Workforce Scheduling Archives - Page 2 of 6

How learning and development can improve recruitment in transport and construction

Posted on: 3 August 2023

Learning from previous projects, mapping skills to future tasks and identifying gaps in the workforce – learning and development can inform your recruitment needs

Recruitment is a vital component of the transport and construction industries. Being able to deploy the right number of appropriately skilled personnel to any given task is essential in delivering services and projects efficiently and on time. A robust learning and development programme can help large organisations in maintaining this balance. From upskilling existing employees to demand forecasting mapped against current and future work, having oversight of core skills and competencies across your workforce is fundamental to your ability to deliver work and services. With a holistic view of your workforce you can understand where any gaps may be emerging or may exist against future work, then remedy them with accurate recruitment.

Knowing when to recruit

Mapping the existing skills and competencies of your workforce against the demand for their skills and competencies against current and future work offers insights as to what you need. If your existing workforce doesn’t cover this, then recruitment is inevitable. If there are only a few gaps, training existing employees so that they are competent for the tasks required can help to plug gaps, but where a simple case of lack of numbers is identified, bringing people in is the only solution.

So how does learning and development help? As part of your wider competency management and training efforts, the overarching learning and development umbrella is essential in gaining a complete picture of your workforce, its competencies, skills and experiences. Maintaining this central database provides insight as to the profile of employee you need to add in order to fulfil projects and tasks.

This covers every aspect of your learning and development programme. From people on the ground to fulfil the tasks required of your services, to the people who conduct assessments of your workforce and run your training programmes. During periods of growth, it will be necessary to conduct more training and more assessments in order to keep your learning and development programme on track.

Ongoing assessment work is crucial to ensure work is being conducted properly. This covers safety and the appropriate fulfilment of tasks. Having the necessary number of assessors is important to achieving this. For more information on how Transport for London (TfL) assesses its London Underground drivers, please click here.

Similarly, getting new recruits up and running is a staple of any learning and development programme. Proper inductions and any training and briefings must be conducted before they start. You can read more about how Network Rail trains its 43,000 employees here.

Maintaining a future workforce pipeline

As projects start and finish, maintaining a core workforce is essential for ongoing work. One way in which transport and construction operators can maintain a healthy pipeline of future recruits is via apprenticeships.

According to the Constructions Skills Network, an extra 225,000 construction workers will be required in the UK by 2027. Filling these roles – and in a relatively short space of time – will be essential to the efficient and timely running of construction projects, many of which will cover the UK’s transport infrastructure, too.

Working with schools and colleges is a useful way of interacting with young people who might be interested in a career in construction. Offering them hands on experience alongside their studies provides practical experience which strengthens their skills and experience in the industry.

What happens once they start their career? Career development, once people have been recruited, helps to broaden the pool of skills and competencies available to you. Offering ongoing training courses and opportunities helps your existing workforce to be upwardly mobile, helping to address skills gaps internally without the need to recruit.

Conclusion

Joined up thinking is paramount in implementing a successful recruitment policy, feeding off the competency management and training aspects of your learning and development programme. Understanding your workforce is central to this. Where are there gaps? Who can be upskilled? This feeds into your wider project management; what current and upcoming work will require what skills and competencies?

A scattergun approach to recruitment is inefficient and expensive. Utilising the knowledge that you can create about your workforce helps you to pinpoint the skills and experience you need for current and future work, whilst creating efficiencies in your processes and accurate responses to your roadmap of work.

We have recently explored the topic of learning and development, including recruitment, in our white paper Learning and development in construction and transport: how can organisations enhance their workforce efficiently, in a data led way? You can download your free copy here.

Competency management: the heartbeat of learning and development in transport and construction

Posted on: 26 July 2023

Every employer conducts basic checks of their employees. Do they have the requisite qualifications, skills and experiences for the role for which they are being hired? Certificates, references and background research usually satisfy this. Then, to ensure that the person is actually appropriate for the job once they’ve started, a period of probation follows, supported by ongoing assessments at set intervals to keep tabs on their ongoing competence. In the transport and construction industries, however, competency management takes on far greater significance.

Forming part of a robust learning and development programme, competency management is essential to the smooth running of services and projects in these industries. Holding a qualification or a certain amount of experience is one thing, ongoing competence is quite another.

