The facts
Client: Warrington
Borough Council
Location: Cheshire
Services: Development of a
baseline programme for the management of the Omega
scheme
Sector: Mixed Use
Project Value: £1bn+
Start/Completion: 2007 - ongoing
The Project
Omega - being delivered by the Homes
and Communities Agency (formerly English Partnerships), Miller
Developments and Royal Bank of Scotland - is a 226 hectare
mixed-use development proposal that will provide offices,
production, technology and distribution space along with some
ancillary uses such as live/work units, leisure/retail facilities
and hotel/conference facilities.
The northern section of the tract is
designated for industrial and distribution projects with target
sectors including pharmaceuticals, telecom, IT, automotives and
biotechnology. Omega will be one of the largest business parks
in Europe and will be built over 25 years.
The whole site will provide 7.1m sqft of
offices, manufacturing and distribution space along ancillary
leisure / retail facilities, hotel and conference facilities.
Around 24,000 jobs are likely to be created over the lifetime of
the scheme. The first two phases include industrial and
distribution space to the north of the site and office
accommodation to the south. The south site will also feature
complimentary uses and a hotel.
During the plan period they will reclaim 35 ha
of brownfield land and create 30,000 sqm of employment floor space
which should result in 400 additional jobs and lever in £30m of
private sector investment.
Using our Programme Management expertise we
developed a tool to enable the Borough Council to manage the
complex S106 agreement for the Omega Business Park on the former
USAAF base at Burtonwood. This is based on a series of triggers and
calculates the value of the S106 payment to be made at the time the
trigger is activated.
There were a number of components
to Capita Symonds' role:
- Testing and validating for optimism
bias the programme put forward by Miller Developments/RBS to ensure
that it is realistic and gives an accurate basis on which to
plan
- Producing for the Borough Council a
baseline programme against which activities can be monitored and
managed. Whilst this needs to be shared with and agreed by
Miller/RBS this has to be the Borough Council's programme to be
used for audit purposes. This will entail reviewing the Planning
Consent, the agreed S106 document and the draft S278 agreement.
This will include: Setting up exception reporting protocols in line
with PRINCE2 to show deviations from predicted performance, the
consequences of the deviations and proposals for remedial action as
required. This will cover project milestones, outputs/outcomes and
cash flow
- Deriving from this programme three
levels of management document: Strategic – high level programme
showing when key decisions are needed, high level cash flow and Key
Performance Indicators, for quarterly review; Tactical – a
management plan showing accountabilities and dependencies suitable
for monthly programme management, a major role for this document
will be early warning of deviation for programme; Operational – at
the level of work packages suitable for weekly review
- Preparation of a job description for a
programme auditor whose role it will be to ensure that the master
programme is maintained, any deviations or variations noted and the
consequences managed