Infrastructure projects are becoming bigger and more complex, making delivering projects on time, within budget, and to specification increasingly challenging.
Leading design, engineering and consultancy company Arcadis is offering a smart solution for government clients, project managers, transportation contractors and partners with Assured and Data-Led (ADL) delivery.
ADL is a proven framework that Arcadis has successfully used on major projects in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
It connects data from multiple sources, providing an integrated approach to project delivery and allowing users to make real-time, data-led and assured decisions across the total project lifecycle.
“By connecting data, streamlining workflows and mitigating risks, ADL is transforming the world of project delivery and helping our customers stay on time, on budget and working seamlessly with each other,” said Craig Dunningham, Digital Engineering Lead – Rail at Arcadis.
Meeting the challenges of project delivery
Dunningham said that major rail projects often come with onerous system engineering and safety assurance requirements.
“A metropolitan rail project could have more than 100,000 requirements, and in some cases, these requirements aren’t straightforward,” he explained.
He said the complexity of managing project requirements can create manifold problems for everyone, from design teams to the contractor and the client.
“Vague requirements can create a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty, ultimately resulting in variations, and it strains relationships,” he said.
“It’s a factor in why a lot of projects have cost and time blowouts, because their requirements are not entirely understood from the beginning.”
Adding to the confusion is the fact that these requirements are usually managed via spreadsheets – adding yet another layer of complexity.
“On a recent project, we had three high-level bodies of requirements – business, operation/maintenance and technical,” Dunningham continued.
“Say you’ve met a system requirement specification, and you need to trace it back to one of those three high-level requirements, to show how it relates to it.”
He said that for an average major metro project, this would take months, because it’s all done with spreadsheets – and even then, you can’t really show the traceability.
“You can only describe it to somebody and tell them how they could go through the spreadsheet and trace back up to where that requirement was being met,” he added.
ADL offers a smarter solution, with dashboards that can immediately display traceability.
Dunningham has recently worked on a landmark rail project in Australia which has benefited from this capability.
“This project operated under a highly compressed program and required adoption of international standards to develop a technical requirement, because it was the first of its kind in Australia, so we had no standards to design it against,” he said.
“We also had to integrate business case requirements and the concept of operation requirements. Leveraging Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and a geographically distributed team, we were able to develop the system requirement specification in a matter of months, with end-to-end traceability.”
At a later stage, when there was a change to the concept of operation, Arcadis was able to update the system requirement specification in just a few weeks.
“Again, if spreadsheets had been used, this would have taken months,” Dunningham added.
Lower risk, greater value
ADL helps clients avoid scope creep and proactively manage change.
By clarifying requirements early and aligning project inputs with deliverables, it streamlines delivery and reduces unnecessary rework – delivering cost savings of up to 30 per cent.
Dunningham shared an example of a project that initially had a “vague and ambiguous” scope.
“In some cases, scope documents for a project could be a copy-and-paste from one project to another,” he said. “Sometimes it’s clear that project requirements have been adopted from elsewhere, without a real understanding of what the requirement is trying to solve.
“Requirements provided by the client are often vague and that is by design. Different delivery partners interpret requirements differently, depending on where you sit within the asset phase. The MBSE process helps make requirements more explicit, ensuring the client and the project are getting what they want or what is needed.”
By applying an ADL workflow, Arcadis was able to guide the client and project team to re-evaluate their requirements.
“Instead of just diving in and starting the detailed design, we were able to clarify requirements upfront with the client, asking explicit questions to help them figure out exactly what was needed,“ he said.
“That way we were able to manage their expectations better and avoid unnecessary rework. This resulted in significant cost savings and a much better outcome for the client.”
Seamless collaboration and smarter decisions
With all project requirements, inputs and outputs organised in a connected digital model, thanks to ADL, all decision makers have quick and easy access to structured, accurate and up-to-date information.
Dashboards and reporting tools allow project managers and stakeholders to quickly see the status of deliverables, identify gaps, and understand the impacts of changes.
Arcadis is close to incorporating Artificial Intelligence (AI), which will enable the data to be queried directly, instantly giving answers to questions such as whether specific deliverables are on track or if additional work is being done outside the original scope of a project.
“Because the design data is structured, the information in these models is assured information – we’re only getting the AI to connect the dots within these assured databases,” Dunningham said.
“As an example, a project manager could ask ‘Can you check our common data environment to see if these 10 deliverables are actually being delivered, or are we delivering more? If we are delivering more, then why?’”
Dunningham added that Arcadis does this already with ADL.
“We statically connect dashboards, it’s not a huge leap to connect AI,” he said. “The AI could tell you that the reason there are 10 additional deliverables is because the client has asked for them, highlighting that these deliverables were not in the baseline scope.
“If you have that information upfront, you can go to the client and have that conversation early.
“We tend to do it retrospectively, when it’s a much harder conversation.”
By aligning all project stakeholders around a single source of truth, ADL improves stakeholder alignment, reduces friction from siloed data, and enhances communication across the project lifecycle.
Stakeholders can more easily work together to make proactive rather than reactive decisions that are based on data instead of guesswork – again, helping to avoid costly overruns or delays.
Another powerful way ADL streamlines communication is by extracting all project requirements from documents and allocating them directly to the relevant system and in turn the discipline leads.
“Instead of each team member having to read through hundreds of pages to figure out what applies to them, the ADL system organises and presents only the requirements relevant to each person,” said Dunningham.
“This means that when someone new joins the team, they immediately see exactly what is expected of their role, without ambiguity.
“And if there is a change to a project requirement, they can identify it immediately because the requirements are organised by the system architecture, ensuring the discipline lead and the client are on the same page.”
From project managers to transport contractors to government departments, embracing ADL means not just keeping pace with change, but leading it – ensuring that the infrastructure of tomorrow is delivered smarter, faster, and with greater confidence
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