Take train drivers as an example. There are several assessments, exams and accompanied drives that must be completed before a driver is left to complete the task solo. That’s not the end of the process. In such a safety critical environment, with service users onboard as well, it is vital that ongoing competency management is in place. Taking Transport for London (TfL) as an example, they conduct regular assessments of their 4,500 London Underground drivers to ensure that they are fulfilling their role appropriately.

To manage this process, TfL utilises CACI’s Cygnum software. The system is used to schedule assessments, log their results and arrange any follow up activities. This helps TfL to maintain a holistic view of its London Underground drivers and their competencies, maintain service user safety and address any issues that arise.

A robust competency management framework, as part of your learning and development programme, is required to monitor, assess and train employees for their tasks. Having the technology in place to link everything together is essential, which is where systems such as Cygnum come in.

Where a large workforce is present with a vast array of skills, experiences and core competencies, staying on top of monitoring this, understanding it and carrying out regular assessments requires careful coordination.

From having an overview of your workforce, to linking projects to demand management and forecasting present and future projects, technology is assisting large organisations in keeping projects on track, creating efficiencies and managing the workforce. Competency management is a central component of this.

Aside from ensuring that people are fit for purpose, competency management can also help to unlock areas upon which to target workforce training. Regular assessments will reveal patterns; perhaps there is a common area in which assessments are failed, or raise red flags? This enables large organisations to data map their workforce and focus on areas for improvement. If certain tasks are regularly underperformed in, then this can feed into you training programme, helping to get ahead of the issue by highlighting it with the workforce and providing the necessary training to help alleviate the issue.

Competency management further feeds into recruitment. If you have a holistic view of your workforce, its skills, experience and competencies, then you can identify where there are gaps that need filling. This helps to refine the recruitment process by enabling you to focus on specific competencies required for projects and tasks. In larger infrastructure and construction projects, this can be linked to demand management and forecasting, helping you to have full oversight of the resources required in order to complete present and future projects.

Competency management is the backbone of learning and development. It feeds into every area of an organisation’s operations; assigning tasks to the right people, ensuring that the workforce is appropriately skilled for the tasks at hand, informing training programmes and guiding recruitment needs. Where workforce and service user safety and convenience are major considerations, failing to run a robust competency management framework as part of your larger learning and development programme isn’t an option.

Competency management further helps to realise efficiency gains by ensuring that the right people are in the right place at the right time; enabling schedulers and administrators to be able to pinpoint staff to specific tasks quickly and easily makes overarching project management easier and more transparent. A full depth of understanding of your workforce’s competencies is also useful in reassigning staff during times of strain, safe in the knowledge that they are appropriately competent for the tasks being asked of them to keep projects and services running.

We have explored this topic in our recently published white paper which focuses on learning and development, How can organisations enhance their workforce efficiently, in a data led way? It is available to download for free here.

Five reasons learning and development are so important in transport and construction

Posted on: 17 July 2023

The technological landscape is rapidly evolving, something being experienced across the transport and construction industries. New technologies bring about new ways of working which in turn mean that large organisations need to have robust learning and development programmes in place to keep up. Learning and development extends beyond the frontline too. Whilst there is an obvious focus on engineers and operators in the transport and construction industries, back-office staff are also realising more effective and efficient ways of working as new technology is introduced.

This blog will take a closer look at five key areas in which learning and development can be best utilised across the transport and construction industries to deliver high quality, efficient and safe services for all. For a deeper dive into this topic, our recently published white paper, How can organisations enhance their workforce efficiently, in a data led way? Is available to download for free.

1. Workforce and end user safety

From health and safety protocols to simply using equipment correctly, ensuring that your workforce is operating within defined regulatory standards and your own internal business rules is essential. Frontline workers in both industries are often performing safety critical tasks that carry some form of jeopardy to themselves, their co-workers and end service users, such as passengers on a train. Learning and development is essential in ensuring that your workforce is equipped with the necessary training, experience and knowledge to perform tasks correctly and safely.

This extends to schedulers and administrators in ensuring that tasks are correctly assigned to members of staff. New systems can help large organisations in scheduling tasks, with aspects such as auto-scheduling easing the administrative burden by matching skills, competencies and experience to tasks and reducing the element of human error in doing so.

A robust learning and development programme will help ensure that all staff are competent and trained for the tasks they are being asked to undertake.

