London Crossrail strategic risk analysis

Crossrail is Europe’s largest civil engineering programme. It involves tunneling a new east-west railway line below London, plus excavation and fit-out of new stations while minimising disruption to complex existing street-level and subterranean urban systems serving a resident population of 8.7 million people.

Our team ran a major strategic analysis of programme objectives, benefits, and risks, focusing on specific contested spaces in the central section between Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road where a highly complex interplay of new and existing technologies and built infrastructure required an innovative cross-disciplinary management approach.

Working outwards from the engineering programme, we designed a framework to map the impacts of each work package against other stakeholder policies, identifying conflicts and developing proposals for mitigation or programme redesign. This enabled all Crossrail ground works and streetworks to complete on time, while preserving the wider functional ecosystem of the city and minimising disruption.