Outcomes
- £7.5m in total expenditure savings delivered through refined support processes during early implementation
- ODI reward payment ranked third highest in the industry in AMP7 Year 1, driven significantly by pathfinder investments made during the engagement
- Board-level agreement secured on a new asset management operating model
- New leaders across all price control business areas took ownership of implementation plans, with governance and assurance structures in place to deliver
Background
Approaching AMP7, the client needed to fundamentally reshape its operating model. Key pressures included: new ODI in-period performance requirements; the need to drive low and no-build solutions at scale in a Totex environment; and misaligned commercial incentives across Delivery Alliances and the wider supply chain. The organisation also lacked a shared understanding of what the new operating model needed to look like and what it would take to deliver it — in terms of people, process, and structure.
Curzon Approach
Curzon served as strategic development and transformation partner across a three-year engagement leading into AMP7 and continued post-settlement. Our approach had four components:
- Regulatory Grounding — We built deep understanding of regulatory methodology as the foundation for all solutions, ensuring every recommendation balanced the needs of regulators, customers, and shareholders.
- Operating Model Design — We created clarity and shared understanding of the new model’s objectives, identifying the required changes across people, process, and structure, and aligning these with functional strategies. Design was iterative and collaborative, involving 1-1 sessions and workshops across the organisation, with senior management providing governance.
- Leadership Pairing — New leaders for each price control business area were paired with experienced Curzon consultants in twice-weekly intensive working sessions over approximately six months. This developed their future role descriptions, organisational structures, and implementation plans — building genuine ownership from the outset.
- Pathfinder Investments — We identified and invested in key pathfinder areas to evaluate transformational options. Developer Services was a flagship example: digital technologies and process redesign transformed a reactive, combative function into a proactive, collaborative one with full integration across internal customer functions. Pathfinder learnings also informed improvements to needs management, Totex decision-making, alliance involvement in asset programming, and data and information management. These pathfinders made a significant contribution to the top-quartile ODI performance achieved in AMP7 Year 1.
A new commercial and incentivisation model was developed from the ground up — one designed not just to incentivise what people did, but how they did it.
