2.22 Throughout the programme, Crossrail Ltd's emphasis in reports on progress presented to the Crossrail Ltd board and sponsors was on what had been achieved and how much of the programme had been completed, rather than on the level of risk to successful delivery that remained in the programme. That said, our analysis of the condition of the programme between 2015 and 2018 is based on information contained in those reports.
2.23 By 2015, delays to the contracts and changes to the design had led to cost increases and the renegotiation of contracts onto new terms. At this time, Crossrail Ltd also produced a plan and programme schedule to reset the programme baseline when productivity and progress on the key contracts had fallen behind plan, and on which to base its management of the programme.
2.24 The 'Master Operational Handover Schedule' (the handover schedule) set out the milestones that individual contractors needed to achieve if Crossrail Ltd were to achieve its main target of opening the central section in December 2018. However, the handover schedule was a set of more or less separate plans for each of the main elements of the programme. It was not a detailed, bottom-up plan that reflected the work remaining, set out the logical and most efficient sequencing of all remaining activities across individual contracts, and highlighted dependencies between projects and contracts, and delivery risks across the entire programme.
2.25 Crossrail Ltd updated the handover schedule in 2016, 2017 and 2018. In these updates, it established a new baseline with more challenging milestones to meet the December 2018 opening date for the central section. The case examples in Appendix Three show how the progress against the handover schedule on critical contracts diverged from plan soon after each iteration of the handover schedule. Crossrail Ltd's assumptions about the level of progress that was achievable bore little resemblance to the historic progress that contractors had made.
2.26 Crossrail Ltd was clear that the handover schedule was intended to be used to manage contractors and increase the speed of delivery on a programme that had fallen behind plan. It also presented it as the critical path. At the February 2018 Sponsor Board, the then programme director at Crossrail Ltd told sponsors that the handover schedule "…has always been ambitious and intended to drive behaviour" and that "if all the Tier 1 contractors' programmes were simply added together the programme would end in 2020".
2.27 Applying pressure on contractors to improve performance to meet deadlines is useful and understandable. However, the absence of an integrated, realistic plan to sit alongside the ambitious handover schedule meant that Crossrail Ltd had a critical gap in the information available to manage risks to complete the programme efficiently and effectively. It meant Crossrail Ltd did not have an effective tool to enable it to, for example:
• fulfil its role as the integrator of the various elements of the programme;
• establish the most cost-effective way to deliver the programme; and
• make key decisions such as when it should aim to open the railway.