2. Ensuring the highest quality of work and standards

In a similar vein to ensuring the safety of all staff and end users, learning and development plays a central role in ensuring that work is carried out to the highest possible standards. By continuing with learning and development programmes across your workforce, you can expose staff to the latest ways of working as well as providing ongoing opportunities to maintain and expand their professional skillset.

Having a team of highly competent, highly trained operators is a great way of meeting high standards across your projects. The better the competency of your workforce, the more likely you are to deliver projects on time and in budget, owing to a reduction in errors and repeating work. The final delivery is also likely to meet the desired outcomes of a project. In transport, it is crucial that skilled operators are performing service delivery tasks competently to ensure the safety of end users and the smooth running of timetables.

3. Keeping up with evolving technologies

Innovation has been a constant in the 21^st Century and shows no sign of abating. New and improved versions of old tools and systems are constantly emerging, which poses a challenge to large organisations in not only obtaining the right tools for the job, but keeping the workforce abreast of such developments and appropriately trained to operate them. The same goes for emerging processes and practices; how can the latest technology and thinking be deployed to realise upticks in efficiency and quality of output?

Needless to say, learning and development is central to staying ahead of industry trends and technologies. Exposing your workforce to ongoing training opportunities helps them to develop their skills and experiences within your organisation, thereby helping them to enhance their careers with you.

4. Improving staff retention

Career development is crucial to staff retention. Your learning and development programme can play a significant role in staff morale. If training and career development opportunities are presented to staff, it means that they can progress within your organisation, rather than seeking new opportunities elsewhere.

This can have a knock-on effect in regard to recruitment too. Persuading staff to join your organisation is made easier if you can demonstrate career progression pathways to potential employees.

5. A more efficient workforce

A robust learning and development programme will help to ensure that your workforce is competent and appropriately trained. If you can be sure that each staff member is the right fit for their role, it makes assigning tasks far easier and enhances your chances of projects and tasks being completely properly and on time. Whilst learning and development cannot eradicate human error – mistakes are inevitable at times – it can help to minimise it and its impact.

Avoiding delays and poor workmanship means that fewer tasks need to be repeated, leading to a more efficient process overall in terms of time and cost committed to projects and tasks.

A robust learning and development programme carries myriad benefits for large organisations, notably in the transport and construction industries. With so many moving parts, having a competent and skilled workforce is essential. Failing to conduct training and to create an overview of skills, qualifications and experiences makes the task of assigning tasks incredibly complicated and wide open to error. In understanding your workforce and appropriately managing it, learning and development is essential.

How can organisations enhance their workforce efficiently, in a data led way? It is available to download for free here.

Workforce safety and the role of management

Posted on: 27 June 2023

This might seem obvious, because the role of management in overall workforce output and workforce safety is fundamental. Management decisions are at the forefront of working practices and outcomes. But when it comes to safety critical areas, it’s important to consider the way in which management structures, decision making and overall input can support, enhance and improve best practice.

It’s very easy for complacency to creep into the management of aspects such as workforce safety. Where an excellent safety record is demonstrable, aspects such as verbal and written communications can take a backseat, with a regression in their presence or simply a standing still and relying on old systems to continue working.

This goes beyond meetings and briefings and into more serious areas such as fatigue management. There have been high profile cases of fatigue management protocols not being adhered to in the transport industry, not least when Renown Consultants was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs by the Office of Rail and Road following the death of two its workers in a road traffic accident following the conclusion of an unacceptably long shift.

It was a failure of management to properly implement regulations. In road transportation and haulage, drivers are restricted to how many hours they can work consecutively without a break, with further rules around taking at least 11-hours rest consecutively during a given day. Again, management of drivers is investigated where infringements occur, with fines in place for discrepancies.

One of the roles of management is to seek to improve, and safety is no different. Data from CIRAS (Confidential Incident Reporting & Analysis System), which is used by Network Rail to anonymously gather feedback from its workforce, found that in 2019/20 over 60% of respondents felt that health and safety concerns were not taken seriously by management. Furthermore, only 75% said that they had received regular safety briefings.

Those numbers paint a clear picture of the need for improvement. Whilst deaths and serious injury remain low on the UK’s railway network, they do still happen. Ticking every safety box is imperative and that starts at the top.

Why are corners cut with workforce safety?

If we accept the adage that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then the same is true for workforce safety. A company can put in place structures and guidelines for aspects such as safety briefings as mentioned above, but if the management levels below them are not enacting them, what can be done?

