Scottish Water overhauls project management for SR21

Scottish Water says it has overhauled its project management arrangements in preparation for the next regulatory cycle beginning in 2021 with the switch to a cloud-based software programme.

The publicly-owned company, which supplies water to the whole of Scotland, said it has adopted a more flexible, modular project management system that can be continuously updated to meet emerging requirements.

The construction and engineering platforms – Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM, Primavera Unifier and Primavera Analytics – were rolled out by Scottish Water between 2017 and 2019 and the company is now decommissioning its previous systems following a successful transfer. At the same time, the company also overhauled how tasks were completed for each type of project to bring uniformity across the business.

The company has around 2,500 ongoing projects and around the same number of sub-projects that can all now be managed from one centralised system.

Brian Maxwell, general manager portfolio management at Scottish Water, said it is replacing multiple offline systems used by more than 900 staff as well as its delivery partners.

“It is a dynamic system that can change and grow. Our previous system being static gave us a problem and was very expensive to go in to make changes and went out of date very quickly,” he explained.

Maxwell said the system can be continually adapted and improved to meet new requirements, something that will be essential for the delivery of its business plan for SR21 – the next Strategic Review period covering the years 2021-27.

“Our new investment programme and the way we look at delivering the capital programme will change so we needed something flexible enough to allow for that,” he told Utility Week.

Commercial management was the first line of work to be transferred in 2017, but most staff began using the system from the main go-live date in October 2019.

Maxwell said the transition to an online platform meant its 900 users were already trained and ready to work remotely when the coronavirus lockdown took effect: “Timing is everything. We were fully operational and everyone could work from home with the cloud-based system. There was no impact on our ability to manage and report on the capital programme.”

He said the integration of a number of previously separate systems is a real step forward in terms of how the business is managed and feeds into its longer-term digital strategy of ensuring they are all able to communicate: “The intent is as we move towards these cloud-based systems they can all share information to save us keeping information in different places. We aren’t there yet but we’re on the journey.”