good skills in developing the teams ideas into a workable solution .” .”
Sam Chapman, Highways Agency

Background

The Highways Agency, established in 1994, is an executive agency of the Department for Transport in the UK. It has a budget of £4.5bn and employs over 3,200 people. It is based in London with offices in eight locations across the country, seven Regional Control Centres and 31 outstations.

Assignment

In 2001, Oakland won a Framework Agreement to provide support to the Highways Agency Business Improvement Team (BIT) to deliver its programme of Continuous Improvement. This was part of a long-term programme to improve efficiency and maximise the return on investment of taxpayers’ money.

The work with the Business Improvement Team was an ‘enabling’ assignment to equip the them to operate as an effective internal business improvement consultancy within the Highways Agency. This required Oakland to:

• Provide the Business Improvement Team with a consulting process and supporting systems, procedures and processes
• • Identify the consulting skills & competencies required by the business improvement consultants
• Assess each consultant in the Business Improvement Team against the competency framework and identify the training required to fill competency gaps
• Carry out the training required to fill the gaps in the competency framework
• Tailor business improvement tools and techniques for use within the Agency using the tried and tested Oakland Consulting TQM tools and techniques as a basis
• Support the Business Improvement Team in the delivery of the Business Improvement programme where required

Approach

During Phase 1 of the programme, joint teams of Oakland and Highways Agency Business Improvement consultants conducted a comprehensive baseline of the existing working practices and improvement activities across the Agency. During this process Oakland consultants acted as coaches, mentors & trainers to up-skill the Business Improvement Team with the appropriate business baselining tools and techniques such as:

• Business excellence self-assessment to enable the identification of gaps in organisational performance when compared against world class organisations.
• Strategy deployment to enable the alignment of Corporate and Directorate strategies as well as ensuring the appropriate performance measures were in place at all levels to deliver the Highways Agency strategy.
• Process benchmarking to enable the Highways Agency to identify gaps in key business process performance and to select a suitable benchmarking partner to identify best practice and introduce best practice into Highways Agency processes.
• Process analysis using the DRIVER process improvement methodology to enable process teams to systematically identify and implement opportunities for process improvement. A toolkit of support tools and techniques such as Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Assumption Busting, Activity Base Costing, Lean and Six Sigma were also developed.
• Development of a web based toolkit of process analysis and BPR tools and techniques with hints and tips for using each technique. This enabled all Highways Agency staff to take part in process analysis and BPR projects with minimum training and consultancy support.
• Business Management System development to enable the Highways Agency to underpin changes to working practices to ensure consistent ways of working throughout the Highways Agency.

These tools and techniques enabled joint Highways Agency / Oakland Consulting project teams to carry out organisational reviews in every Directorate of the Highways Agency which included:

• Project Services
• Procurement and Supply Chain Management
• Information Technology ( IT)
• Highways Maintenance
• Highways Construction (new roads)
• Financial Services
• Highways Planning including land acquisitions
• Facilities Management
• The CEO’s Office and Corporate Services
• The Information Directorate
• Human Resources
• Traffic Operations
• AICD – Internal Audit and Consultancy
• Health and Safety
• Environmental and Sustainability group

Furthermore Oakland has an extensive knowledge of the Highways Agency supply chain organisations, and provides lead assessors for the Capability Assessment Toolkit (CAT) Assessment Framework. All assessors have undergone Highways Agency training to deliver CAT 3 Assessments on the Highways Agency supply chain organisations. Oakland continues to work closely with the Highways Agency at both tactical and strategic levels and is currently providing Quality Assurance and Technical Assurance support for supply chain contract compliance audits.

Oakland is also developing an Integrated Audit and Assurance Framework for identifying and addressing tactical and strategic business risks in the Network Design and Development Directorate

Achievements

Since 2001 we have supported the successful delivery of over 170 projects throughout the Highways Agency. We have a reputation for introducing concepts and working with Highways Agency staff at all levels to shape the concepts into deliverable projects taking into account the Highways Agency’ culture and its ways of working. This approach has produced many achievements for the Highways Agency such as:

• The strategy alignment and deployment methodology has enabled the Highways Agency to react rapidly to changes in Government Directives and Government initiatives by providing a framework for ensuring the operational changes required at Directorate level are identified and implemented, thus ensuring alignment of Corporate and Directorate strategy at all times.
• Self-assessment methodologies and support of the delivery of self-assessment projects throughout the Highways Agency to provide a business baseline for prioritising business improvement activities.
• The introduction of benchmarking and process improvement techniques and supporting the delivery of benchmarking projects to introduce best practice into the Highways Agency’ processes.
• The design and development of a set of lean experiential training modules tailored to deliver efficiencies required from the Highways Agency processes using language and case studies appropriate to the Highways Agency and other public sector bodies. These techniques identified levels of waste in a procurement process that if removed would reduce the road scheme procurement time by 70%.
• A web based toolkit developed for Highways Agency staff to perform process analysis and BPR has been used to investigate the Highways Agency invoicing payment process in the finance Directorate and has reduced the cost of operating the invoice payment process by 50%