Background
This was not only a significant milestone in the British rail industry, but a significant opportunity to transform technology, digital platforms and operational approaches in part of the mainline UK railway.
Achieving asset transfer from Network Rail by ourselves was a significant milestone and main foundation in realising the Welsh governments vision of a better, more integrated public transport system. Better public transport services will result in real benefits for people, including better access to employment opportunities and better integration of services, such as education and health, with the public transport system.
Amey Consulting's role
Leading the design and implementation of a multi-million-pound Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) on IBM’s Maximo platform into the newly formed organisation. This was delivered on time and budget. We successfully led the transformation programme in line with wider organisational changes to provide a platform for AKI users to manage the infrastructure safely and effectively.
The Challenges
The individual cultural challenges were addressed through our ability to develop relationships with stakeholders who were resistant to change. In these cases the selection of appropriate system champions sponsors became even more important. We identified who and what those individuals would respond most effectively to and adapted our approach accordingly. By identifying these individual cultural challenges and the appropriate sponsors enabled us to build relationships and slowly start to engage the individuals with the upcoming changes.
The Solution
To ensure successful implementation and maximum benefit of the new Maximo EAMS solution, our change management approach required individuals within the transforming organisation to:
- Understand the philosophy behind the change
- Agree with the opportunity the change presents
- Understand how the change will take place
- Develop the skills and behaviours required for the change
- Understand the effort required to sustain the change
Due to the nature of the asset transfer and significant organisation changes, we proactively identified champion end users that we were able to engage with prior to AKI taking on Infrastructure Management responsibilities. We identified sponsors, middle managers and front-line staff to support us in preparing and influencing the wider organisation. This people centred approach enabled us to deploy a change programme, with full engagement, that incorporated Iterative Design Validation, Iterative User Acceptance and System Integrator Testing, Functional Training Programmes. This took users through the journey, so they understood and bought into the change, how it would impact them and the benefits, whilst we focused on supporting them to develop the technical skills required to use the new system and ways of working.