Suburban Rail Loop Program

Project Overview

Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) is the largest transport Program to be constructed in Victoria. It comprises a 90km underground rail line connecting Melbourne’s middle suburbs along with associated precinct development and urban renewal works. The rail loop will circle Melbourne, connecting together major railways lines, education and health precincts, employment and activity centres and Melbourne Airport. The Program will be constructed in stages over multiple decades, including:

• Cheltenham to Box Hill (South-East) (Stage 1)
• Box Hill to Melbourne Airport (North-East) (Future Stage/s)
• Melbourne Airport to Sunshine (North-West, Airport Rail Link)
• Sunshine to Werribee (South-West) (Future Stage/s)

TBH’s Role

TBH provided planning, scheduling, and reporting services covering the pre-contract works including environmental and funding approval, land acquisition and procurement of contractors. Schedules for these workstreams were integrated into a master program and used to manage the entire SRL pre-contract scope.

TBH collaborated with the SRLA to develop a reference construction program which was utilised during the optioneering phase to assess the feasibility of various program options. TBH was engaged by SRLA to work collaboratively with their project team to develop and implement the risk management function.

TBH tailored a risk management plan to suit SRLA’s needs which established the risk management governance structure, processes, reporting procedures and guidelines. This included:

• Hosting risk identification workshops and collating the results in risk register
• Implementing a hierarchical reporting structure enabled program and portfolio views
• Preparation and piloting organisational change, processes, associated tools and training material
• Undertaking a Schedule Risk Assessment. TBH developed a schedule risk model based on SRLA’s summarised master program and impacted the model with risks identified from workshops.
• TBH performed Monte Carlo analysis of the impacted risk model and collaborated with SRLA to run several iterations to establish the sensitivity of the program to specific risks.
• TBH presented the results to executive level and based on its thorough schedule risk analysis, advised the SRLA regarding the allocation of contingency across the SRL program.

The TBH Difference

SRLA clearly understood the program’s critical path and key assumptions based on TBH’s clear and concise communication of the program. Based on TBH’s detailed scenario analysis and recommendations the SRLA was able to adapt its delivery strategy to optimise the program.

TBH deployed a targeted risk management plan that was aimed at ensuring repeatability and transparency across the SRL program. This framework encouraged proactive risk management and consolidated several data sources into a streamlined reporting dashboard. This facilitated better decision making through providing visibility to accurate risk data in a user-friendly format. TBH plans to expand this in future to include real-time data as the overall maturity of the control processes increases.

TBH’s Schedule Risk Analysis highlighted the sensitivity of the program to a small number of high-impact risks. TBH proposed mitigations to executive level and validated contingencies used in the master schedule for the Final Business Case.

To find out more about TBH’s Risk Management and Planning & Scheduling experience, please visit the Risk Management or Planning & Scheduling page.