Management structures on the ground face different challenges to those in the office. Works need to be conducted in time-critical circumstances, with every minute counting. It can be tempting, with that sort of pressure, to gloss over safety briefings to a team of experienced engineers and workers. They’ve been doing the job for years without harm befalling them, why would that change now?

There is also the element of human error. People make mistakes. If people are running late, or have made a mistake, then there will be a natural compulsion to make up for that, be it by skipping a briefing or working a bit longer to make up for it.

Improving processes to improve workforce safety

Recording and understanding these errors is part of the management remit. We can see from the ORR’s 2019/20 Rail Safety Report that 41% of major injuries suffered by the rail network’s workforce was a result of a slip or trip. The role of management in these risk factors is in recording and reporting them. Gathering evidence and understanding can help to reduce the likelihood of reoccurrence.

An accident like a slip or a trip can also happen to anyone at any time. When you factor that in against 60% of respondents to CIRAS’s survey stating that they don’t feel that management take health and safety concerns seriously, with 25% not receiving regular safety briefings, it’s clear that the role of management, at least in some circumstances, can be improved.

Elements such as safety briefings are crucial for reinforcing safety best practice. Monitoring that they are happening is equally as important, to ensure that they do.

Utilising workforce management software can greatly help to achieve this. Electronic recording of sessions, via handheld devices on site, allows you to record that briefings have taken place. Where they have not been recorded against a job, workflows can automate alerts to management. Leaving a reliable and transparent evidence trail helps management in understanding why accidents have occurred and if their processes have played a part in them.

Equally, such software can help management retain proper oversight of working hours and shift patterns, ensuring that fatigue management protocols and the like are adhered to.

Whilst the intentions of management decisions are always well meaning, it is vital to underpin them with a robust framework to support decision making and to help reduce the number of accidents that occur.

You can find out more in our white paper, Improving workforce safety across the UK’s rail network, which is free to read here.

Cygnum from CACI used by Network Rail as planning & administration solution for training across its workforce

Posted on: 13 June 2023

CACI is delighted to announce that its Cygnum software is now being used as Network Rail’s planning and administration solution for training its 43,000-strong workforce.

Cygnum supports all aspects of Network Rail’s training management, from automated creation of courses based on demand, intelligent allocation of staff, trainers and resources to courses, to communication of planning and optimisation of changes. Cygnum will assist Network Rail in achieving a holistic view of all its training and results, helping it to realise efficiencies across the process and ensure that all staff are appropriately trained. The attendance and results of courses are logged in Cygnum, with the system submitting course invitation and joining instructions to Network Rail staff, as well as actioning any follow-ups as required.

“We are delighted that Network Rail has chosen CACI’s Cygnum software to support and underpin its training planning and administration process,” says Ollie Watson, Group Business Development Director at CACI. “We are looking forward to supporting Network Rail in achieving a more efficient and streamlined training programme that delivers necessary and ongoing training to its workforce as optimally as possible.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

A Voyage of Discovery

Posted on: 10 May 2023

A month into live operation of your new system and everything could not be running more smoothly. The solution went in on time and within the original budget and quickly delivered benefit, fulfilling the needs and expectations of your business and IT. Everyone was clear from the outset about what needed to be achieved and why.

Panacea, perhaps, but as a solutions supplier, we want this outcome as much as you, our customer. There are many reasons IT projects succeed or fail, some of which are unpredictable, but what practical measures can you take to give us all the best possible chance of a great outcome?

A key measure of success of solution delivery is that the requirements it set out to meet were indeed met. This sounds obvious, but if the requirements laying this foundation were unclear or incomplete, it is unlikely that the solution delivered on them, or that consensus was reached that work was complete. It is no wonder that the Government Digital Service (GDS) stipulates “define user needs” as the first point for consideration in their Technology Code of Practice.

For CACI as a solution supplier, it would be superb if we embarked on a major project where all requirements were fully defined, with clear, testable acceptance criteria and supporting specifications were in place. We could focus our efforts entirely on design, build and testing. But let’s get real: this rarely happens. Eliciting, analysing, validating and documenting a full, detailed baseline of functional and non-functional requirements effectively, is a time-consuming activity. It has dependencies on skilled business analysts and subject matter experts from the business, and technical and security teams who may not be available ahead of procurement or the project mobilising.

