How the Skanska Costain STRABAG Joint Venture manages detailed design with Aphex

The project

The Skanska Costain STRABAG Joint Venture (SCS JV) is constructing 13 miles of twin-bore tunnels on the HS2 route to its southern terminus at Euston. In addition to the tunnels, the project scope includes numerous shafts, structures and large tunnel portals spread across 11 asset sites.

The Stage 5a Detailed Design phase of work involves breaking-down high-level design package envelope programmes to a level of detail that’s suitable for construction. This means developing an accurate, coordinated model that represents construction requirements and building components. The complex scope of work includes 14 design packages across the 11 assets developed and owned by teams of Project Managers, Package Managers, Design Managers and Planners across various teams and businesses both in-house and subcontracted.

A key element of the project’s Stage 5a strategy to ensure installation certainty is having a multi-interdisciplinary contractor approach to detailing design. A short-term planning approach that empowers the team to take ownership of their sections of the plan, share key updates and have full visibility of dependencies and targets is key to driving progress and understanding the impact of change on the project schedule.

"The need to manage M&E Stage 5 deliverables and progress is critical to any project and something notoriously difficult to do, Aphex helps us achieve this. Having data summarised to identify the key issues means that SCS could pinpoint what and where action was needed enabling SCS to be both effective and efficient.”
_{Joe Kemm, MEP Delivery Director}

Introducing a new way of working

Having experienced first-hand the benefits of implementing Aphex on a complex CrossRail station project, and with an enterprise partnership between Aphex and SCS JV in place, Anneel Majid, MEP Planning Manager, believed Aphex was a no-brainer for short-term planning.

“I decided to push for Aphex to be implemented in the detailed design stage to ensure everyone had visibility of the plan and progress - vital when delivering such complex work - and to connect such a large team," he says.

An important first step to introducing Aphex to the team was to define and communicate how Aphex would align to and improve the team’s way of working. This meant clearly outlining responsibilities of the team, and empowering the supply chain to take ownership of the plan.

As Anneel explains, “Aphex is written into MEP subcontracts as a requirement - for all MEP works to be captured in the plan from day-1 and for the supply chain to be involved in the short-term planning approach.”

Although Aphex is a contractual requirement, Aphex is positioned as a way to promote collaborative working and improve short-term planning, not as a contractual means of punishing the supply chain.

Amar Patel, MEP Lead Planner, took ownership of building and iterating a short-term planning process to control the cadence of planning and hold everyone accountable to expectations. This clearly defined responsibilities of the team and what their weekly planning routine entailed.

“Managing behaviour is key, working in Aphex is easy, but fostering a culture of transparency and getting everyone to buy-in to a consistent way of working and process is always a challenge with a big team.”
_{Amar Patel, MEP Lead Planner}

‍Collaborative working

Showing the team how Aphex would save everyone time, improve their way of working and outcomes for the project was critical to getting everyone onboard. With such a complex plan, the team spend a considerable amount of time recording and looking for information in the plan. Like on many other projects, a large amount of information and updates are shared during weekly collaborative planning meetings.

As Amar Patel says, “With Aphex, we replaced a 9-10 page long meeting minute document that would take hours to produce every week and wasn’t an efficient way for anyone to find the information they needed.”

The team use the Gantt’s Notes Column to record detailed weekly updates against Tasks in the plan, stored with every weekly publication and baseline along with a full history of changes against each Task. As the team all have access to the live connected plan, updates can be made when anyone is aware of change, not having to wait for a weekly meeting.

Matt Wilson, Planner at Fourways, explains that “The biggest benefit I’ve noticed is the level of interaction and visibility from the team - getting email notifications when a key task is updated, seeing change live in the plan and the impact on that when everything is linked, not waiting until a weekly meeting to understand it.”

Many of the supply chain members are also involved with delivering other projects and have vast experience doing so using a range of other methods and approaches. By clearly understanding benefits to project outcomes — especially when delivering such a complex project — and seeing improvements to their way of working, buy-in to a new, better approach came naturally.

“Many other projects plan with spreadsheets which means more flexibility to input information in different ways, but it also means working as a team can be more challenging, compromising the level of detail or structure of information. With Aphex you save time by not colouring bars or rebuilding a plan when something changes, and we can spend more time inputting more detailed records and updates.”
_{Yen Armstrong, Planner}

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Understanding key dependencies with Give-Gets

There are various critical dependencies — “Give-Gets” — between work package. This is information that needs to be shared from one team to another in order to complete the detailed design process. The team designing the lifts need to understand when and where power routes will be supplied into the shafts. The cladding team need an understanding of steelwork as this is what the building’s cladding is fixed to.

As Matt Wilson explains, “The biggest challenge with Give-Gets is identifying what the real impact of that dependency is and identifying the key Gives and Gets required to continue driving progress to the modelling process.”

Having a single short-term plan means having a single schedule of Give-Gets, so everyone has clear visibility of what needs to be shared with who and when, in order to drive progress. The team reviews these weekly and any change to historical baselines to understand impact and what’s most critical to driving progress.

Driving progress to milestones

In the detailed design phase Model Freeze Dates are a collection of key milestones built into the plan. These represent when teams designing elements of an area of a structure complete and lock-down their model before the assurance and certification of the design.

Each specialist team delivering their section of the overall design of an asset is working towards Model Freeze Dates that are part of an overall sequence in the schedule. The MEP and HVAC models need to be locked-down before the completion of Blockwork openings, these openings need to be locked-down before they can be plugged by Firestopping.

With Aphex, all Model Freeze Dates have been built into the short-term plan and linked giving the entire team visibility of the critical path and an easy way to understand the impact of any change so everyone can rally around a single set of target milestone dates and strive to achieve the earliest Certification Dates for each area of the scheme.

In fact, as Amar Patel says, “Aphex is now ahead of P6, it’s the source of truth. I can say confidently within a week’s forecast where we stand for a key target deliverable."

Rather than waiting for a 4-weekly update to the contractual programme, everyone is aware of change on a weekly basis and key milestone updates are shared across the team and to senior management every week.

“Without Aphex you have 12 accurate reporting instances every year, and opportunities to identify potential delay and impact on timelines. Now with Aphex we have 52. The feedback loop of detailed updates has been improved exponentially.”
_{Amar Patel, MEP Lead Planner}