Learning and innovating with Rijkswaterstaat Noord-Nederland performance contracts

Rijkswaterstaat Noord-Nederland uses performance contracts for the maintenance of roads, service areas and ferry ports, and for handling disasters. These are agreements that RWS concludes with contractors for all regular and plannable maintenance and incident response. Witteveen+Bos assisted in managing these performance contracts in the northern provinces from April 2018 to May 2021.

The work included coordinating the Request for Change (RFC) process and reviewing the contractor’s requests for the issue of performance statements. This leads to the correct and lawful completion of these contracts. The assignment focuses mainly on customer needs, so that we looked beyond the product requirements. A number of new products and methods have also been developed to contribute to future performance contracts. Among these are an EMVI monitor, developed for better monitoring of the extent to which a contractor meets the EMVI promises offered. An RFC coordination environment has also been developed in GRIP. This environment helps to monitor the various statuses of the (more than 300) RFCs, as well as the execution lead times. In this project several young Witteveen+Bos employees were given the opportunity to work directly with Rijkswaterstaat on managing the performance contracts. This allowed young colleagues to gain a great deal of knowledge and experience in a short space of time. Thanks in part to their fresh outlook, various adjustments were made to the working methods of the requested products.