Accelerate Impact Through Innovation and Partnership
How might we accelerate impact by embedding innovation adoptionand strengthening partnerships?
The challenge:
Introducing innovation and new wyas of working across teams should be straightforward; however, in practice, adoption remains challenging.
The key challenge is to determine what targeted steps are required to deliver a step change in pace and ensure that new approaches are embedded effectively and sustainably across the organisation.
Decision-making across the portfolio is currently difficult to execute at pace, largely due to the scale and complexity of programmes, the number of stakeholders involved, and differing perspectives. This often makes it challenging to present information in a clear, concise way that supports rapid and effective decisions.
To embed innovation and new ways of working, we need to fundamentally simplify how options are developed, communicated, and reviewed. This includes adopting more consistent approaches to presenting information, improving how teams collaborate, and enabling clearer visibility of choices and trade-offs.
There is also a need to balance traditional capital-led decision-making with a broader whole-life perspective, ensuring that short-term affordability considerations are aligned with longer-term outcomes for NWG.
At present, information is fragmented across multiple sources and option sets can be complex. The opportunity is to introduce more integrated, technology-enabled approaches that bring information together, standardise outputs, and support faster, more confident decision-making across teams.
This sprint is not intended to be a theoretical discussion on established frameworks, nor a reflection of “textbook” approaches.
Instead, it is deliberately pragmatic and action-oriented, focused on embedding innovation and new ways of working to improve decision-making across the portfolio.
Recognising that decision-making is currently constrained by complexity, fragmented information, and multiple stakeholder perspectives, this sprint will focus on simplifying how options are developed, presented, and reviewed to enable faster, more effective outcomes.
The primary objective is to design, prototype, and establish a simple, intuitive methodology that supports clear, consistent, and efficient decision-making—enabling teams to move at pace while maintaining alignment and governance.
Through this sprint, we will:
- Map an end-to-end process flow that supports faster decision-making
- Review and rationalise existing artefacts to remove duplication and complexity
- Define the critical inputs required to support consistent and informed decisions
- Establish clarity on roles, responsibilities, and timing (Who / How / When / What)
- Explore if or how a digital solution could help
- Understand how it integrates with the design process and links with risk and value
- By the end of the sprint, we will have a tangible, solution that supports more integrated, transparent, and efficient decision-making—helping to embed new ways of working and drive a step change in delivery performance across the organisation
Participants will collaborate through a series of structured and interactive sessions to:
- Quickly align on the core requirements
- Review the existing artefacts
- Understand the existing problems
- Map out a new processs
- Prototype the solution
- Map out an implementation PLAN
- Bring it all together
By the end of the sprint, we aim to deliver:
- A Process Document
- A working prototype
- A plan ahead to implement
- Project management in asset investment delivery
- Sponsors & Operational colleagues
- Heads of Service
- PMO
- Engineering