I had the privilege and honour to be the CEO of as delivery was completed and we opened the . I’m only one of 75,000 people who, over 22 years, completed one of the greatest engineering achievements of our age. I’d like to acknowledge the incredible contribution of all the people who preceded my team and me.
Since the railway opened in May of this year it has truly delivered on its promise to change London for the better. Customers have been impressed by the comfort, reliability and speed of the railway. I am particularly pleased that we now have a fully accessible east-west rail corridor across our great city, adding 10% capacity in one go. We are also only a few short weeks away from the seamless “through running” of the railway, a landmark event that brings 1.5 million people within a commute of central London. A true game changer I am sure we would all agree.
I am now in the energy sector as CEO of SGN, one of the UK’s biggest gas distribution networks. Since I stepped down from Crossrail, I’ve thought a lot about the lessons I’ve learned as we got the railway open.
“Own the Whole”
Crossrail was never just a huge civil engineering project, it’s a large complex system made up of many interdependent constituent parts. To complete the railway, we needed to move beyond a conventional mindset of the individual parts working in collaboration with each other and more towards every leader and team owning the whole of the system. Genuinely standing in the shoes of others.
“Transparency is all”
In a programme as large and complex as Crossrail, I found it impossible for the whole truth to be known definitively at any point in time. By adopting a culture of ultra-transparency across the programme we revealed the gaps in integration and future icebergs that lay in wait for us, so that we could work on them together, in a spirit of active intervention.
“End dates can be deadly”
The single fixed end date of the planned commencement of the Elizabeth line was determined years before. In my belief, this distorted the reported realism of where the programme was at and forced the programme into exponentially escalating systems integration risk as activities become overlapping. Programmes of this size and uncertainty should always plan in windows, not a singular date.
“Be Inclusive”
To achieve transparency and “owning the whole” means creating a culture of kindness, the removal of fear and the acceptance that failure is an intrinsic part of ultimately winning. Also greatly assisted by a diverse as possible decision-making collective of all the talents.
Despite all the well-known Crossrail challenges and bumps in the road, it really is a once-in-a-generation success story over more than two decades.
A true engineering triumph delivered by 75,000 people.