CACI’s FUSION delivery methodology recognises this reality by proposing a structured approach through our Shape step. CACI can support these activities as much as you need to build a strong foundation and achieve success together.

To hit the ground running once a supplier is appointed, what practical measures can be taken by you ahead of project mobilisation, when time and specialist skills may be in short supply, to research and define your users’ needs?

Start with the Afters

You should ensure there is a clear definition of the benefits that the solution aspires to deliver. These may reflect pain points the solution is intended to address or additional gains that will be achieved.

There needs to be consensus on these drivers at a business level and with your key stakeholders who will be engaged in delivery.

Having this in place will help provide some shape to the requirements and inform prioritisation. Without it, there may be a lack of clarity on what the solution should be setting out to achieve, which in turn will disrupt delivery both for your organisation and the supplier, once appointed.

Breadth before Depth

It is sensible to appoint a single owner for the business and IT requirements, often called a product owner, and ensure they are fully supported to fulfil that remit. This might involve access to business analysts and subject matter experts (SMEs) on technical aspects and business operations.

They should first establish that the breadth of requirements is complete before the more time-consuming elaboration on the depth (detail). This will help you track where the scope has been defined and where work still needs to be done.

One approach is to take a top-down view, first identifying the major groups of requirements, for example, by breaking it down into epics:

Take each epic a step further by identifying users’ functional needs, such as through defining user stories: “As a [actor], I need to [do something], so that I can [achieve something]”, and adding these to the epics. Just one line per user story is sufficient at this stage.

The system will also need to comply with the organisation’s technical and security standards. Furthermore, there may be other aspects requiring the new solution to “be” something, rather than perform a function. For example, it may need to be available between specific hours, have a certain technical capability or comply with a security standard. These are known as non-functional requirements (NFRs).

If the new “to be” solution is replacing an old “as is” one, you need to ensure that you fully understand all aspects of what the “as is” system achieves and ensure that these are reflected in the “to be” requirements, or that there is agreement as to which elements will not be in scope.

Elicitation of requirements merits an article in its own right, but may involve workshops, interviews, surveys and document reviews. The Chartered Institute for IT (BCS) provides a framework and certification for requirements engineering, which includes such techniques.

Once a working set of requirements has been established, these need to be cross-checked to:

Identify and resolve any conflicts
Remove duplicates
Ensure they are accurate, consistent and understandable

Reviewing that requirements are aligned to the benefits the solution is seeking to achieve, and prioritising accordingly, ensures they will deliver against the business goals.

Now is a great time to agree a baseline for your requirements, since the scope has been fully defined and therefore amendments can be controlled through a change management process. You are also in a strong position to engage with a supplier on detailed implementation plans to deliver the solution.

Diving Deeper

Each requirement needs further elaboration to establish its depth, completing its definition:

Supporting assets, such as technical specifications, policies, standards, process maps and business rules definitions, are available and can be referenced from the requirement
Clear, testable acceptance criteria define the evidence used to assess that the requirement has been successfully met

A full requirements catalogue can quickly resemble a database rather than a single document. When implementing Cygnum solutions, CACI use Jira and QMetry to model requirements, collaborate, link assets together and manage processes such as approvals, change and traceability through testing.

If you cannot clarify requirements to this extent ahead of engaging with a supplier, the exercise needs to be accounted for in the implementation plan. CACI recognise the value to customers and the delivery team in collaborating on this, as this assures a shared understanding of requirements. The Shape step of CACI’s FUSION delivery methodology explicitly provisions for this activity under the Discover phase.

Once complete, you have a solid foundation for solution design and delivery. It would be prudent to re-baseline to reflect this milestone, such that there is a clear distinction between what was agreed at the time and subsequent change.

Better Outcomes

We believe that defect-free delivery to you is achievable when your requirements are clear, accurate and complete. Before handing a solution over to you for acceptance, we run system test cases against your acceptance criteria and evidence the results, providing full, objective traceability that your requirements have been met.

Your time should be focused on value-add activities, such as user acceptance testing against your business processes.

Celebrating a successful, on-time transition into live service is the outcome we all want to achieve and is distinctly more likely when a structured approach is adopted.

Cygnum from CACI used by TfL as competency management solution for London Underground drivers

Posted on:

CACI is pleased to announce that its Cygnum solution is now being used by Transport for London (TfL) to support the competency management process for its 4,500 London Underground drivers.

