Senior management support was key to mastering the complexity of High Speed 1

The High Speed 1 is the United Kingdom’s first ever high-speed rail line linking London to the European network. Furthermore, it is the first new British railway in more than a century, and is the UK’s largest single construction project to date.

The programme had 80 work streams at its peak, but the real complexity came from the delicate balances of political, and corporate and environment; moving services across London; building and moving to a new depot; and, not least, a non-negotiable, very public end date.

Key to the successful outcome was visible and sustained senior management support.

In this case study, we talk to the then chief executive of Eurostar Richard Brown, to gain insights into what top management support is and how it contributed to the success of this complex programme.

Creating the environment for success

Brown not only championed the programme throughout, but he also insisted that project management at Eurostar was ‘professionalised’ before High Speed 1 commenced.

“We worked with CITI to review and strengthen our project management capability,” he said. “The impact of this work focused us on performance and delivery, and created a ‘profession’ within the project management community. This was invaluable in helping us open services on High Speed 1 from the new station at St Pancras International exactly on time and to a high standard.”

Appropriate authority was sensibly and confidently delegated to the programme director – reducing bureaucratic delays – and High Speed 1 was an agenda item at each main board meeting, giving it ‘visibility’ and underwriting its status as a critical strategic initiative.

As well as visibility, a design authority was established to ensure the ‘big picture’ perspective was taken into account when making project decisions.

The programme was structured to match business decision-making, ensuring decisions and changes were ‘owned’ by the business functions.

Managing key stakeholders

High Speed 1 was by no means the first of the major programmes involving Eurostar, but it was one of the most publicly visible.

Aside from Eurostar, three other major groups were involved: the promoters (London and Continental Railways), the operators and Union Railway, and the project designers.

“From previous experience, we knew how important it was to ensure that these groups worked together to achieve the joint outcome,” said Brown.

Three and a half years prior to the station move, a steering group – instigated by Brown – was established, consisting of the CEOs of each of the groups.

Everyone understood the need and logic of the steering group, and met every month to oversee plans and deal with issues. “It made sure that we were all singing from the same hymn sheet,” said Brown.

The commitment and seniority of this group sent a very clear message to the teams: “We are committed to working together so you need to find ways to solve the issues and conflicts that will naturally arise.”

In this sense, the presence of the steering group seemed to promote cross-group participation. “It seemed to prevent problems – not a vast amount was escalated; we anticipated problems and hunted them down before they could turn to issues,” said Brown.

Focus on the change programme

Up to the launch of High Speed 1, Eurostar services started from London Waterloo, but this was always only a temporary site.

The long-term aim was the implementation of a new international station at St Pancras, which would connect services from all parts of the UK, across London and into mainland Europe.

In the interim, staff had become accustomed to working at Waterloo, and the passenger service was established and well publicised. Now, Eurostar had the problem of selling the new vision to stakeholders who were established, familiar and comfortable with the current operating practices.

High Speed 1 was defined as three major work streams. “The move” work stream was all about the core deliverables – setting up the new passenger services. But, as Brown commented, “We were conscious that the impacts of the change, in particular staff having to work at different sites and passengers having to use different stations, was a major risk that had to be managed.”

The naming of the other two work streams: “Taking our people with us” and “Taking our passengers with us”, reflects the vision, right from the beginning, that this was not merely about a technical implementation, but a change in the practices of the major affected stakeholders – passengers and staff in the stations and on the platforms.

“Taking our passengers with us” focused on the risk from passengers, many from overseas, not being aware of the move and turning up at the wrong station.

Passengers who previously had easy access to Waterloo and a direct train would now have to cross London. The hurdle was set high – Eurostar did not want to want to lose a single customer.

“Taking our staff with us” was all about the retention of motivated, involved and committed staff. Like the story of the cleaner at Nasa, Eurostar needed every member of staff to understand and commit to the changes necessary, acting as the on-the-platform ambassadors interfacing with the customers from day one.

“They were all important, but in my mind ‘Taking our people with us’ was what really made the difference between a well-executed programme and the major successful programme High Speed 1 became,” said Brown.

“We knew there was a risk we may lose some of our staff who didn’t want to move – we needed our staff to be positive and on-the-ground champions of the new service.”

Eurostar was at risk of losing 100 staff as a result of the change in work location.

As it turned out, only four members of staff were lost – a stunning result of good change and stakeholder management.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

“Taking our people with us” was managed by the head of UK Sales and the head of Organisational Development, who worked half their time on the programme while maintaining operational responsibilities.

This was a complex change environment, and every communication mechanism was considered, and many utilised.

The basic communications strategy could be summed up as persistent and consistent – there can never be ‘too much’, but it must not be repetitive – techniques to make the communications ‘fun’, engaging different types of audience with different media and different approaches were used, systematically building up communications’ traffic to ensure peaks coincided with critical programme events.

