The Euston Partnership: Transforming a complex…

London’s Euston Station is the site of one of the UK’s largest infrastructure schemes, made up of four major projects: the new high-speed rail (HS2) terminal, the redevelopment of the existing railway station, a major upgrade to the tube station, and a new 60-acre development of homes, offices, shops, and open public space.

Delivery of these projects also requires changes to existing infrastructure – such as the bus station and taxi rank – all of which needs to come together to provide a seamless experience for customers as well as work for local communities.

The prize is huge – a transformed experience for more than 50 million rail, bus, and underground passengers a year, and an estimated £41 billion boost to the British economy by 2053. But so is the complexity.

The Euston Partnership, responsible for helping to integrate activity across the site, sought a new model for collaboration among the partners involved. Drawing on our experience in developing collaborative operating models and working in complex, multi-stakeholder major infrastructure delivery, we designed a new model to align the four major projects across the Euston campus and achieve a more integrated delivery approach.

Pulling in different directions

Each of the projects is run by a different organisation, and was set up separately, with their own remits, objectives, success measures, budgets, and ways of working. The Department for Transport (DfT) created The Euston Partnership (TEP) to improve the coordination between the projects and help find ways to constructively manage the challenges that arise in such a complex infrastructure delivery environment, such as aligning objectives across projects and understanding competing demands for finite amounts of space and funding. These challenges were a known driver of costly project delays and stakeholder and public frustration.

When the previous Government decided to pause HS2 development in 2023 and develop an alternative long-term delivery approach, TEP saw the opportunity to rethink how to bring the projects closer together.

To help us make faster progress, we needed a way to better integrate the projects, so they had more of a shared outlook and joined-up approach. We turned to PA because they knew the Euston campus well and had expertise in transport and delivering large-scale infrastructure programmes, as well as designing operating models to help organisations work better.”

John Reed Managing Director, The Euston Partnership

Our team saw the challenges of alignment across projects first hand and how the opportunity of improved integration could benefit the programme, from greater clarity over strategic outcomes through to more productive working-level interactions between the projects. Viraf Avari, PA Operating Model expert explained, “Individuals were willing to work collaboratively but it was easier for individual projects to focus on their own targets and timelines, rather than considering the more difficult and wider programme impacts.” Tom Becker, PA’s Project Lead elaborated, “We recognised that we needed to make it easier for project teams to work through integration issues, for example how altering the number of rail platforms would impact the value of retail space, or how changes to the concourse might impact operational elements across the site, such as the location of the bus station.”

Creating common ground

A new way of working was needed at the project that was integrated at programme level to produce gains right away, while recognising the need to remain aligned with DfT’s longer-term plans to change the programme’s delivery approach.

Within this remit, our team worked with DfT, TEP and other partners to find ways to:

Encourage stakeholders responsible for different parts of a project to work together early on, before integration issues arose through providing clarity on their respective roles and responsibilities.
Feed the existing decision-making machinery with ‘pre-integrated’ recommendations, supported by a streamlined end-to-end process.
Improve the supply of quality analysis and evidence to inform recommendations, designing the required future portfolio level capabilities.

Adopting a collaborative approach with the organisations involved, we drew on examples of industry best practice and Project 13 principles to create a new multi-organisation operating model focused on improving collaboration. The model includes a forum allowing all stakeholders to come together and agree recommendations for senior decision-makers. Becker explained, “In parallel, we worked with TEP to identify development of the partnership’s capabilities to feed this forum with improved evidence and analysis. So as the organisation matured, its recommendations would be well researched and credible.”

We also set up the team for this project to include stakeholders likely to eventually be on the forum and clarified the process either side to allow for greater coordination, alignment, and insight-driven decision making. This created continuity between designing the new forum and implementing it, and meant it could quickly become effective. At the same time, we made sure the DfT, as programme sponsor, supported the idea fully and ensured the new interim operating model would not disrupt their longer-term plans.

Seeing value quickly

The new ways of working and forum were established within five months and quickly improved information sharing across the partner organisations and led to new coordinated working, including a workstream to develop the spatial layout across the entire 60-acre site.

This was a thorny problem because there’s not enough space or funding for each partner to have everything. Compromises are critical to our shared success. The beauty of PA’s approach was that they facilitated all the stakeholders through the process, getting everyone’s views, setting out the options, and explaining pros and cons. So, rather than imposing a solution, they helped all parties arrive at it together, which meant they felt more ownership of the result, and could go straight into getting value from it.”

John Reed Managing Director, The Euston Partnership

The new ways of working have already had successes, including the creation of initial options for the layout of the elements of each project at the Euston site. Viraf Avari, PA’s Operating Model expert, said: “Previously, individual projects would have to work hard to understand what other partners were planning. So, this is a big step forward in bringing them together. The new ways of working have helped integration at all levels, with the partners recognising their own project will only succeed if the others do too.”