London Underground (LU) was named the best Metro in the world in March 2011 by ‘The Metros’ Awards. London’s Tube beat Copenhagen, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Madrid and Singapore to win the trophy. This despite carrying out a huge investment programme while operating a railway.

The Tube is at the very heart of London. It carries over 1 billion customers a year, and up to 4 million a day. With this being the world’s oldest network, the only way to maintain service to meet present and increasing demand is to renew the infrastructure. At any one time, the Capital Programmes Directorate (CPD) of LU runs more than 300 projects on the network encompassing new trains, new or refurbished stations, new track, new signalling and associated assets. Annual spend is more than £1B a year. At the core of this renewal lies effective project management.

In December 2007, following the incorporation of Metronet into London Underground, the combined organization faced a myriad of project processes with significant amounts of local practice and, consequently, unsatisfactory project delivery performance. The CPD conducted an external assessment which found that projects were often late and had over-spent, there was inconsistency in the application of methodologies, lots of broken processes and conflicting information. 

Under the leadership of Doug Norman, Head of the Centre of Excellence, the CPD  made a commitment to take a long, hard look at what was going wrong and to improve the business systematically. To help, Doug chose OGC’s P3M3 Maturity Model because of its focus on industrial project management, its multi-dimensional view of a business and the model’s inherent ability to develop action plans for improvement. The fact that P3M3 was developed and used by the UK Government was an added factor.  The Maturity assessments were carried out by Outperform, an APMG Accredited Consulting Organization. The results of LU’s recent assessment – achieving Level 3 on the Project Management Maturity assessment - shows just how much the project delivery capability of LU has improved.

“Our first maturity assessment in 2007 showed we were below Level 1,” Doug says. “This demonstrated we didn’t understand our organization well enough and that there were systemic deficiencies which needed to be corrected. The assessment gave us the business case for driving change, we used it to put together an initial two-year development plan and we have used it ever since to help with our planning cycles.”

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