NW3168 - Project Risk Tool

Northumbrian Water Limited (NWL) provide water and sewerage services to just under 4.4 million people operating principally in the North-East of England, Essex, and Suffolk. It is NWL's vision 'to be the most digital water company in the world'. Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) is a large and diverse organisation which employs a varied set of processes to achieve its business outcomes. Our organisation is entering a period of increasing scale and complexity, and our current Excel‑based approach creates challenges with consistency, auditability, quantitative analysis, and real‑time visibility. To address these issues, NWL intends to procure a centralised Risk Management Tool that reflects our business, functional and non‑functional requirements. Our ambition is to embed a consistent minimum standard for risk and opportunity management across all levels of the organisation, while maintaining flexibility to support differing risk types, project complexities and operational environments. The new solution must allow NWL to manage risk at project, programme, and portfolio level with configurable hierarchies, strong governance controls, audit trails, validation rules, automated workflows, and clear ownership and accountability. The tool must support qualitative and quantitative analysis, including interaction with Monte‑Carlo simulation to enable QSRA/QCRA, ensuring NWL can reduce reliance on external consultants and improve the agility of in‑house modelling. It must also support configurable scoring, heatmaps, pre‑ and post‑mitigation views, dependencies, assumptions, exclusions, and risk and opportunity management across all levels of hierarchy. As the solution will be used by a wide and diverse user base, it must provide an intuitive, user‑friendly interface that can be easily navigated and adopted, with accessibility‑aligned design, strong searchability, a training/sandpit area, and clear help and guidance materials. It must also support controlled access for external users (e.g., contractors) and role‑based permissions to ensure secure collaboration. To meet NWL's operational and digital integration expectations, the system must offer open API‑based links to corporate platforms including (but not limited to) O365/Power BI, Active Directory, Oracle Fusion, and other related systems. Bulk uploads, automated data exchange, scheduling of tasks, notifications, escalations, and workflow automation are essential to improving efficiency and reducing manual effort across risk management activities. The solution must be scalable to support 1,000 active projects, with capacity for at least 500 risks per project and a minimum of 500 concurrent users, ensuring sustainability as NWL grows. Auditability, resilience, data retention, lifecycle management, and the ability to retain historical risk information for lessons learned and long‑term organisational insight are critical requirements. Suppliers should be able to demonstrate strong hierarchy management, workflow capability, governance controls, reporting and dashboarding, including automated distribution, heatmaps, drill‑down and drill‑up views, and flexible output formats for audit and assurance purposes. Solutions that offer high configurability, strong training support, sandpit environments, and effective licence models are considered strong candidates based on market assessment. Initial contract term 5 years. NWL intends to award a contract aligned to a 5+3+3 model (up to 11 years in total). Implementation is expected to begin in December 2027, following contract award, with a planned go‑live in January - March 2027. Future phases may introduce additional capability dependent on business priorities. Target Contract start date 02/11/2026.