DataVisibility Ltd

West Midlands LTP Case Study

Background

The seven West Midlands Highway Authorities and the Passenger Transport Executive, Centro, implemented the Imprest system providing management the West Midlands Local Transport Plan.

The scope of this implementation was to provide project and portfolio management for each Authority’s contribution to the West Midlands Local Transport Plan, and an integrated central reporting structure to enable greater transparency for strategic management at a West Midlands level of the entire portfolio. There are approximately 1200 schemes within the portfolio that are presently being managed by the Imprest system.

The project required the Imprest system to be implemented within each of the seven Authorities, and Centro, as well as providing a reporting structure to consolidate information into a central system. The central system is managed by the Chief Engineers and Planning Officers Group (CEPOG) for greater co-ordination of the West Midlands Local Transport Plan and reporting to the Department for Transport (DfT).

Challenges

A solution was required that could solve a number of the issues associated with management of the Local Transport Plan (LTP) for multi-party working and for each Authority individually. The key challenges that Imprest addressed included:

• Difficulty reconciling scheme expenditure and aggregating information from disparate sources.
• Late visibility of schemes that were likely to be over- or under-spent or slipping against delivery targets.
• Difficulty tracking performance of scheme outputs and outcomes and monitoring them against targets.
• Difficulty in making informed decisions because information is not contemporaneous.
• Poor visibility of projects across programmes and the portfolio.
• Excessive administrative time spent preparing management information.

Outcomes

The solution was to implement the Imprest system using a framework of consulting services for configuration. Imprest was already proven in project and portfolio management and had the technical architecture, configurability and breadth of features to meet the challenges ahead.

We have worked with the West Midlands to achieve the following outcomes:

• Improve the timeliness and integrity of strategic reporting across the West Midlands which was three months out of date before Imprest was implemented. Strategic reporting is an aggregation of cost, schedule and risk information from the seven Authorities and CENTRO. With Imprest implemented the reporting is now accurate to within one week.
• Transparent view of approximately 1200 schemes across the West Midlands LTP portfolio.
• Provide a single system for managing and reporting project and programme information in order that portfolio reporting against a common standard was possible.
• As a result of putting in place information standards and using a common reporting format the integrity of the data being reported has improved.

Additional Information

Within the West Midlands there were seven financial systems which required an interface. To achieve this we worked with each Authority to define the scope of the interface and then agreed and produced a functional specification and timescale for development. In most cases this included a summary level interface which imported the actual amount of spend per month for each project, into the corresponding Imprest project cashflow. The import was designed to be run as frequently as required. The data was then consolidated up across projects, programmes and the entire portfolio

020 7917 9570
sales@datavisibility.co.uk