Stuart Kitching

Curzon worked in close partnership with the client’s Water sector leadership and its wider Technology and Consulting organisation — bringing structure and external challenge to what needed to be an internally owned transformation. The centrepiece of our approach was a series of Executive Workshops, designed and facilitated by Curzon, that brought together key stakeholders to build alignment, surface best practices, and mobilise action.

The workshops were carefully sequenced to address the foundational building blocks of the growth ambition: developing a genuine understanding of Water sector client needs; taking stock of the group’s existing capabilities; shaping compelling Consulting and Technology value propositions; and constructing a credible marketing and sales narrative.

Rather than delivering a strategy and stepping back, Curzon focused on ensuring the organisation had the roadmap, the governance, and the momentum to carry the transformation forward itself — with internal delivery responsibilities clearly defined from day one.

Curzon deployed a red team methodology — drawing on the experience of senior executives from across multiple sectors to conduct a thorough and targeted review of the TOM and all its underpinning artefacts. This cross-sector perspective was deliberate: bringing in thinking from outside the rail industry allowed the team to surface alternative approaches and fresh insights that a purely sector-specific review would not have generated.

A series of immersive workshops and structured engagements with the client’s own subject matter experts shaped a clear set of thematic areas for the assessment to focus on. These themes formed the backbone of our recommendations, ensuring the outputs were coherent and actionable rather than a disconnected list of observations.

Throughout the process, cross-sector benchmarks were used to enrich the findings — giving the client both a clear picture of where the TOM stood relative to best practice, and practical reference points for addressing the recommendations identified.

Curzon began with a rapid but thorough diagnostic — reviewing performance data and engaging senior stakeholders internally and externally to establish a clear picture of where value was being lost. A key early output was an objective evaluation of the outsourcing question: our analysis concluded that retaining the service in-house was the stronger strategic option, directly challenging the prevailing internal recommendation.

With that decision reframed, we moved into a structured programme of performance improvement interventions. These targeted the root causes of underperformance across the supply chain: improving supplier OTIF through tighter schedule adherence and lead time compression; aggregating demand to unlock contractual price-breaks; rationalising the supplier base and renegotiating contracts; and reducing transactional volume and cost through order aggregation and automation.

We also designed a future-state operating model to lock in the gains achieved — ensuring the improvements were structural and sustainable, not just a one-off uplift.

Curzon’s first task was to create order from fragmentation — aligning the independently developed functional workstreams into a single, coherent programme before a single site closure had taken place. Pre-launch alignment was treated as a non-negotiable foundation: without it, even the best execution would have been undermined by sequencing conflicts and unmanaged interdependencies.

A clear geographical sequencing logic was developed for the programme rollout — ensuring that the capacity to fulfil client deliveries was maintained throughout, and that site closures were executed in an order that minimised commercial and operational risk. An integrated programme management framework with a clear delivery drumbeat was established to coordinate and manage the multiple workstreams, supported by programme reporting covering both operational and progress metrics at workstream and programme level.

Regional management teams — initially resistant — were actively brought into the implementation, transforming potential blockers into programme contributors. The asset disposal programme was structured with mechanisms to maximise secondary market value, ultimately delivering the 127% value recovery that significantly exceeded the original business case.

Throughout, the design principle was self-sufficiency: every governance mechanism, tracking process, and reporting framework was built to operate within the client’s existing management and reporting infrastructure — ensuring the programme’s gains would be owned and sustained by the business long after Curzon’s involvement ended.

Curzon’s role was to challenge, provoke, and reframe — helping the organisation see beyond its current assumptions about what digital could and should mean for an airport of its scale and ambition. A series of structured workshops challenged prevailing thinking and opened up new lines of possibility, while benchmarking against best practice inside and outside the aviation sector gave the client both inspiration and evidence for a more stretching vision.

Gap analysis identified the capabilities the organisation would need to develop to realise a genuinely transformative digital agenda — providing an honest assessment of the distance between current state and future ambition. Financial implications of the revised vision were assessed, translating strategic aspiration into the commercial language needed to build a credible investment case and secure board-level commitment.

The output was not just a strategy document — it was a shared understanding of the challenge, a structured roadmap with real sequencing, and the organisational momentum to act. The appointment of a new CIO to champion the agenda was a tangible signal that the engagement had moved the organisation from ambiguity to conviction.

Curzon took a data-centric approach from the outset — recognising that the fragmented analytical landscape was the root cause of most of the operational problems, and that sustainable improvement required a single, integrated planning foundation rather than another layer of process on top of existing dysfunction.

A Minimum Viable Product model was designed and implemented first — proving the approach at smaller scale before committing to full rollout. This disciplined sequencing reduced implementation risk and built the internal confidence needed to scale. The product hierarchy structure was scrutinised and rationalised to form a credible basis for S&OP planning, complemented by value chain analysis across key product lines to identify the highest-impact improvement opportunities.

All demand signals were mapped against available capacity — creating reliable utilisation plans supported by historical Demonstrated Capacity data. Inventory consumption plans were developed, integrating future buying patterns and opportunities for strategic procurement across 3,000+ components at an aggregated value of £4.7 million. Seamless S&OP review cycles were established, with detailed objectives and long-term performance measures giving the organisation the ongoing discipline to sustain the gains.

The result was a business that moved from reactive operations managed by instinct to proactive planning managed by data — with the visibility, controls, and processes needed to serve its customers reliably and its contracts confidently.

Curzon moved at pace — conducting a rapid but comprehensive assessment that covered the internal landscape, the external market, and the delivery partners operating across the programme. The work was structured around four interlocking activities.

First, a productivity management capability framework was developed to provide a consistent, organisation-wide lens through which digital solutions could be understood and compared. Second, stakeholder interviews were used to map the current-state usage of digital solutions across the business — creating, for the first time, a single consolidated picture of what was in use, where, and to what effect.

Third, a rapid assessment of the external landscape was conducted — including a digital maturity assessment of key delivery partners, external case studies of industry-leading solutions, and a market assessment of tools with potential for adoption. This external perspective ensured the organisation was benchmarking its digital ambition against the best available, not just against its own prior practice.

Finally, a standardised prioritisation methodology was applied — assessing each solution across four dimensions: value-add, deliverability, scalability, and alignment to industry direction. The result was a prioritised digital portfolio with clear implementation sequencing, grounded in objective criteria rather than internal advocacy or historical momentum.

Curzon began with an honest assessment of the organisation’s management capability to implement change and mobilise the workforce — recognising that technical solutions alone would not be sufficient in an environment where behaviours and culture were at the heart of the problem. A detailed analysis of project management capability gaps was conducted, mapped against both the current and future operating model, and used to prioritise where intervention would have the greatest impact.

Project lifecycle process mapping gave a clear picture of where the gaps, levers, and weak points in the system lay — providing the evidence base for a targeted, sequenced improvement plan. Critically, Curzon developed an on-the-job implementation approach that delivered immediate, visible results while simultaneously beginning to address the longer-term capability challenges. This dual-track approach was essential: the programme needed to see early progress to build confidence and momentum, while the deeper behavioural and cultural shift would take longer to embed.

Performance indicators were redesigned to align with outcomes rather than outputs — shifting the conversation from “did we complete the process?” to “did we deliver the result?” This reframing, supported by a new set of shared cost, schedule, and risk metrics, gave the project management community a fundamentally different set of incentives and a common language for performance that had previously been absent.