A communication plan was defined and a very early activity was a series of one-day workshops. Ninety-six percent of staff attended these, which ran over a period of two and a half months. The content and format of these was debated and the key messages identified: “We knew what impacts we wanted to leave our audience with,” said Brown.

In the morning of the workshop, detailed briefings were given by project managers, and the groups looked at the risks and the upsides of the changes that were to be brought about by the programme. “We didn’t pretend that everything was perfect,” said Brown. “We knew there were dangers – we might well lose passengers from the South West.”

All the risks were shared and nothing censored. This did mean that sometimes the sessions were quite heated – in particular where union members were concerned about changes in working arrangements.

In the afternoon, a director would join the group to give Eurostar’s views and to answer questions.

For the first few sessions, Brown took this role and found it invaluable to get a feel first hand for the kinds of issues that his staff saw and what concerns they had.

The workshop was completed with a visit to St Pancras station – still in construction, but already it was an impressive and inspiring reminder of what the change programme would result in.

Communication was innovative, certainly for the time the programme was being run. Weekly newsletters went out to staff and, in the latter stages of the programme, the project director managed to keep up a daily blog!

Organisational adoption of project practices

The project office was key in co-ordinating the communications across the entire programme. It further acted as the centre for project expertise and support.

The entire company embraced project management: Even marketing and sales staff, who traditionally might have avoided and even undermined project activities, were committed to a project-oriented approach.

There was a shared project methodology and common language across the programme, implemented by professional project managers. Every project was managed by maintaining management and governance on the critical success factors or declared impacts or benefits each project had been created to deliver.

When incidents drove work ‘off plan’, management knew, and introduced control actions to bring the programme back to plan.

All the projects had proven links, and were demonstrably aligned to the programme’s benefits strategy – keeping the work focused on the ‘end game’.

In addition, rigorous portfolio prioritisation techniques were introduced very early in the programme to sequence the projects and achieve the desired benefits; and the programme structure was aligned with its governance – keeping the vision of success firmly in view throughout the programme.

Preparing for the launch

As Brown commented, “One of the most difficult decisions on a major programme is the ‘go no-go’ decision. I know from previous experience how hard it can be, particularly if you leave it too late in the programme. Do we launch the new service or not?”

In this programme, the go no-go decision was set early in May prior to the go live in November. Well before this time, a go no-go decision matrix was developed.

“Working with all the key stakeholders, we identified what absolutely had to be in place for me to take the decision to commit to the go-live date,” said Brown.

Interestingly, the go no-go matrix turned out to be a motivational planning device: it gave clarity and focus to the definition of the work that must be done in the latter stages of the project – an unintentional benefit of using the go no-go matrix approach.

The date was set for 14 November 2007.

In these programmes, being one day late signifies failure. There are so many stakeholders – the public, the media, the government – all observing from the sidelines.

Brown felt strongly that his team, rather like an Olympics team, had to be prepared and performing at peak performance.

Eurostar engaged a professional sports coaching organisation that uses Olympic sports coaches to develop and support management teams.

Like preparing for the Olympics, Eurostar focused on ensuring all its staff were performing at the top of their game for the launch of the new service.

Testing the launch – protective shelling

The programme team was able to appreciate the ‘customer value proposition’ from the paying customers’ viewpoint of the new journey experience by extensive testing. This led directly to the smooth service launch.

The importance of testing – whether people aspects, processes or information technology – should never be underestimated.

Testing to establish the operational and emotional impact of the changes on Eurostar’s staff was carried out by creating a model ‘office’ environment and running the new processes, until the impacts were understood and could be managed.

“We listed out everything that could go wrong; marketing called this ‘protective shelling’,” said Brown. “This meant we had management actions defined for everything, which not only prepared our staff, but gave them the confidence that on the day of the launch they could and would deal with any eventuality.”

Championing the programme

Brown was the champion of the programme. What did this mean in practice?

“In my communications, I really needed to keep a clear focus on the opportunities we were seizing, what we were doing and why it was important. The benefits planning was crucial to guide us through the programmes. We kept a clear focus throughout on what the benefits were [that] we wished to achieve,” he said.

“In this way, we were able to realign ourselves as the obstacles came up – as they do – looking for different ways to gain our end goals. At times, this would involve not just communicating the vision, but also cajoling the teams – giving them the conviction in what they were doing.

“In my role, I needed to not only to talk the part, but be there leading – I personally attended many of the meetings and briefings. This was undoubtedly one of the high points of my career,” Brown added.

High Speed 1, the largest programme Eurostar has ever run, was successfully launched on 14 November 2007, with no disruption to passengers and HS1 services running to schedule from St Pancras from day one.

In 2008, the Eurostar High Speed 1 programme was given the Programme of the Year Award by the Association of Project Management in the UK. (For more details on the awards, visit www.apm.org.uk/awards.asp or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .)

Thanks to the chairperson of Eurostar Richard Brown and CITI members who agreed to be interviewed for this article. 

Louise Worsley

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