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Network Meeting Turin 2016

Name: Network Meeting Turin 2016
Start: 2016-10-24T00:00:00+00:00
End: 2016-10-25T23:59:00+00:00

24 October 2016 @ 00:00 – 25 October 2016 @ 23:59

The next NETLIPSE Network Meeting will take place in Turin on the 24th and 25th of October 2016. We would like to thank the TELT (Tunnel Euralpin Lyon-Turin) organisation for hosting the meeting in Turin and we hope to meet you there!

> Please, scroll down for presentations and photos

Day 1: Who has the longest?

After a small delay because of a fire alarm, the Network Meeting in cloudy Turin was opened by Per-Olov Karlsson, NETLIPSE Chairman. During his opening speech Per-Olov expressed his special thanks to the Tunnel Euralpin Lyon Turin (TELT) organisation for hosting this meeting. Special attention was given to the Infrastructure Project Assessment Tool (IPAT) and Project Leader Seminars, which both will be discussed more in depth during the meeting. The number of participants (47) at this meeting is very good number especially as we are welcoming new delegates and new organisations to the network. All delegates represented 13 different European nationalities.

First speaker was Mario Virano, General Director of TELT, welcoming the delegates to their facilities and project location. Mr. Virano pointed out the special relationship between his project organisation and NETLIPSE, referring to the previous NWM that took place in Turin in 2008. Mr. Virano gave a brief overview of the project and underpinned the dissemination of project management knowledge along European client organisations. He ended his presentation by showing two videos which illustrated the long project history and current status.

Maurizio Bufalini, Deputy General Director of TELT, brought more insight into the specifics of the TELT project. He addressed the recurring theme of the morning that every tunnel project owner would like to present their tunnel as the longest in the world: in his case this is a 57 km railway tunnel with two small ‘open air’ sections. During the visit to the Chiomonte work site on Sunday the safety access part of the project in Maddalena was visited by a small group of NETLIPSE delegates. This tunnel section (including road access tunnels to the final tunnel) was very impressive to visit.

Interesting facts and figures about the Lyon-Turin project included the financing structure, with the European Union (partly) financing the project and the application of the Italian anti-mafia law in France, which is unique. According to Mr. Bufalini, this project is the first international project which is officially mafia free and will be delivered in 2029.

Raffaele Zurlo, CEO Brenner Base Tunnel SE, told us about the other longest tunnel through the Alps connecting Italy with the rest of Europe. His project will have huge impact on possible capacity for passengers and freight between Italy and Austria. Project complexity is found in the technical details and geological environment, resulting in that some of the sections need to be constructed by explosives because of the instability of the rock formation. The construction planning is to finish the project in 2026.

Wim Gideonse, Schiphol Airport Project Manager Asset Management, provided insight in the transition of the maintenance department of Schiphol Airport towards a more professional asset management organisation. In his approach projects need to be executed from a more strategic vision on assets. This places a lot of pressure on the available asset data. Wim took us along the four main challenges of asset management for projects at the Schiphol organisation: (1) ownership of data, (2) understanding each other, (3) commissioning and testing and (4) who is the project owner?

Karin Anderson, BIM-specialist at Trafikverket, explained the experiences during the BIM-implementation pilot in the Stockholm Bypass project. Challenges she faces are for example the absence of no industry standards for object classification for coding these kinds of models in infrastructure projects. There are a lot of developments within the field of work, but still there are more challenges ahead, such as educating senior staff how to work with this technology. Since this year all big projects (>€ 200 mio.) in Sweden are obligated to implement BIM, which will stimulate the use and benefits of BIM.

After lunch, Erik Lööv – Project Manager of the Hallandsås rail project – provided insight into his tunnel project, which is the longest (8.7 km) in Sweden. He shared his perspective on both the failures and successes of the project. In the project history, they faced a sociological disaster when the construction polluted surrounding wells as well as technical challenges such as 150 meters of water pressure and a geographical very complex situation. The way the project organisation was able to turn around this project after confronting many challenges is impressive.