Cygnum is designed to assist organisations in all aspects of their workforce management, from scheduling and competency management, through to training and recruitment, helping to keep appropriately skilled, experienced and qualified staff performing tasks. Cygnum will assist TfL in gaining a holistic view of the ongoing competencies of its London Underground drivers.

“We’re delighted that TfL has chosen our Cygnum software to underpin the ongoing competency management of its tube drivers,” says Ollie Watson, Group Business Development Director at CACI. “We’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with TfL on its Cygnum solution to help ensure that its competency management programme is run efficiently and effectively into the future.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Effective workforce management – training and competency management

Posted on: 17 April 2023

Ongoing training and competency management efforts are vital for organisations in maintaining effective service delivery. Keeping staff competent, via mandatory ongoing training for their role, is often a regulatory issue. Offering staff opportunities to expand upon their core competencies makes the same process beneficial to the development of your workforce.

Whilst training and competency management are closely linked, there are some differences.

Training management

Certain training courses are mandatory in most professional environments. For example, offices require a number of trained first aiders and fire wardens. Such training needs refreshing every three years, so having staff with those competencies in the office requires them to be trained on an ongoing basis.

In more public facing and safety critical roles, ongoing mandatory training in aspects of health and safety is required. Not fulfilling these training obligations leaves firms at risk of staff carrying out their tasks improperly.

Keeping on top of these courses is vital. A central system helps firms to set reminders and book in mandatory courses for their employees. Such a system can also help to keep track of attendance, ensuring that courses have been attended and completed.

Using the same system, organisations can also make their training courses open to their employees for them to book onto when it suits them. This makes your training management more flexible and opens up training opportunities to employees who may find them interesting. By offering the opportunity to expand on their professional interests, training management can help with staff morale and career development.

If you can train and bolster the competencies of your existing workforce, it makes life easier if you need to move staff around tasks to keep project and service delivery on track during times of strain.

Running training courses also incurs an expense. It makes sense to monitor attendances and interest in certain courses, so that you can offer tailored and more relevant courses to your workforce. Where spaces are likely to be free in arranged courses, having robust oversight of this enables you to open course registration within your organisation, or even sell spaces to other industry firms, the employees of which also need to attend such a course.

Competency management

Competency management is closely, even inextricably, linked to training management. Where it differs in the first instance is in the recruitment of new employees. If an employee says they have the necessary qualifications to fulfil the role for which you are employing them, competency management is the simple act of ensuring that they are indeed appropriately qualified.

For example, if you’re employing someone to do a driving job, it’s prudent to check that they have a driving licence. Where competency management would link with training management in such a scenario would be if you need that employee to further their driving credentials at a point in the future. So, for example, you may need to enhance their competency and send them on an advanced driving course.

Ongoing training plays a crucial role in competency management, too. As mentioned above, in many industries ongoing training is mandatory. This keeps your workforce competent for the tasks that you need it to be competent for.

Where competency management extends this is by linking to performance. If a certain employee is involved in a certain number of similar incidents, it can be a good idea to try and find out why and assign them to an appropriate training course. This means that you are taking reasonable steps to provision for both employee and customer safety, whilst also keeping your services running smoothly.

Assessing staff competencies on an ongoing basis, therefore, is crucial. In the same way that you would schedule an employee, assessors need to be scheduled to staff members and teams to periodically check their work. On the rail network, for example, such assessments take the form of an assessor conducting a ride along with a train driver to check that they are carrying out their job appropriately.

If all is well, this can be logged instantly in a central system. Similarly, if errors are detected, these can be logged instantly, with any follow-up tasks, such as another assessment or the requirement for further training, being actioned straightaway. This helps to ensure that the competencies of your staff are covered, whilst linking directly to your training management for mandatory and remedial courses.

Maintaining a central database of your workforce and its competencies fundamentally helps you to ensure that your have the right people performing the right tasks. A robust competency management framework benefits your scheduling efforts, too, since your administrative teams responsible for scheduling can assign tasks with peace of mind that those employees being rostered are appropriately qualified and/or experienced for the role to which they are being assigned.

Furthermore, a central competency management system feeds into other areas of your organisation. In being able to swiftly and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce, you can make informed decisions in other areas such as recruitment.

Training management and competency management for your entire organisation

The benefits of having robust training and competency management across your organisation are clear. Fulfilling mandatory ongoing training obligations whilst at the same time opening up opportunities across your workforce to expand upon their competencies is hugely beneficial.

