The Four Windows: Turning Opportunity into Innovation in Megaprojects

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Construction   Governance   Innovation   Strategy  

On April 27, 1649, on the order of Oliver Cromwell--Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland--a soldier in Cromwell’s New Model Army was executed in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London for inciting armed insurrection in what is now known as the Bishopsgate mutiny.

Not as famous as the bones of Richard III (recovered from a parking lot in Leicester, England), digging for Robert Lockyer’s counter-revolutionary remains by archaeologists at the site of a municipal graveyard (near London’s Liverpool Street railway station) is not the kind of digging one usually associates with a megaproject. But the opportunity to do so was made possible by the UK’s largest infrastructure project--the £14.8 billion ($23.13bn) Crossrail.

Apart from the size of their budgets and the reach of their ambition, one defining characteristic of megaprojects is their desire to create enduring legacies. The Bedlam big dig at Liverpool Street is just one aspect of the legacy that Crossrail is creating. Another that it hopes will have an even greater impact is in the field of innovation.

An Opportune Moment
Many challenges and problems encountered by megaprojects occur across the diverse and inter-locking supply chains on which the outcome of the project depends. From the outset, Crossrail recognized the inherent risk this …

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