A joined-up digital future for the NDA

Understanding the NDA’s digital transformation needs

The NDA is the non-departmental public body currently responsible for managing the clean-up and decommissioning of 17 legacy civil nuclear sites in the UK. It has around 380 permanent staff and works through a network of subsidiary operating companies, many of which were originally separate organisations involved in managing different sites and facilities around the UK. In recent years, it has taken steps to simplify its structure, merging some of its subsidiary operating companies and giving them a shared identity as the NDA group.

As part of its ongoing organisational transformation, the NDA wanted to adopt a unified approach to managing information to enable and enhance stakeholder co-operation throughout the companies in the group. Having carried out a digital benchmarking review which highlighted limitations in its existing digital capability, it is now committed to establishing a "more informed, safer, more responsive, and digitalised NDA group, accessing information and data where, when, and how it is needed."

Designing a collaborative and aligned digital strategy

The NDA asked Mott MacDonald to help it develop this vision and to guide its strategy for becoming a more digitally mature organisation. This involves an agile transformation of business culture and practices, and developing integrated, optimised processes across the group.

Our digital, project management, and nuclear industry experts worked together with the NDA to understand its needs and deliver this programme. We worked with digital leaders across the NDA group to design and deliver both the strategy, and a suite of supporting documentation to assist with its effective adoption.

To allow for all stakeholders to work together towards one digital vision, all the business functions – ICT, cyber, information governance, people and skills, RD&I and asset management – had to be strategically aligned, and their inter-dependent strategies considered.

Building digital maturity through skills, governance, and data

We assessed the digital maturity of the group to develop a plan for continuous improvement and re-assessment, establishing key digital delivery principles and creating digital roadmaps for each function. We developed an NDA digital skills and competency framework and conducted gap analysis, which recommended the creation of a digital community of interest to facilitate ongoing digital improvement and upskilling, aligning this with digital project delivery.

The programme was data-intelligence driven, with clearly defined data standards which enabled collaboration and integration across operating companies. Data was reviewed and assessed to ensure connectivity of all stakeholders’ data, and this formed the basis of a group-wide data strategy.

The team created effective governance steering and working groups with representation from all relevant functions and operating companies. This unlocked common digital design principles and enabled the digital vision and strategy to be truly collaborative. The final outputs were endorsed by the NDA’s leadership team.

Enabling long-term benefits and future innovation

We delivered a strategy based on collaboration that will enable the whole NDA group to realise the benefits of digital convergence. By providing the right information to the right people at the right time, it will enable more effective and informed decision-making to support the NDA’s mission of cleaning up nuclear sites safely, securely, and cost-effectively. The aligned approach will realise benefits incrementally over a number of years and pave the way for future digital innovation. It is already evidencing benefits from collaborations by reducing duplication across the group, leveraging process automation and sharing knowledge and information.

Through implementing the digital strategy, the NDA is able to adopt and make more effective use of modern infrastructure and tools. It is also digitally upskilling its workforce and future-proofing its teams, building a capable, resilient, and agile group ready to face both existing and new challenges.