Network Rail’s mission is to run a safe, reliable and efficient railway. That means operating, repairing and developing 20,000 miles of track, 30,000 bridges, tunnels and viaducts, as well as managing 20 of the country’s largest stations.

With such responsibility for the safe transit of millions of people, competencies among staff are key.

Network Rail sought the help of comaea, developers of powerful and secure competency management software, to build skills frameworks for their Project Management community, to enable them to identify career steps and development areas.

“We wanted to put this front and centre, rather than it be a tick box exercise.” said Head of Professional Development, Barry Barrington.

As well as incorporating the Project Delivery Capability Framework (PDCF) (which describes the job roles, capabilities and learning for Project Delivery Professionals across government) comaea is now the home to the competency suite for project professionals across Capital Investment and Delivery.

Comaea’s ability to create and manage multiple frameworks complimented the various professions, allowing responsibilities to be assigned to users, enabling them to manage their own teams and to provide the right level of reporting. Incorporating learning into the system encouraged everyone to get on board with the journey.

Network Rail quickly saw that comaea’s system was useful for other functions within the business, enabling them to conduct workforce assessments and analytics.

They have since introduced comaea across Controls, Sponsorship, Document and Information Management, Risk and Value Management, and Planning professions.

Network Rail had a positive pull from the business early on because they had a defined business question to answer. Senior leadership was involved from the outset and they involved stakeholders by establishing working groups for the professions.In just two years, use of the system has more than doubled from 1,100 to current c.2,500 users, expanding into Technical Authority, Route Services, and Project Engineering.

“We chose comaea as it provides a direct link between competence and development options and has great reporting functionality,” said Barry. “Comaea were excellent in supporting us and we now have the likes of Technical Authority eager to get onto the system.”

The most utilised feature has been the reporting functionality (compliance report and team spider).

The ability to create other frameworks aligned to awarding bodies has been invaluable, and has included:

• Risk and Value being able to incorporate specific technical competence
• Document and Information Management have competence aligned to the public sector’s best practice and ISO standards, and
• Sponsorship have access to legislative as well as professional competences such as CDM, CSM and Interoperability

The biggest benefit Network Rail has realised so far, has been providing end users with access to learning offerings specific to their role and in line with competence requirements.

“Previously employees had no insight as to what the best opportunities were for them so would just apply for every course,” continued Barry. “Comaea really guides them to the option that’s right for them, meaning more targeted development that will help reduce oversubscription to course waiting lists.

“Time saving has been huge, especially as the system is cloud based and saves as you go. Our Competence Assessment Tool (CAT) used to take around 2.5 hours to complete and now this has reduced to just 45-minutes. With the same level of saving for other processes, we are realising a huge financial benefit across the board.”