Keeping staff competent is one thing but offering career progression boosts morale and helps to keep staff working for your organisation rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, your workforce is your point of project and service delivery. Maintaining and understanding the array of skills and experiences drives effective and efficient delivery. Plugging this into other areas of your business, such as scheduling, enables your organisation to be agile in the face of short-term changes and responsive in remedying medium and longer term issues which are more easily identified with a bird’s eye view of your workforce.

Getting your training and competency management frameworks to dovetail will help drive understanding of your workforce, which in turn will help effective and efficient deployment to projects and services.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

Fatigue management – a matter of life or death?

Posted on: 27 March 2023

Fatigue management regulations are implemented in the rail construction industry to ensure not only that workers are treated fairly, but also that they are sufficiently rested to carry out what can often be dangerous jobs which require full focus and attention. Any impairment to their work can result in expensive mistakes, injury and, in the most extreme circumstances, death.

Having components of any given job improperly carried out can be an administrative headache that sets work back days, weeks or even months, and can potentially have severe knock-on safety consequences. The chance of human error leading to this is heightened when workers are fatigued, so deploying a tired workforce makes little sense.

DEFINING FATIGUE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

The Health & Safety Executive describes the consequences of fatigue as follows:

Fatigue results in slower reactions, reduced ability to process information, memory lapses, absent-mindedness, decreased awareness, lack of attention, underestimation of risk, reduced coordination etc. Fatigue can lead to errors and accidents, ill-health and injury, and reduced productivity. It is often a root cause of major accidents e.g. Herald of Free Enterprise, Chernobyl, Texas City, Clapham Junction, Challenger and Exxon Valdez.

The implications of fatigue can be vast and, like any other hazard in the workplace, fatigue needs to be properly managed.

This is something that was brought home to the rail construction industry earlier this year when Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 by the Office of Rail and Road, with £300,000 in costs as well, for failures in managing its fatigue protocols which resulted in the tragic deaths of two of its workers when they crashed their van on the way home from a job.

For safety critical work, there is a requirement that there must be a minimum of 12-hours rest between booking off a turn of duty before booking onto the next. Having this requirement is one thing, actively implementing it is another.

IMPLEMENTING, ASSESSING AND MANAGING FATIGUE PROCEDURES

Many companies do not have adequate systems in place for monitoring and implementing fatigue management procedures. In the case of Renown it was noted that, “Operations and managers knew what they were supposed to do in relation to fatigue but lip service was paid to these systems. Senior operations cut corners.”

This is where technology can help firms, with procedures modelled into business systems that can plan, guide and monitor staff, ensuring fatigue is always being considered. Rosters and shifts can be planned in advance based on the work to be carried out. The systems can include rules to consider factors related to both the time of the day that the shift is occurring and the travel time involved for the staff to potentially be deployed. This helps prevent allocation of resources to jobs that contravene the 12-hour rest period because of the travel time to get to or from the job.

There also needs to be improved recording of shifts, overtime and any shift swaps that have occurred. A management system can help by allowing staff to confirm or clock actual time spent, which again may trigger a knock-on warning for future planned work from rules configured to consider fatigue. The Office of Road and Rail (ORR) have also said that companies should be far more proactive in talking to staff and finding out their own concerns on fatigue and how it is affecting them. This could be done by capturing information directly onto questionnaires within a system. When completed these can automatically be flagged for management review and any remedial action required can be instigated, with all information stored against the staff record.

Capturing all this information into a single system allows risks to be automatically flagged to planners. They will then be able to amend and adapt the rosters based on the information presented to them. Having this data to hand ensures companies can comply with their risk assessment guidelines and not plan jobs when they do not have resources to safely do so.

SAFETY FIRST

The ORR was also critical of companies accepting jobs without carrying out proper risk assessments as to whether they have the staff to carry out a job safely. Having systems that can model ‘what if’ planning scenarios to indicate whether it is safe to accept work based on all elements of a risk assessment helps this decision making.

Furthermore, if accidents do occur, having auditable systems in place demonstrates that correct risk assessments were undertaken, helping pinpoint causes quicker and helping co-operation with any third-party investigations.

The RSSB has highlighted that fatigue is a factor in some 20% of high risk accidents in the rail industry. This high percentage suggests that many firms are underestimating the seemingly intangible impact of it. Implementing robust management procedures around this will help firms to see the full scope of the problem and align their workforces correctly to mitigate it.

