Interpreting the influencing factors within the decision making process between two train safety systems at ProRail

Abstract

This thesis explores the decision making process about the implementation of a new train safety system at ProRail. ProRail is responsible for the entire rail infrastructure of the Netherlands and faces tasks such as maintaining, optimising and replacing the infrastructure. One of ProRail’s current projects concerns aged train safety systems and they must be replaced before 2018, because the economic and technical life-cycle will come to an end. A general choice between two families of train safety systems has to be established. In addition, reliability and safety may diminish if the aged train safety systems are not replaced on time. One of ProRail’s incentives is to maintain maximum availability and safety of the railway infrastructure for transport companies, therefore this project can be considered as a very important project. The endurance of the decision making process constitutes ten years and is still ongoing. Therefore, we are intrigued to find out why the endurance of this process is relatively long and what factors contribute towards this issue, this research will help to answer this challenging question. To answer this explorative research question, two rounds of interviews were performed. The first round of semi-structured pre-interviews included three participants at various hierarchical levels. These pre-interviews were conducted to acquire background information about the decision making process. With the help of ‘discourse analysis’ most important features influencing the decision making process were found. The second round of semi-structured interviews is an extension of the first round of pre-interviews. In that case seventeen interviews were performed of all functional groups and hierarchical levels within ProRail that are involved in the decision making process. This round focused upon the factors that were gained during the first round of pre-interviews. Again discourse analysis was used as an analytical tool in order to establish key-points that have an effect upon the decision making process. Furthermore, a comprehensive literature study was conducted about five theories, namely principal-agent theory, contingency theory, resource dependency theory, transaction cost economics and social network theory. These theories were used in order to give meaning towards the results. This exploratory study adds perspective towards the decision making process at ProRail. The results from discourse analysis ascertained that organisational structure, communication, group decision making, inconsistency and culture influence the speed of the decision making process. It is worth mentioning that these key-points have a reinforcing effect upon one another. Furthermore, culture can be regarded as an independent variable influencing the decision making process. This explorative study adds new and improved perspectives on scientific and managerial aspects. Still, this study also bears with some limitations. Due to the small sample size, the most likely categories influencing the decision making process are far from generalization. Another important note, the study did not analyse external parties that are involved in the decision making process. However, the explorative nature of this study does supply a first large building block on this topic, which will have an informative character towards ProRail.