Kier

Before Morta, every change to a deliverable on one of Kier’s custodial projects meant saving an Excel file, versioning it, and redistributing it. Across four projects, that added up to roughly 5,760 TIDP document revisions per year — all of which vanished overnight. Changes are now made once and visible to everyone immediately through their filtered views.

For the first time, Kier has a single consistent reporting mechanism that spans its custodial projects. Five Power BI dashboards embedded in Morta provide views across the portfolio: project overview with 30+ suppliers and delivery status by originator, CDE delivery status with new revisions per month and suitability codes, IDP delivery status with a plan-versus-actual date slider and automated QA checks on filename fields, CDE search, and data quality metrics. All of it pulls from the same standardised data structure.

Data confidence climbed as well — controlled column types, pick lists from reference tables, and automated document numbering ensure integrity at the point of entry. Teams can no longer accidentally break formulas, overwrite data, or introduce the inconsistencies that were endemic with Excel. And the solution works regardless of which CDE a project uses — whether Viewpoint, Asite, or anything else, the same Morta templates and reporting structure apply.

Kier’s information delivery planning story starts in 2012, on HMP Oakwood, where there was no TIDP or MIDP process at all — just an information release schedule and a general hope that the right documents would arrive at the right time. By the time HMP Five Wells came along in 2019, Thomas Crossley had built something much more serious: interlinked Excel spreadsheets for TIDPs, linked to a master MIDP, with metadata scraped from Viewpoint and piped into Power BI. It was a genuine step forward. But Excel at that scale fights back. With 12,000+ documents planned across the custodial programme, errors crept in constantly — duplicate document numbers, broken formulas when rows were inserted, data that looked right but wasn’t. Every change to a deliverable meant saving the file, versioning it, and redistributing it to everyone affected. The manual effort was so punishing that James Franklin had to hire Thomas’s identical twin brother Matt on a part-time basis just to keep one project running. And there was no permission control whatsoever — anyone could open a TIDP and add columns, change formulas, or delete rows with no audit trail.

The breakthrough was flipping the entire information flow upside down. Instead of collecting individual TIDPs from subcontractors and amalgamating them upward into a master MIDP — the Excel way, which meant chasing spreadsheets and manually federating data — Kier now starts at the top with a Programme MIDP and filters downward. The programme view filters by project code to produce Project MIDPs, which filter again on originator and discipline into Supply Chain TIDPs and Internal Kier TIDPs. Everything is connected through table relationships, so data entered by a subcontractor automatically rolls up to the programme level without anyone touching it.

Permissions replaced the chaos of open Excel files. Every user gets exactly three tags: project code, originator code, and discipline code. When John Smith logs in to work on HMP Channings Wood for Baker Hicks as an electrical engineer, he sees only Channings Wood electrical deliverables for Baker Hicks — nothing else. Supply chain TIDPs use pick lists populated from reference tables, so suppliers select from controlled options rather than typing free text. The internal Kier TIDP goes further, with automatic unique reference generation via webhooks that eliminates manual document numbering entirely.

The Viewpoint API connection pulls all document metadata — including superseded revisions — daily at 6am, giving the team a live plan-versus-actual view without anyone checking the CDE manually. A final auto-calculated column catches documents uploaded to the CDE that aren’t on any TIDP, surfacing unplanned deliverables that would otherwise slip through.

Kier’s journey to this point spans over a decade, and it was far from a straight line. From no formal IDP process at HMP Oakwood in 2012, to Thomas Crossley’s ambitious Excel-based semi-automation at HMP Five Wells, to the introduction of Morta via Rob Jackson of BonBryan Digital through the Ministry of Justice work — each stage built on the last. Ashley Dawson and Thomas Crossley built the Morta solution together, just two people, in six to eight weeks. The initial deployment covered Full Sutton and the Accelerated House Block Development Programme, with ongoing organic growth as they refined templates and added capabilities.

Over 30 information suppliers across the custodial programme now input directly into Morta, each with a filtered view showing only their deliverables and controlled pick lists guiding data entry. Kier has also been collaborating with Andy Boutle at ALEC, sharing ideas and templates between the two organisations.

The biggest lesson, as James Franklin put it, was that success is mainly about people and culture, not technology. The technology enables the process, but adoption depends on making the change feel natural and beneficial to the teams using it every day. Once the benefits were explained, people were normally along for the ride.