CLIENT'S OBJECTIVES:

TransGrid appointed ConnellGriffin in 2020 to undertake a forensic review of its delivery practices and performance across five completed renewable energy (wind and solar) connection projects in NSW and Victoria within its non-regulated, Business Growth division.

The aim of this review was to:

support and help inform TransGrid’s assessment of its performance as a key player within the competitive market for contestable transmission connection services,
identify and address reoccurring areas causing issues within the delivery portfolio, and
improve the certainty of scope, cost and time parameters that projects are delivered within.

OUR ROLE:

Reporting to the Project Controls Lead, ConnellGriffin’s Project Controls Manager was involved in the development of the Stage 1 final business case for State Government endorsement and in the procurement of the main contracts. In this role, our Project Controls Manager was responsible for schedule, cost, risk management, and project reporting.

ConnellGriffin undertook a forensic review across each project, involving significant information gathering (documented and interview sourced) and analysis. Our services were delivered across the following work streams:

Scope Analysis: review of key documents and identification of scope changes on each project throughout the project lifecycle.
Cost Analysis: identification of the initial budget for the works, assessment of its completeness and identification and quantification of key cost movements and their associated issues throughout the project lifecycle.
Schedule Analysis: identification of base line programs (both Customer and Sub-contractor) and comparison against the as-built program for the project.
Contract Analysis: analysis of the contractual entitlement for changes to scope, cost and schedule of both the Customer and Sub-contractor contracts, and the identification of common contractual and commercial issues.
Summary of Findings: reported on the key findings about scope, cost, schedule and contractual issues for each of the five projects. Recurring issues were identified at a portfolio level and were further investigated to develop targeted recommendations.
Recommendations: a series of recommendations were developed at both a project and portfolio level. These were further split into phases of implementation to help TransGrid to easily identify the areas of priority and realistic timeframes that they could be achieved in.

KEY OUTCOMES:

Our detailed report delivered the following key recommendations and outcomes to TransGrid:

Taking TransGrid’s performance at a business unit level into consideration, our key recommendations covered program management, governance practices and how accountabilities were distributed within the Business Growth division.
Provided a high-level summary scorecard with supplementary key findings and associated recommendations made across the core disciplines of scope, cost, schedule and contract management, which identified issues and trends across all five projects.
Delivered an in depth forensic report for each project, including a score card and detailed analysis, findings and recommendations made across the core disciplines.
Provided an implementation plan that showed how our recommendations could be grouped into 'quick wins', 'challenging' and 'complex' categories with associated timeframes to implement each.

CG Team Members Involved: