The Big Interview with Mark Wild

Andy Saunders meets Mark Wild, the megaproject mastermind who helped turn Crossrail around. With the Elizabeth Line still not scheduled to open fully until 2023, ex-CEO Wild explains the human failures that lay behind the troubled project.

It may have become infamous for being four years late and £4bn over budget, but the ‘what’ part of the Crossrail story is only half of the tale. After all, the unwelcome truth is that most major projects are late and cost more than anticipated. By those measures alone, project failures like Crossrail are much more common – and thus less remarkable – than successes.

What made Crossrail’s fall from grace so spectacular was how it happened. Suddenly, a scheme that had been touted by its top team as a paragon of modern project management would not only fail to open as promised in December 2018, it was also going to need a lot more money than its £14.8bn budget if it were going to open at all. And let’s not forget that even now, several months on from the ‘official’ launch date, the Elizabeth Line (as it is now known) is still not fully operational.

Having carefully built up a glittering international reputation as the definitive ‘on time, on budget’ megaproject, Crossrail lost it almost overnight. Much time has been spent poring over the wreckage and asking what tools, technology and processes might have helped avert the disaster.

There are certainly lessons to be learned at all levels, says Mark Wild, the former Managing Director of London Underground (and a Crossrail director at the time), who was tasked with the rescue mission in December 2018. But ultimately, the failure was human, he reckons.

“The risks were all in our risk registers, and [the project tools] were state of the art. But Crossrail still ended up with a £4bn black hole.

“What happened was that the leadership team created an environment on the board – that I was part of – where failure was not an option. And in an environment where you weren’t allowed to fail, people started not measuring the important stuff. At the last board meeting before the collapse, Crossrail was said to be 97.1% complete. It wasn’t; it was 60% complete. We weren’t measuring the right things. That was a fundamental mistake.”

When the truth emerged, it caused as much damage internally as externally. “Crossrail was demobilised, it lost critical mass and we were in a lot of trouble. The project was stalled but was still consuming vast resources. To be honest, it was a very, very difficult situation.”

Wild’s first thought on taking the controls was to wonder briefly if the whole thing could be stopped to stem the flow of cash and allow some time to regroup, but that would compound the delay and destroy all remaining momentum. Instead, he went cap in hand to his key suppliers in search of a new top team in a hurry. “Key people had left, so the first thing I did was a rapid re‑inflation of people, to get a new senior team in place.”

This turned out to be easier than it sounds. Despite its travails, there was a huge desire to see Crossrail succeed among those who had been involved. “I went to the CEOs and chairs of all our supply chain partners and said to them: ‘You’re going to help me.’ My side of the deal was complete transparency; I would try my best and there would be no politics. Their side of the deal was to give me their best people. To a person, they came on board – no one I asked for help didn’t help me.”

Although he is a highly experienced executive who has worked in urban rail and metro transport for most of his career, in some ways Wild was a surprising choice for the job of getting Crossrail back on track. He happily puts his hands up to having been part of the board that led Crossrail into trouble, but says that an outsider may have had spotlessly clean hands, but would have struggled with the need for urgent action on the one hand and the vertiginous learning curve of a standing start on the other.

“One of the things that made me a good choice was that I already knew about Crossrail and that the project fundamentals were sound. I was running London Underground and I was on the Crossrail board, so I certainly didn’t come in on some kind of white charger and sort it out. But I was supported by the Commissioner, the Mayor and the Permanent Secretary. If somebody had landed cold into that situation, I don’t know what they would have been able to do.”

Credit: Louise Haywood-Schiefer

The established narrative around the Crossrail calamity has already set into a sort of high‑tech, high‑stakes version of the Millennium Dome saga – too much focus on the ‘hardware’ construction phase and too little on making a cohesive operational whole. There’s truth in that, Wild says, especially when it comes to the challenge of integrating the mass of digital technology that lies at the heart of Crossrail – something that was hugely underestimated by the original team, for whom boring tunnels looked like the hard part of the job.

There were many other contributory mistakes, however, particularly around the failure to identify those parts of the project that were irreducibly complex and to simplify everything else. “Having three different signalling systems was always going to be off the scale – it’s the most complex signalling system in the world and there’s no way around it. For me, that means everything else had to become simpler and more modular to leave you with the core of what was always going to be an epic integration.”

But instead, there was complexity added at every level, he says, from bespoke architect‑designed stations with hundreds of different types of doorways to unnecessary gold‑plating of the technical specs. “Crossrail is a world‑class railway; there’s no doubt about that. Some parts of it will blow people’s minds – the train control system, the ventilation. But there’s also a lot of needless complexity. Crossrail was the first major project to use LED lighting throughout, which is a great positive for sustainability. But all the thousands of LED bulbs are individually condition‑monitored, which doesn’t reflect how they are actually maintained. That’s a good example of complexity that the operator doesn’t really need.”

With no fewer than 37 procurement contracts, the project design itself was also over‑complicated and led to a build‑up of hidden systemic risk, because no one had sight of the sum of the problems that were accumulating across all those individual parts.

“All of these contracts had what we called an ‘element outstanding works list’ – things that weren’t quite right that had to be addressed. In my first six months at Crossrail, the Technical Director added them all up, and there were 75,000 of them in total, off the books and that the client couldn’t see. That’s a mind‑blowing statistic.”

It’s also clear that setting a fixed end date many years in advance – which looked like a bold statement of intent – became a suffocating weight. The key to major project delivery in future, Wild says, is going to be managing windows of uncertainty rather than fixed deadlines that may be little more than a guess and will damage external credibility and internal morale when they inevitably slip.

Those windows will be big initially when the uncertainty is equally big – perhaps a year or two in the early phases – but will narrow to months and weeks as completion gets closer and the uncertainty level drops. “The art of project management will be to drive the teams to the front edge [the earlier end of the window]. The later date is your commitment to your stakeholders, but the earlier date is the one you drive the team towards.” That way, there is always a bit of wriggle room, whatever stage the project is at.

The son of a Durham miner, Wild grew up in a “classic working‑class family”, he says. He comes across as down to earth and approachable, but also unafraid to take tough decisions. “I was a bit of a late starter academically. My dad always wanted me to be an engineer, so I went to Newcastle Polytechnic, did electrical engineering and joined the electricity industry.” Perhaps his career‑defining moment came when that industry was privatised and his employer – state‑owned Northern Electric – was bought by Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company owned by Warren Buffet.

His ambition fired by the prospect of international travel and the spice of competition, he left the regulated utility sector and joined the rail industry, where he ended up as General Manager for Westinghouse Rail Systems. He then worked on resignalling the Jubilee Line, before heading in 2012 to Australia, where he became CEO of Public Transport Victoria, responsible among other things for Melbourne’s famous green and yellow W‑class historic trams. “I realised that I wanted to be a more general leader, but that I didn’t have much operational experience. The attraction of Australia was that it was a great place to live, and I got my hands on all of the state of Victoria’s public transport network. I also think it’s important to have experience of working in both the public and private sectors.”

Credit: Louise Haywood-Schiefer

Wild came back to the UK in 2016, lured by the offer of “the best job in the world”, Managing Director of London Underground. Now he has handed over an operational – if not quite fully complete – Elizabeth Line to the team at Transport for London, what’s next for Wild? “I was always going to leave when we opened the Elizabeth Line, and now I am heading back to the utility sector as CEO of SGN, one of Britain’s four gas distributors. It’s a large‑scale business operationally, but for me the real attraction is the drive to net zero.”

As projects inevitably become more complex and more digital, a new breed of project professionals and leaders will be required, Wild believes, and despite Crossrail’s manifold failures it has also shown us the way to future success. “What it isn’t about is a single person heroically leading the charge. The modern project leader will be curious; they will understand uncertainty and that some things are unknowable, but they will work to minimise them. They will be people who can listen, convene and create an environment where there is no fear.”

He’s also hoping his new role will leave him with a bit more time to get out on his bicycle, which has been gathering dust during the Crossrail years. “Crossrail was all‑consuming, seven days a week. My decompression is cycling. In normal life, I love long cycle rides, but they have had to take a bit of a break.”

But despite the rise in remote working and the change in people’s travel habits that has arisen during the pandemic, Wild remains a firm believer in the transformative power of public transport. “I travel the world and everywhere I go people are interested in the Elizabeth Line. It’s catalytic.” He is also convinced that the project will ultimately produce its promised £42bn of economic benefit for London and the rest of the UK.

“There might be a bit of a delay [in realising the benefit], but we built Crossrail for a 120‑year design life. It’ll still be here in 250 years. It’s globally recognised as probably the world’s leading railway. In one way, we’ve kind of won the cup, but what happened was very serious and we did let people down – that matters. We can’t afford another major programme black hole like this, which is why seeking the truth is so important.”

With legacy projects, the proven long-term benefits quickly wipe from the collective memory any budget and deadline overruns. As BBC presenter Evan Davis told Project earlier this year: “[People] get annoyed when they see Crossrail was meant to open in 2018…but the truth is the public swoon over some of the great achievements that project managers do, and they love it when projects go right.” And Crossrail, we suspect, will be one of those.

Listen to Mark Wild’s interview on the APM Podcast

_{Credit to Louise Haywood-Schiefer}