In the discussion that followed the presentation, Bjørn Andersen (Professor at NTNU) stressed the importance of a network such a NETLIPSE with regard to the technical challenges, because some of the problems described by Erik were also faced in Norway in the nineties.

Seppo Toivonen is Procurement Development Manager of the E18 project in Finland: a 32 km long motorway next to the Russian border divided into 4 parts of which the last part will be opened at the beginning of 2018. This project is organised as a PPP-project, resulting in a rewarding financial benefit with respected to the initial cost estimates. Seppo described the procurement process in detail from the preparation and marketing phase till the financial closure.

Last topic on our programme for day 1 was a workshop about flexible project management in the planning phase by Afshin Jalali Sohi, PhD-student at the Delft University of Technology. During the NWM he is challenged to bridge the gap between research and practice in the field of project management. In the Q-sorting exercise he gave all delegates the assignment to prioritise their perspective on the factors that importantly affect the flexibility of project management. The results of this exercise are presented on the second day.

Day 2: Lean and flexible management

The second day started with a brief retrospect on the recently conducted IPAT assessment at the MX-ATP Railink project in Milan, Italy. Stuart Baker, Deputy Director National Rail Projects within the UK Department for Transport, gave a general introduction on the IPAT tool and process as well as the preliminary results of this specific assessment in Milan. Main message from his side is that the IPAT (and NETLIPSE in general) focusses very much on learning from experiences on how to manage our mega sized infrastructure projects, for which there is not a course available.

Up next was the special discussion on lean management in large infrastructure projects. This topic was introduced by Janne Posio, Development manager at the Finnish Transport Agency, and Willem de Graaf, Project Manager Rijkswaterstaat. They provided insight into the Dutch and Finish approaches towards lean management and the way that lean management has been introduced in the two organisations.

Janne elaborated on his three main conclusions to stimulate the benefits of lean management: focus on (1) integration in projects, (2) value producing interaction and (3) recognize various approaches for integration.

Willem explained the general principles of KR8 (translation = power, programme within Rijkswaterstaat to promote lean management) and the eight types of possible inefficiencies. In this KR8 programme, projects are evaluated by a Rapid Project Assessment (RPA) on 11 themes in order to distinguish the most important topic for improvement.

Main conclusion is that lean management is not rocket science and it is not new in many of the organisation. The focus of lean management is to organise this more structurally in order to improve our organisational processes.

Ľuboš Ďurič, Director of the Department of Road and Water infrastructure projects in Slovakia, and his colleague Zuzana Sebestova explained their experiences during the Gabčíkovo Locks project. Their biggest challenge is realising the project on time with respect to th EU grant conditions, as the public procurement of the works looks to take longer due to appeals from losing contractors resulting in a delay of the contract award. Something that the Department often faces.

Pau Lian Staal, NETLIPSE Programme Director, gave the latest information about the NETLIPSE network. Many new initiatives are in place at the moment and NETLIPSE receives more and more requests for collaboration and partnering from organisations around Europe. Thanks to the successes of the applied IPATs and the Project Leader Seminars the NETLIPSE’s activities are increasing.

Last, but not least, Afshin Jalali Sohi presented the results of the Q-sorting workshop on day 1. After a night of analysing the provided input, he came up with four main perspectives towards flexibility from the present group of delegates: flexibility by (1) who, (2) what, (3) when and (4) trust. Most important lesson made was the awareness of the different perspectives on flexibility in infrastructure projects and the possibility to react on this fact during your project in order to increase the project’s flexibility.

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We would like to thank the TELT organisation for all their support during this Network Meeting and all Turin participants for their active and interesting contributions to discussions. We hope to see you all at the next Network Meeting in The Netherlands on 8th/9th of May in 2017!

NETLIPSE Management Team

info@netlipse.eu