How do you keep the trains running through a global pandemic?

In the busy London commuter belt served by Govia Thameslink Railway (GTR), around a million passengers depend on rail journeys to get to and from work every day. In early March 2020, when the extent of the COVID-19 crisis started to become evident, GTR urgently began planning how to keep its essential services running for key workers and colleagues.

Establishing DataHub

GTR has extensive reporting requirements which need to be completed so the business knows how it is performing and can report on how the services are operating. Last year, the industry changed how UK train operating companies (TOCs) report performance metrics for journeys. Prior to April 2019, TOCs reported on the public performance measure (PPM), which assessed a train’s punctuality over the length of the journey. This changed in April 2019 to the On-Time measure; the punctuality percentage of recorded station stops arrived at “on time” – either early or less than one minute after the scheduled time – in Great Britain.

This change was the original driver for GTR to create its DataHub: a single source of truth for internal reporting that would enable GTR to automate the KPI visualisation exercise. The TOC had been building a business intelligence platform on Azure with Power BI for 12 months before the pandemic struck.

By March 2020, 90 percent of the required performance information was automatically flowing into the DataHub to create a single point of truth in as near real time as possible. Jonathan Galloway, BI Consultant at GTR, explains, “We wanted to help create efficiencies in the Joint Performance Team. Rather than spending time manually handling data exports and number crunching, when the business needs them analysing the data and taking action; delivering value to the business.”

While integrating numerous legacy data sources, Galloway’s team engaged with teams across the business to officially validate the data, initiate automated reporting and begin thinking about analysis that could make a difference. For example, working with the commercial team to create and analyse various data sources to revisit and renegotiate a long-standing contract.

Facing COVID-19

Real-time performance data is now made available to leadership and managers for self-service analysis and automated reporting. This enables decision-making based on live and accurate data, served up on dashboards on a Microsoft Surface Hub in the office or on a PC or phone at home. Everyone is working from the same data now which makes it easier to identify trends, issues and likely causes.

The work to establish this flexible and agile platform that supports insight-driven decision making proved to be both invaluable and incredibly prescient when the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

The leadership team knew early on that COVID-19 had the potential to disrupt the essential services GTR delivers. “As soon as it became clear how bad Coronavirus could be, we needed to prepare to deploy additional support at the drop of a hat,” remembers Aidan Shanahan, Head of Information Technology at GTR.

While many staff at GTR’s three offices in Kings Cross, Croydon and Monument could work from home, GTR’s frontline staff needed to remain available in stations, depots and onboard trains to support customers still travelling. It became essential to understand staffing levels and staffing availability to enable effective planning and ensure minimal disruption to services.

Power App from concept to company-wide deployment within days

GTR had already understood the value Power Apps delivers to an organisation. Earlier in the year, it had recruited a Power App Developer so it could build and govern a Citizen Developer programme across the business. With the rapid change in priorities, GTR reoriented this resource to its COVID-19 response. Shanahan says, “He was certainly thrown in at the deep end but supported the development and deployment of Power Apps within days!”

Even before lockdown was announced, GTR quickly built an application using Power Apps that enabled managers and staff to record staff absences and sickness. Using the application, local managers were able to quickly and easily access guidance documents, hosted in SharePoint, from GTR’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr Illeana St Claire. The data was gathered and could be viewed in crucial dashboards, enabling service planning and faster decision-making throughout the pandemic.

Work then began to rollout a social distancing app that allowed all front-line colleagues to record how well social distancing rules were being observed at stations and on trains. To ensure drivers could access the new apps, a driver phonebook app was created to facilitate the remote deployment of modern Android smartphones to all drivers during the pandemic. Plus, to reassure GTR’s frontline teams, a further app showed up-to-date sanitisation records for all trains.

Toby Pielow, Power Apps Developer at GTR, was responsible for developing the apps. He says, “Microsoft Power Apps enables GTR to seamlessly connect data sources from multiple locations, empowering users to make well-informed business-critical decisions instantly. For me, the best thing about Power Apps is the flexibility it gives us, allowing an agile development environment to thrive.”

“In just a couple of days we created a series of Power Apps that helped plan for staff availability during the coronavirus pandemic, safeguarded staff by informing them of the sanitisation of the trains, and provided a desk-booking app to manage capacity in our COVID-19-secure offices.”

Aidan Shanahan, Head of Information Technology, Govia Thameslink Railway

How do you plan and inform people?

At the same time, Galloway’s team developed a series of COVID-19 dashboards using Power BI. They pulled together essential service usage information, such as gate lines into and out of stations and ticketing data as well as data from the Power Apps and on-premise HR system, to create an accurate self-service basis for strategic decision making.

“Once we had the staffing projections for key roles, we could ensure we could serve our passengers and key workers with revised timetables and inform people,” explains Shanahan. “Passenger numbers dropped 97% on lockdown. Once we’d done the first big step down, we tried to tune things better: our stakeholder team helped us understand where the hospitals and health centres are on our routes, which keyworker services to prioritise and how we could support around shift times.”

Leadership, planners and managers could access this information anytime, anywhere on their phones and laptops. Key dashboards were also published on the company’s SharePoint intranet for wider visibility.

The Teams of the future

GTR’s vision of the Microsoft-enabled modern workplace has been a springboard for fast-track digitalisation of a kind that kept the rest of the business working throughout the pandemic. While the insights and dashboards based on Microsoft Azure and Power BI have helped to keep GTR’s trains running, GTR’s rollout of Microsoft 365 productivity tools and Always On VPN has helped to keep GTR’s office functions on track.

The existing VPN solution was set up to allow around 300 staff to work remotely. Shanahan explains, “We were coming to the end of a Windows 10 rollout, so we quickly switched to Microsoft Always On VPN. Within a week, we stood this up to support 1,000 seats. After a week change freeze, whilst we did a timetable change, we extended that to 2,000 seats.”

GTR’s use of Microsoft Teams grew exponentially during April: leaping from around 200 active call participants to consistently over 1,000 and from around 200 channel messages per day to over 10,000.

“Microsoft tools have enabled the business to successfully operate through the pandemic,” says Shanahan “Many people have pretty much lived on Teams. People have grabbed it and run with it and I don’t see that changing when people do go back into the office.”

Working from home and facilitating COVID-secure offices

Today, new guidelines mean the offices must operate at around a quarter of their previous capacity. To assist in ensuring these spaces are COVID-19-secure for staff, Pielow turned to Power Apps again. A new app now enables staff to book desks in advance, ensuring a safe space is available to those who want it.

Shanahan explains, “We can now be more agile. This was delivered quickly, instead of buying an alternative off the shelf. As a result, it has delivered a significant and tangible financial reward.”

Now the business is looking forward to ways in which the digital transformation journey of the last few months can drive further strategic improvements, especially around data insights.

Shanahan concludes, “Jonathan and his team have built GTR a strong foundation using DataHub as a service. This puts us in a great position to build on; automating the ingestion of additional data sources and leveraging data to better serve our passengers. It will also act as a secure source of GTR data for collaboration with industry partners.”

“Many people have pretty much lived on Teams. People have grabbed it and run with it and I don’t see that changing when people do go back into the office.”

Aidan Shanahan, Head of Information Technology, Govia Thameslink Railway