Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP) for South West Water

Case study

Client: South West Water
Scheme Value: -
Fee Value: -
Start Date: -
End Date: -

Workstream Lead: Jack Mumford-Tuner
Project Lead: Jonathan Wright
Project Team: Adam Figg
Services: Project & Programme Management, Asset Management

Problem / Opportunity

Over the past two years, Aqua consultants advised and mapped out an approach to develop an effective Water Resources Management Plan (WRMP) for South West Water (SWW). Aqua created a WRMP24 programme and resourced this with Aqua secondee expertise.

All water companies in England and Wales must provide Water Resources Management Plans in accordance with the Water Resources Planning Guidance.

Solution

We developed & defined a process to undertake options appraisal for both water supply and demand options in the WRMP24. Aqua provided a full time supply and demand option development team consisting of 5 full time employees who were seconded into South West Water for ~2 years. This team ran the options appraisal process for the WRMP24 plan.

Aqua defined a process for identifying, screening and assessing all the supply options for inclusion in the WRMP. Options that make the feasible list are subject to detailed environmental, engineering and water resource benefit assessment. Some key deliverables were subcontracted to subject matter specialists. The programme of work was scoped and project managed from inception to completion.

Area of Focus: Supply Option Deliverables & Data

The objective was to provide a data set that met the requirements for SWW investment delivery process and align to WRMP planning principles.

To achieve this, the Aqua team defined the high-level option scope, design process, inputs and deliverables. A series of subcontractors were project managed by Aqua to develop concept engineering proposals, strategic environmental assessments, costing and carbon assessments for the supply options.

The Aqua team acted as an interface between SWW and each consultant discipline (design, environmental, carbon, costing) managing the programme delivery to ensure internal and regulatory deadlines were met.

A process map was developed and communicated to ensure all parties were understanding of the client requirements and to show a clear methodology for delivery of complex data and the interdependencies between multiple data sources.

A Master Data Sheet was designed, developed and implemented by Aqua asset management specialists to ensure capture and storage of the require data outputs in a suitable format. This facilitated governance reviews, audits and supported efficient population of WRMP and PR24 data tables.

The Aqua project manager held weekly progress meetings with the subcontractors to track progress, resolve risk and record activity completion on the project programme. This information was provided in the form of update reports at weekly management meetings attended by SWW senior leaders.

Outcome

Using project management principles, the Aqua project manager was able to successfully deliver the client requirements on time, to budget and to the level of quality expected of the client and regulatory bodies.

The Aqua secondee’s, working closely with the SWW water resources team produced multiple chapters and technical appendices that made up the SWW Water Resources Management Plan24.

Shared Capability

Aqua provided specialist resource skilled in different disciplines to second into the client organisation ensuring the delivery of key management plans under tight timescales.

Aqua supported SWW with the management of key stakeholders including Ofwat, the Environment Agency and Natural England during the WRMP production to ensure a robust and acceptable plan was produced and published.