Project Overview: Digitally enabling the Sellafield Infrastructure Strategic Alliance 

The Challenge: 

The Sellafield Infrastructure Strategic Alliance (ISA) is a long-term (15-year) partnership between Sellafield Ltd, Morgan Sindall Infrastructure, and Arup, responsible for delivering essential infrastructure at the Sellafield nuclear site. The ISA manages a £1.1 billion portfolio of infrastructure assets, including utilities such as: steam, electricity, water, gas, as well as civil infrastructure like roads and bridges. 

At the commencement of the ISA in 2013, the three alliance partners were very different in terms of their cyber security readiness, technical environments, and overall digital maturity. As a result, there was very little ability to seamlessly collaborate in the digital space between the partners at the commencement of the ISA. This significantly hindered efficient and effective working across the alliance.

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​The Solution: 

​Alliance joint-venture partners Morgan Sindall and Arup drew together a team of digital experts, comprising internal resources and specialist consultants to build a digital enabling service for the ISA. Members of the Fox & Associates team have variously been involved in the ISA as specialist consultants since 2014, and two consultants (Graham Morgan and Ben Curran) continue to provide services to ISA at the time of writing. 

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The services we and our team have provided cover the full ITIL service lifecycle, from creating the enterprise digital strategy and operating plans through to the design, build, rollout and support of a range of enabling collaboration services. These included: secure cloud platforms, reporting tools, data integration tools and services, preconstruction and engineering design collaboration tools, personnel management and compliance systems, contract management and procurement workspaces, amongst many others.​

 
Key Requirements: 

• Establish the appropriate governance to manage the ISA's digital service.

• Develop a strategy, operating model and procedures for the operation of the ISA's digital service.

• Mobilise a team of specialists to provide the service.

• Provide secure collaboration environments and toolsets that are available and accessible to all three partners, including solutions capable of working at Official-Sensitive marking.

• Ensure that the data held in those systems are protected to the minimum standards defined by NSCS and UK Government.

• Ensure that the risk of passage of a securely marked document into an environment or system accredited to a lesser security marking is mitigated to the maximum extent possible​.

• Provide secure network connections to site and partner offices.​

How we contributed: 

Strategy, governance, and team leadership: 

As members of Arup's digital discipline, our team's principal role has been to provide SME expertise in the establishment and operation of a digital service for ISA, including: 

• Establishing and leading the governance and operation of the service on behalf of the ISA, (with ultimate ownership and accountability resting with the client, Sellafield Ltd). 

• Capturing the requirements for the ISA's digital service.

• Managing the introduction of the solutions, which were provided by various vendors, as well as Sellafield's Information Services Organisation and its suppliers.

• Oversight of business change for the new solutions.

• Development of service strategies, e.g. Data Strategy, Cloud Strategy, GIS strategy, Framework Exit Strategy.

Technology & Infrastructure: 

Over the last ten years, the ISA digital team, led by Peter Fox on behalf of Arup, have developed a comprehensive range of services to enable secure partner collaboration across ISA, including: 

• Third party secure cloud platform deployed to all parties within 2 years (one of the first in Sellafield), enabling file sharing up to and including OFFICIAL marking between all alliance partners and their supply chains. This remains the formal document repository for ISA.

• Microsoft 365 Cloud platform deployed to all parties for working up to and including OFFICIAL marking, providing a number of key internal-facing services, including:

  • Intranet;

  • Personnel System to record SQEP and compliance;

  • Power BI reporting;

  • Risk management and analysis;

  • SharePoint file repository;

  • Data transformation and integration;

  • Process automation and integration.

Delivery & Impact: 

​The ISA has moved from a starting position of limited digital collaboration to one where the partners and members of their supply chains are able to securely collaborate in real time across a variety of platforms and tools. Many aspects of automation have been introduced into workflows. This has significantly improved efficiency in project delivery, and has also - importantly - improved safety by reducing the risk of adverse incidents caused by conflicts in document version control and reliance on manual processes.​

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Team members involved:

Aaron Bazler - Strategy, Transition and Exit Lead (Digital)

Ben Curran - Cyber Security Lead

Peter Fox - Digital Strategy and Service Lead

Gill Hart - Communications Lead

Graham Morgan - Cloud platform Lead

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