Description
Amey commenced delivery of Plymouth City Council’s highways contract in December 2008 and provide a full range of highways design, maintenance and management activities.
Previously undertaken by the council’s Transport, Engineering and Infrastructure team, the contract is the result of a council wide transformation and restructuring project with the Amey partnership model of delivery.
We manage and maintain over 900 kilometres of roads, 180 structures and several thousand street lights, providing emergency response, winter maintenance and street lighting, plus a full network management service.
In year one the contract adopted an eight stage process for transformational change and successfully delivered a £2.2m innovative city centre “shared space” regeneration scheme.
Efficiency & Innovation
Amey developed a transformational programme to assist in the management of culture change and to move the contract forward. The diagram below provides a summary of the journey we wanted the partnership to take.
During mobilisation, a Transformation Programme was created that encompassed all business work streams, focused on bringing together staff who constitute the partnership and cemented relationships with other service delivery partners supply chain partners other services and staff within the wider OCC organisation.
Our transformation programme for achieving full service integration has eight stages.
Stage 1: Establishing a sense of urgency
This stage involves gaining buy-in from all parties involved in transformation, and identifying potential pitfalls.
Stage 2: Creating the guiding coalition for the alliance
The transformation programme is driven and overseen by the operations board. The overall progress and impact of the programme is monitored by the Strategic Partnership Board.
Stage 3: Developing a vision and strategy
The Strategic Partnership Board has articulated its vision for the new, integrated service.
Stage 4: Communicating the change vision
Communicating both the ultimate goal and the direction of travel
Stage 5: Empowering broad-based actions
It was essential that we removed as many potential barriers to success as possible, so that those who are passionate to make the vision a reality can do so.
Stage 6: Generating short-term wins and efficiencies
Staff and stakeholders want to see tangible benefits and outcomes from the change process. Celebrating the achievement of quick wins and early milestones have helped build momentum during the first year of the contract.
Stage 7: Consolidating gains and producing more changes
Changes to policies and practices are certified through the performance manager, who carries out audits to highlight areas that may require further focus.
Stage 8: Anchoring new approaches in the future.
We will monitor the ongoing effectiveness and success of new approaches to allow us to refine them.
Outcome
The development and monitoring of a transformation programme has enabled Amey to capture and plan activities that help the contract move forward in line with our continuous improvement processes.
A structured staged approach has enabled the senior management team to focus on core activities and prioritise their workload. A key example of this was the introduction of mobilisation working groups which purposely continued for two to three months post mobilisation to build on the existing momentum and to ensure that the key business functions had the relevant support.