Design in a Year – Accelerating Capital Design
How might we design a capital delivery process that is genuinely collaborative, fast enough to meet our ambitions, and robust enough to work on real schemes - right now?
The time taken to get from an approved outline business case through to construction is too long. Concept and definition stages - the design-intensive phases between Gateway 1 and Gateway 4 - are where projects slow down and where the LWE has the greatest opportunity to improve.
The process exists. The gateways exist. But the way we move through them - the behaviours, the handoffs, the decisions - is often transactional rather than collaborative. This sprint asks a bigger question: not just how do we map a better process, but how do we actually use it, in real time, on real schemes, and make it work?
We are going to do something no design sprint has done before at this festival.
We will not just design a new process on a whiteboard. We will design it and then immediately test it against two real phosphorus removal schemes. one grey and one green. Taking both from concept through to Gateway 4 over the course of the week.
The tent will run three parallel workstreams. The first is the process table, which will write the new end-to-end process in real time, segment by segment. The second and third are the two scheme tables, which will run their real schemes through each process segment as it is written - testing whether it holds up in practice, not just in theory. A fourth commercial thread will run throughout, ensuring every contractual and governance requirement is met.
When a process step does not work for a real scheme, we redesign it on the spot. By Thursday, we will have a process that has been written, tested, challenged and refined against two live projects. That is a year’s worth of work in a week.
Each day of the sprint represents a season in the year.
Monday is January - new year, new start, new process, new schemes. By Thursday evening it is Christmas: the gift we are giving NWL and the LWE is two schemes ready for contract award and a new collaborative process to get future schemes there faster.
- We will run structured sprint sessions each morning and afternoon, with table leads guiding their workstreams and the whole tent connecting at key moments. Midweek, we will bring in external governance experts to challenge our concept solutions - a real-world stress test before we press on into definition. On Thursday morning, senior stakeholders will walk the tent and see the work before we present on Friday.
- Throughout the week, we will hear from external voices and guest speakers who are already solving the problem of getting to site faster. Their provocations feed directly into our work.
By the end of the sprint, we will have delivered:
- A new end-to-end process document, from Gateway 1 to Gateway 4, that the Living Water Enterprise can put into practice immediately
- The grey P scheme taken from concept to Gateway 4 - a real scheme, with a real solution, ready for contract award
- The green P scheme taken from concept to Gateway 4 - demonstrating that the same process works for a constructed wetland solution
- Project management in asset investment delivery
- LWE Partners
- Sponsors & Operational colleagues
- Heads of Service
- PMO
- Engineering