Interface Insight

Q: “Why do bad things happen to good projects?”

A: “Interfaces, interfaces, interfaces…
it’s where projects always go wrong.”

Interface Insight exists to help major infrastructure project teams to make more informed design decisions, more quickly and more reliably, when it matters most, by bringing a proactive mentality and a ‘whole-systems-thinking’ approach to Interface Control and Change Management.
We systematically map out projects’ interface details – seeking to uncover the hidden ones before they cause problems – modelling ‘ripple effects’ across the overall system. Understanding these multi-layered inter-relationships enables informed management decisions to be made in a timely manner, and ‘with both eyes open’.
This approach has been developed from ~15 years of working on major offshore renewables projects, which each involve many multi-national organisations. For example, 10-15 different large companies all coming together to design, fabricate, install, commission and then operate (plus, in the future, to decommission) hundreds of 200m+ tall wind turbines, over hundreds of square kilometres of seabed, connected together with offshore cable networks through offshore substations, and transmitted back to shore, then plugged into the National Grid. The numbers of inter-dependencies – between components, between organisations and between phases of projects – is enormous. However, ‘there are always problems with interfaces’ is a common complaint across the industry, and it’s typically the ‘hidden interfaces’ – where people involved in one part of a project don’t necessarily realise the full consequences of decisions that they make on other people working on different parts of a project – where the biggest problems come.

The new approach being developed by Interface Insight seeks to drastically reduce these schedule delays and cost over-runs, by helping to get every Interface In Sight: because interfaces that aren’t visible, won’t be managed.

Since starting in 2024, the applicability of the approach has been recognised far beyond the offshore wind industry: it is relevant (and can be applied to) all large and complex projects, for example low energy buildings, construction sites, transportation networks, vehicle design, etc: basically any project where multiple different organisations have to work together and interact with each other to collectively deliver a successful project outcome.