A joint Department for Transport and Transport for London review into sponsorship arrangements for Crossrail highlights nine lessons learned from the project’s delivery and governance.
The nine lessons learned include ensuring sponsors check and ensure project delivery board expertise is effective and that senior management experience and organisational capabilities match the evolving nature of a project’s work. Sponsors should design external scrutiny and assurance to avoid group think and ensure their own role is clear, with sponsorship functions properly resources. At the start of a project, the sponsor’s own role should be clear with pre-planned capability review points. The sponsor should also configure governance, levers and incentives to encourage ‘solution integration’, and that having created a delivery model it should formally review and adapt it at pre-agreed intervals. The final three lessons learned are that sponsors should ‘own’ outcome-based requirements, maintain sight of and manage material scope, schedule and cost trade-offs arising through design and construction…
