A new look Gatwick Airport station has opened to passengers. DSE’s Wilson Caro and Kate McPherson explain more about the company’s involvement
The journey from train to plane has been transformed at Gatwick Airport, with a new look station opening to passengers and giving those travelling between Brighton and London easier, faster, more reliable journeys.
A bigger, better and brighter station with a new second concourse and airport entrance has doubled the space for the millions of passengers that will use the station each year. Eight new escalators and five new lifts also provide a step change for accessibility.
Playing a vital role in its completion was Detailed Strategic Engineering (DSE), a specialist consultancy with the ability to provide team support to the project or imbedded consultant support across several positions from senior management in project recovery, engineering and quality support for key positions.
“DSE has had the opportunity to support the project since the early stages, prior to construction which allowed us to work with the project and the client to ensure all deliverables were understood and strategies for phased EIS, hand back and overall asset management plans were agreed by all key parties up front,” said Wilson Caro, Co-founder and Delivery Director.
“We are incredibly fortunate to have been a part of this fantastic project that has delivered such an enhanced passenger experience to such a key station. From the outset, this project’s aim was to improve the vertical transportation and the ‘train to plane’ passenger experience. We can see from the eight new escalators, five new lifts, platform widening and new station concourse, as well as the behind the scenes deliverables, that this project has well and truly delivered on this promise.”
What has been particularly pleasing for Wilson and the team has been the attention that has always been given to what defines project success and the prominence given to how to hand back/over to the maintainer and asset owners.
“DSE has led the engagement with the asset owners and stewards throughout the construction lifecycle, which has significantly de-risked the hand-back process,” he said. “With buy in from the principal contractor, Costain, and the Network Rail project team, we provided the asset owners and maintainers with discipline completion packs (DCP), which contained all relevant engineering and quality assurance to fully satisfy the asset owners. The packs were strategically mapped out according to disciplined and location and in accordance with the spatial breakdowns.”
DSE’s discipline assurance managers Nikesh Bhandari, Kate McPherson and Karo Agbure have carried out page turnovers of the assurance information, followed by site inspections of the given assurance area. By doing this throughout the duration of the project, the delivery team has built up the trust of the asset owners, as they know in detail what they are getting to enable the operational use and final asset acceptance.
“We are really proactive in demonstrating what is required, by whom and when it’s needed,” said Kate McPherson, Senior Assurance and Certification Manager at DSE. “For me, pulling together the specified deliverables from the Network Rail engineering standards into an interactive dashboard has really changed how the engineering and operational standards can be managed on a project.
“The dashboards we have put together have facilitated key T- meetings to demonstrate project status and readiness against the planned trajectory. From the information I gained from working with the delivery and quality teams, my updated trackers fed into our dashboards, so we could focus on the variance between the planned vs. actual documentation, with itemised issues highlighted. This allowed our weekly progress meetings with the client to focus on dealing with the issues or, where applicable, mitigations for the deliverable to be identified and agreed with relevant parties.”
By being able to drill through and identify all deliverables for the EIS checklist, Kate explains how DSE was able to rapidly identify all deliverables and share this information as evidence for the assessment body.
“This was extremely useful when differentiating between a required EIS deliverable and an asset hand back requirement, enabling the teams to focus on the priority deliverables,” she said. “By having that real time status on product/asset assurance, we were able to demonstrate to Network Rail we had the required assurance deliverables to enable Entry into Operational use, which was a massive achievement for the for the entire project.
“Additionally, leading the inspection process for the EIS and DCP handback areas provided DSE with a real sense of responsibility. Particularly for EIS, where we managed the full list of required deliverables ahead of the operational use date, ensuring the required certification was compiled to enable the assets being signed off by the Contractor’s Responsible Engineers (CREs) were fit to be taken into use.”
For DCP inspections, DSE built dashboards containing any snags identified by the Route Asset Managers (RAMs) during the inspection on a room by room basis.
Kate said: “All these were then listed against the corresponding AMP016 – Defects & Outstanding Works Identification certificate so the RAMs knew exactly which bits of outstanding works and assurance needed to be completed to allow for the sign off of the Taking Over certificate of that particular area/asset/system”.
“I liaised with the delivery and client team to close out the defects and updated the dashboard so I could present regular progress of closure to the RAM and provide confidence to obtain AMP016 closeout and sign off.”
Reflecting on the overall project, and Kate explains how DSE has been able to support a project that was open to exceeding the expected norm. This included DSE producing both a Health & Safety File Matrix and Master Index.
“The principal contractor and supply chain always set ambitious targets to deliver the works rapidly, with assurance following to suite, so it’s not often you have a project embrace the challenge of not only delivering an incredibly complex engineering scheme, but also providing all the required engineering and quality assurance to close out the project within the agreed timeframes,” she said.
“This has made our role much easier, as the behaviours on this project all support the challenge to deliver this commitment. We cannot hand back to the maintainers without the supply chain and the principal contractor building as per design and evidencing this progressively. By having this culture of build and progressively assure, we have been able to compile majority of the hand back documentation ahead of time and provide the placeholder links into the DCPs.
“Once we have approved CRE assurance files, we carry out a review with Network Rail’s Designated Project Engineer (DPE) and link the approved documents into the DCP. This has also enabled us to progressively compile every deliverable into the Health & Safety File throughout the project.
“In summary the determination of the delivery team and the supply chain has allowed us to prepare the ground work and document all the required certification ahead of programme, so when the product comes, it is immediately linked to the associated DCP and then to the H&S File. We have been able to focus on the Network Rail AMP certification process and deliver the required certificates when required, allowing the project to focus on the delivery and assurance validation. We are part of a collective that has made the this project a massive success.”
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Photo credit: DSE
