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The lessons to learn from Crossrail’s delay

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  1. Alternatively you could wonder why electrical subcontracts were let to people who were not competent for domestic works.

    I laughter when I heard one team of electricians had been given a parcel of works as my experience was none of them could read a simple circuit diagram. They couldn’t wire a central heating timer clock right: really. Yes really for them that was “specialist” work.

    This just the skills shortage rearing it’s head again.

    Yes, you can rapidly teach people to do repetitive tasks but where you have to understand and apply rules and logic then the issue is baked in and inevitable,

  2. There seems a lot of blame pointing toward procurement. Although we know there are ongoing issues with this subject nationally, there were all of the other things being rolled out as providing solutions, being cost effective and leading the way for the future. These include BIM, VR, AR and drone surveys.
    I am a strong supporter of these new ways. In fact I actively promote them, as they provide greater levels of information, but something beyond laying the blame at the doorstep of procurement went wrong with this project. Something that, so far, has led to a 10 month delay.
    It appears that procurement and a shortage of electricians is the lazy excuse for failure. This is London, if you can’t find any particular form of service here then maybe you should attempt nothing more challenging than feeding the pigeons!!!
    We need to find all of the reasons for failure, not so that we can join in with any blame culture, but so we can review the whole process and learn how to be better, more effective and generally less disappointing.
    My rant is at an end.

  3. I tend to agree with the above comments by I.Jones. Though I would go further on the BIM specifically. Yes BIM can be a good process for providing greater levels of information but inputting and managing that information can be a real distraction and time-consuming activity that detracts from time spent on actual design work. In the early days of BIM it was a process that enhanced the design capability without consuming important design time. It is now far more complex than it needs to be.

  4. The August 2018 announcement of a delay to completion should have come as a surprise to nobody involved in Crossrail – I worked on a project which submitted a programme in December 2016 forecasting a “works” completion date of January 2019, followed by the 8-month commissioning programme. The surprise is why hasn’t the press picked up this story? Oh yes, everyone had to wait for an official “press release” as nobody employs investigative journalists anymore.
    By the way, right now it looks like the December ’16 programme submitted by the contractor (and rejected by Crossrail) was spot-on.

  5. Amongst all the nonsense being spoken on this, the comments by Ann Bentley shine out like a beacon of light. The overriding reason that it is taken longer than the original estimate is simply that the original estimate (carried out about 20 years ago while the design was still conceptual) understated the difficulties
    The time and cost estimate submitted at the time was more motivated to get the job started than give realistic figures.
    It was exactly the same with the JLE and the CTRL I worked on these projects and knew at the start that it was impossible to complete these works in the time originally stated.
    Readers may recall that the original estimate for the Channel Tunnel was £4.6 billion while the outcome was £9.2 billion – exactly twice!

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