Releasing the Potential of Your Value Chain: Is Your Organisation Ready for PAS 4010?
Most infrastructure clients ask the same question when productivity stalls: what is the supply chain getting wrong? It is usually the wrong place to start. Contractors, designers and suppliers respond to the signals they receive. They price what the client asks for and pace themselves to the client’s decisions. If those signals pull in different directions, no amount of supplier effort will release productivity.
PAS 4010:2026 Infrastructure – Improving productivity in infrastructure development and delivery puts client ownership at the centre of its approach. It asks the asset owner to show, in auditable terms, that it can lead the value chain. This article sets out how to assess that ability and capability using four phases: Discover, Diagnose, Design and Deliver.
Discover: start with purpose, not process
PAS 4010 treats productivity as two things: doing the right things (effectiveness) and doing those things right (efficiency) (ICE, 2026.).
Begin with a simple test. Can your leadership state, in one sentence, why your organisation wants higher productivity? Has it changed a major decision in the last twelve months? If not, your value chain has nothing to align with and will optimise for what it can see: price, programme and risk transfer.
The UK Government’s 10-Year Infrastructure Strategy reported that UK infrastructure productivity has fallen behind France, Germany and the United States (ICE, 2026). Your organisation has realised it must change. Discover is where you accept that your value chain cannot change until you do.
Diagnose: assess your own capability first
PAS 4010 centres on a strategy for productivity management (SPM). This is a document that runs for the life of a project and states, in clear and auditable terms, what each member of the value chain must do to improve productivity. A SPM only works if the asset owner can lead it. Assess your ability and capability before you ask anyone else to perform.
Score your organisation honestly against six questions:
• Ownership: does a named executive hold both accountability and authority for productivity?
• Definition: can you define and measure productivity consistently, covering effectiveness and efficiency?
• Decisions: can you make decisions at the pace your value chain needs, and hold scope steady once agreed?
• Commercial signals: do your procurement and contract terms reward productivity, or only price and risk transfer?
• Collaboration: do you build your strategy with your suppliers, with enough psychological safety for them to tell you where the client is the constraint?
• Assurance: can you embed productivity in your existing reporting and audit rather than add a new layer?
Look for root causes. Late or slow decisions, shifting scope, and misaligned incentives often start on the client side of the table. That is not blame. It is where the lever sits.
Design: build the team around the strategy
Constructing the team to deliver starts with the client. Design your SPM with the value chain, not for it. The specification expects teams to analyse the productivity drivers likely to boost or restrict performance, identify material constraints, risks and opportunities, and set targets against agreed benchmarks.
Three design choices decide whether this works:
• Select partners for productivity capability, not only price. Ask bidders how they improve productivity and how they would hold you to account.
• Align the commercial model so that gains are shared and client-caused delay is visible. This builds alliance maturity.
• Clarify roles. PAS 4010 sets out the roles of all value chain members, so the client’s own role in productivity is written down and open to audit.
Draw on the collective intelligence of the whole team. A Lean mindset helps: the people closest to the work see waste first, if the client makes it safe to say so.
Deliver: make it stick beyond the sponsor
Delivery is where intention meets the programme. Measure productivity against the baseline you set in Diagnose. Review it at the same board meetings that review cost, safety and programme. Treat each review as a continuous improvement loop.
Then test continuity. If your productivity sponsor moved on tomorrow, would the strategy survive? An ambition that leaves with one person was only ever a preference. Build the governance so that it does not.
The commercial case is plain. Fewer late or slow decisions, less rework and clearer incentives turn into cost certainty, programme certainty and better use of public or regulated money. These are tangible outcomes your board can measure.
Call to action: set the tone, the behaviour, and the pace
Clients set the tone, set the behaviour, and set the pace of any project. Your value chain will follow the signals you send. Before your next procurement or programme gate:
• Run an honest PAS 4010 capability assessment of your own organisation.
• Name the executive who owns productivity and delegate them authority.
• Ask your value chain to score you, and act on what they say.
Black Pear Advisory Ltd works with infrastructure clients to run this assessment and turn it into a Strategy for Productivity Management and a productivity management plan that the whole value chain owns.
References
BSI (2026) Draft PAS 4010:2026 Infrastructure: improving productivity in infrastructure development and delivery. Specification. Draft for public consultation. London: British Standards Institution. Available at: https://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com/projects/2024-03460 (Accessed: 19 October 2026).
ICE (2026) What is PAS 4010? London: Institution of Civil Engineers. Available at: https://ice.org.uk/news-views-insights/inside-infrastructure/what-is-pas-4010 (Accessed: 19 October 2026).
ICE (2026) ‘Strengthening what organisations already do’. ICE Knowledge Hub. Available at: https://knowledgehub.ice.org.uk/cpd/delivery-exc/pas-4010-compliance/ (Accessed: 19 October 2026).
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