Improving Construction Delivery on Metrolinx’s ‘GO Expansion’ Programme

In this blog, we met up with Toronto-based Iain Thomas FCIOB, who is currently the Head of the Construction Management Office at Metrolinx, to find out how his firm (SYSTRA) is helping Metrolinx – southern Ontario’s publicly owned transit agency – to improve construction delivery on Canada’s largest programme of capital transport infrastructure works.

The key challenge for any contracting authority client on a large public infrastructure project is to address identified needs on time, to budget, and within an overall vision for improving the lives of local people.

This is no mean feat when projects cost billions and last decades. Operating under heavy public scrutiny, the client must somehow protect their business case from the ravages of uncertainty, complexity, volatility, and ambiguity. As CIOB’s Client Guide says, finding the optimal solution for the best outcomes is tough.

An increasingly common way to overcome some of this difficulty is for the client to employ a programme delivery partner. These consultants are an agile resource filling in the gaps between the desk-based client and site-based workers with talent from a global pool of resources.

Metrolinx

This is precisely what Metrolinx, a provincial Crown agency in charge of southern Ontario’s regional transit system, did back in 2021. In existence since 2006, Metrolinx became increasingly aware that there were opportunities to improve the programme management of their works packages. With over $70 billion (CAD) of projects in the pipeline and skills shortages in Canada, they began to recruit from wider afield attracting talent from all over the world, especially Europe.

Targeting better delivery

As part of that drive, Metrolinx tendered a contract in 2021 to provide ‘program delivery partner services’ for GO Expansion – Canada’s largest mass transit infrastructure programme. Expanding and upgrading the existing regional rail network around the western end of Lake Ontario (an area known as the GTHA or Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area), its purpose is to improve transit options for the rapidly growing local population.

The tender was won by a joint venture called MCS, a consortium comprising Mace, Comtech, and Iain Thomas’s mother company, SYSTRA.

Innovation is unevenly distributed

Thomas’ first impressions of working in Canada were an eye-opener. Metrolinx was in the process of moving from a project-based to a programme-based delivery model. Teams weren’t singing from the same hymn sheet. Worksites were at times resistant to technological solutions that would speed up completion. And leaders relied upon on static data to make active decisions.

It is easy to forget that best practice doesn’t magically get implemented everywhere at once. The nature of adopting innovations makes these kinds of gaps in practice inevitable. The good thing was that Metrolinx was determined to move to new practices to improve delivery and management.

Strategic interventions

MCS’s brief is twofold. First, they work to improve how Metrolinx functions as an organisation. This includes analysing their design and systems integration, community engagement, and how they deal with people and culture. Second, they target better on-site delivery by improving collaboration and coordination across different projects. As Thomas says, “Working with the existing Metrolinx teams and contractors, MCS is the glue to bring all these good functions and practices together into a clear cohesive approach.”

Procurement: visible pipelines

Clients like Metrolinx with a huge programme of work have an enlightened self-interest in helping their supply chains to plan their forward workload – especially when supply is constrained. By publishing their pipeline of upcoming tenders publicly online, Metrolinx does precisely that. Bidders can see the future plans as they develop, helping to de-risk their work-winning strategies, and Metrolinx avoids bids from suppliers whose resources are either already stretched or whose capabilities are less well suited to the job.

Procurement: collaborative behavioural assessments for alliancing contracts

The success of any procurement process is about getting the right people with the right skills on board at the right time – especially if, as Metrolinx is doing, you move from transactional procurement models to alliancing ones on major projects. It’s no longer just about relevant skills, knowledge and experience but also, crucially, behaviours.

To help, Metrolinx have adopted collaborative behavioural assessments as part of the procurement process. These consist of workshops facilitated by external consultants who present shortlisted bidding teams with relevant work problems and then observe how they interact. Their recommendations go to Metrolinx, who are then better informed when it comes to making their appointments.

Governance: control boards

When Thomas first started, he noted that some lines of communication and accountability between different project partners and back up the chain to the client were sometimes fragmented. As a result, on-site teams did not always have a clear understanding of their day-to-day priorities.

Metrolinx has since rolled out a simple system of weekly ‘control boards’ for every project to help their project managers to focus on their top three issues from the last meeting and identify priorities for the coming weeks.

To establish a clear governance pathway, these control boards were established at three levels beyond the on-site team, all the way up to the Deputy Chief Capital Officers. Thomas likens it to a processing plant: “Information goes into the hopper here, goes through the levels until it is signed off at an appropriate level there.”

Governance: dashboards from a single source of truth

Complete, up-to-date, and well-communicated information stored as a single source of truth is the lifeblood of good programme management. Metrolinx is now deploying a data capture and analysis platform – Power BI – to achieve that aim. Harvesting data from multiple sources and displaying them on dashboards, the platform replaces a static PDF report populated with data that could at times be a month out of date. Leaders at Metrolinx now have comprehensive, real-time information to make informed management decisions.

Quality: centralised technical expertise

Metrolinx has diagnosed quality logjams on projects due to a potential over-reliance on consultants for technical guidance. To solve the issue, Metrolinx has set up an in-house, centralised, technical management office (TMO) staffed by people with relevant qualifications. Similar to the construction management office that Thomas knew while working on the London Underground, and now leads for Metrolinx, TMO staff will go out to mentor, coach and advise contractors on site. As he says, rather than laying down the law, the idea is that TMO people will be a “friendly uncle putting an arm around the contractor’s shoulder to talk through better, smarter ways of working.”

Quality: offsite fabrication

Although off-site fabrication is now common in Europe, it is less so in Canada. Metrolinx is changing that, aligned with the engagement of proactive contractors. On GO Expansion, there have been significant successes at Eglinton GO station, where the contractor was able to fabricate two platform canopies in an adjacent car park during the dayshift – in other words, off the rail corridor. They were able then to lift them into their permanent position during a single nightshift, necessitating only one major track closure. The resultant speed, efficiency, and quality is an improvement that Thomas hopes can be replicated across Metrolinx’s wider GO Expansion programme.

Change management

The appointment of a delivery partner did not resolve issues overnight, of course.

The challenge of introducing change to teams that are contractually set in their ways was difficult, particularly since the majority of construction projects had already been procured. As Thomas explains, “Our appointment was like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. We’ve had to win hearts and minds to explain how we planned to add value while better aligning the delivery and handover assurance process.”

Thomas admits that they’ve made mistakes along the way: “Some of what we’ve done has been too quick, with some contractors and staff reporting that their heads are spinning with the quantum and pace of change.” Now with a Metrolinx change transition team embedded, the engagement results are improving. Metrolinx is evolving from a desktop organisation reliant on external parties, to an engaged, boots-on-the-ground, people-oriented organisation. The changes promise to reap long-term rewards for Metrolinx and their stakeholders as they continue to deliver upon this ambitious, transformational programme.