It makes no sense from a financial, personal or moral standpoint to facilitate fatigued workers carrying out intensive, dangerous and important work. Deploying the correct technology is a major step in the right direction.

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum.

The importance of communication in rail safety

Posted on: 24 February 2023

A collision between a train and tractor in Kisby highlights the importance of training, briefing and communicating with all workers and operators to enhance rail safety.

Setting out safety guidelines and effectively communicating them with the workforce is paramount to creating a safe and accountable working environment. If staff aren’t briefed on safety procedures and processes whilst conducting their work, then mistakes are likely to happen. This was brought into focus on 19 August 2021 when a freight train collided with agricultural machinery being towed by a tractor at 04:10. The incident happened at Kisby, at a user worked crossing. The train was travelling at 66mph. So, how did this happen?

According to the report released in October 2022 by RAIB (Rail Accident Investigation Branch), the accident occurred because the driver of the tractor didn’t telephone the signal operator to check that it was okay to cross. Rather, they assumed that it was safe to look at the tracks to determine whether or not a train was approaching. With the train travelling at such speed, they didn’t see it, resulting in the collision.

Firstly, the incident could have been significantly worse. The train driver sustained minor injuries in the collision, with the driver of the tractor uninjured. From a collateral perspective, the locomotive and one wagon derailed, whilst the rail infrastructure sustained significant damage.

The cost of repairing the infrastructure, whilst not noted in the RAIB report, will have been significant, whilst there’s also the time the section of rail will have been out of action for to take into consideration. The stretch of line of was out of action for four days whilst the train was recovered and the tracks were repaired. This will have resulted in delayed and cancelled services.

A Class 66 locomotive, the type of locomotive involved in the accident here, has a value of around £1.5m. This is based on GBRf spending £50m on a fleet of 37 such locomotives in 2014. It’s fair to assume the repair bill won’t have been cheap.

The short-term planning, to assign engineers at short notice to track repairs, will have taken them away from other projects on the rail, resulting in other projects being affected by this incident. This, too, will have had cost implications, as well as creating scheduling issues for engineering workers, since their rosters will have had to be re-jigged.

It’s clear that the cost, time and resource implications of this incident were vast. That’s before taking into consideration just how much worse the incident could have been.

In its report, RAIB notes that the driver of the tractor wasn’t aware of the requirement to phone the signal operator to check it was safe to cross. They had not been briefed. RAIB concludes that this is most likely a result of the land owner on either side of the crossing failing to brief users of the crossing in a way which resulted in its correct use. Rail staff were unaware of this until shortly before the incident.

So, significant upheaval, in terms of time and cost, was created because of a simple lack of communication and safety briefings. How can such a situation be avoided?

Having the ability to evidence that training has been delivered, briefings have been given and that communication is recorded, is a major step in the right direction. The RAIB report notes that they were unable to find evidence of any call from the tractor driver to the signal operator, nor that the tractor driver had been briefed on the need to do so. Creating an evidence trail of such activities enables organisations to determine where failings have occurred and rectify them, preferably before an accident happens.

The technology exists to underpin such processes. Keeping a robust record of training and briefings can help to ensure that incidents such as this are avoided. And they are a lot cheaper than repairing a Class 66 locomotive.

Complete workforce management solutions can support your training, competency management, recruitment and scheduling. This helps organisations to keep a complete audit trail of activities, ensuring that tasks, such as safety briefings, are conducted. Human error, however, is inevitable, so they can also assist in the short-term rescheduling of staff to emergency activities such as track repair in the wake of such incidents.

Operating the UK’s rail infrastructure is a complex process which requires the monitoring of several moving and independent parts, as this incident highlights. It involves everyone from land owners to rail operators and anyone who needs to cross the tracks. Keeping tabs on the communication with all parties is difficult. Having a system in place to record communications and aspects such as safety briefing enables operators to keep track of who needs to know what and when.

The cost of not having such a system in place can run beyond the financial. The incident at Kisby could easily have been a fatal one. Is it acceptable that such an avoidable incident occurred through simple ignorance of the required process for safely crossing a railway track? The process can be managed and alerts can be created to ensure that everyone receives the briefings they need to receive. The cost of not doing this can be far greater than the cost of implementing the software that helps to avoid such incidents.

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum