Completing Crossrail – after that encouraging and optimistic title,  once again the NAO goes all “glass half empty”. Actual trains may be very infrequent so far, but to be fair we’ve been treated to some really cool videos of tunnelling machines.

Crossrail started in the 1970s and the 21st century iteration is now unstoppable, because large tunnels have been dug underneath London and no-one knows what else to do with them. Opportunities for repurposing as some sort of vegetable stockpiling facility or ferry terminal seem to have gone away, temporarily at least. Perhaps there’s scope to convert them to luxury bunkers ahead of the apocalypse. 

The Crossrail programme was ‘absolutely dominated’ by completion in December 2018 and everything was focused on that completion date, apart from adopting a programme management approach which could actually deliver it. When this milestone was (inevitably) missed, it was all too unbearable and the team are now refusing to admit when a full service will run. None of the Underground lines currently in operation is named after a living monarch, and Crossrail seem determined to uphold this tradition.

The NAO make some radical suggestions in ‘Completing Crossrail’: unrealistic and arbitrary milestones can be counterproductive and actually end up causing delay ; an ‘aspirational plan’ has limitations in terms of actually helping to achieve any useful results; and the critical path should take account of interdependencies across the whole programme. Fortunately, this seems to be a unique set of circumstances and similar issues are unlikely to occur elsewhere.

On the plus side, everyone admitted from the start that this project would be complex and challenging and it’s only 19% over budget (so far). Key lessons about risk have also been learned – commiting to an actual delivery date means people inevitably start banging on about slippage, so the current open-ended approach seems more prudent.