Working in such a technically demanding industry, it’s essential that we keep our skills and knowledge up to date.

We run a comprehensive in-house training programme, to ensure colleagues have the right skills for the job.

We also have a skills succession programme, in which younger colleagues shadow older, more experienced engineers, to ensure knowledge is retained within the business when engineers retire.

This approach of teaching new dogs old tricks ensures we can face the future with confidence.

Future WOW is the collective name we have given to a major overhaul of our IT systems and underlying processes.

The project will allow us to build our own apps, run off regulatory reports at the touch of a button and make better business decisions.

All parts of our business are involved. By bringing consistency to the way we gather, store and use data, and implementing a fantastic user experience, we can dramatically improve efficiency.

The first Future WOW projects are now being implemented, and there is lots more to come.

Developing a more flexible, front-line workforce means we can hit our performance out of the park, even as budgets get tighter.

In 2017/18 we began to expand the skills-set of our engineers, so they can turn their hand to different types of jobs, rather than specialise in one area.

We also changed the way we plan and deliver jobs, by appointing managers who have an overview of everything that happens on their patch – allowing greater co-ordination and less silo working.

The benefits are already being felt – with the flexible approach helping us deliver a business-as-usual service during the Beast from the East and freezing temperatures in early 2018.

In 2017, we plan to recruit sixteen new operational apprentices and nine apprentices in office roles.

Muzamel Ahmed joined NGN as a graduate mechanical engineer in 2016, and is relishing the opportunity to build a career.

The variety of the work, combined structured programme of training and goal setting, has proved a great launch pad.

Muzamel said:  “The graduate scheme has given me the perfect start to my engineering career with its well-balanced and structured targets.”

In our business, flexibility is vital. Workloads can ramp up dramatically in winter months, when the network is under greater strain.

In response, we’ve developed a bespoke training course so that our engineering teams can become qualified Gas Safe Registered engineers in by building on their existing experience. This enables them to provide back-up to our full-time emergency engineers when needed.

The move allows us to ramp up our quota of qualified, professional engineers on the ground, if the weather is unkind to us this winter.

Like many large organisations, the way we store and manage data needs improving.

We are mid-way through a major project to replace a variety of legacy systems with a single, elegant solution. Colleagues will be able to access real-time information on just about any aspect of the business, through an easy-to-use interface.

A huge amount of work is going on to clean up existing data and move it to the new system, which will be rolled out towards the end of 2018.

It will allow us to make quicker and better informed business decisions, right across the company.

Historically, we have owned our own IT infrastructure and worked under a model where maintenance and support were outsourced.

Our move to a Cloud based system is making it easier and faster for us to invest in improvements that we need to make for customers and stakeholders, rather than what is available through an existing supply chain.

We estimate these improvement will save around £2m per year, but more importantly, the changes will mean we are in real control of IT and data, so we can be faster in responding to our customers and to emerging business needs.

Bringing our development team in-house is also delivering wider benefits, with the team being able to harness the kind of cutting-edge app technology our colleagues and customers are used to.

Over the past year we have shared our approach with Wales and West Utilities, SGN and Leeds City Council, among other organisations.

Working in such a technically demanding industry, it’s essential that we keep our skills and knowledge up to date.

We run a comprehensive in-house training programme, to ensure colleagues have the right skills for the job. Training has a strong practical focus, and combines practical on site exercises and classroom based learning. We use latest technology, such as Google glass, to bring topics to life.

We also have a skills succession programme, in which younger colleagues shadow older, more experienced engineers, to ensure knowledge is retained within the business when engineers retire. This approach of teaching new dogs old tricks ensures we can face the future with confidence.