Calba

IWA 2026 · Stand 320

Calba in the water industry

Improved plant and materials. Faster insights. New construction techniques.

The best engineering deserves the best ways of working

How teams work matters as much as the solution itself. We help your engineering investment pay off.

We enable you to get to site faster, with fewer surprises. We call this Building to Collaborate.

Download our thought paperTalk to us

01Why Calba

We deliver better outcomes in complex environments.

New plant, insights and techniques all help, but none of them change the time between identifying a need and addressing it. That is decided by how well people and organisations work together.

  1. 01

    We enable collaborative teams

    How a solution gets planned and delivered matters as much as the solution itself. We make sure teamwork gets the same care as delivery.

  2. 02

    We work in the gaps

    Between teams. Between organisations. Between a request and a decision. That’s where months go missing.

  3. 03

    We address causes, not symptoms

    We find the challenges, address them, then build habits that stop them coming back.

  4. 04

    We build lasting capability

    Everything we do is built with you and shaped by your context. We coach your people to work more effectively.

Our work is inside teams, between teams and between organisations.

01Why Calba · The gap

Where time is lost on capital programmes

Improved plant and materials
Faster insights
New construction techniques

The industry’s investment lands here

A need is identifiedOn site, delivering

Waiting on people and organisations

Handoffs, decisions that stall, blockers nobody owns

Doing the work

Design and build

This is where we work.Shorten the left-hand block and everything downstream of it moves.

Inside teams

People dedicated to the work rather than split across programmes, and the skills to run their own improvement.

Between teams

Hard handoffs replaced by integrated, cross-functional working, so design and construction knowledge arrives early.

Between organisations

One shared view of the work and a rhythm of joint review, so decisions get made where no single manager has authority.

02Our track record

Better outcomes from real programmes

“We got to site in a third of the time, almost three years faster, and with scope to go further still.”
Lynsey Lennon, Unit Owner
Improving Urban Waters, Scottish Water

Scottish Water · Improving Urban Waters

Get to site faster

An alliance of five partner organisations, working as one team instead of five. We coached them to plan together, be transparent about the flow of work, and make decisions together. They now get to site in a third of the time.

Scottish Water · Treated Water Storage

Use capital budget more effectively

By making work visible, we surfaced delays and blockers. A regular decision-making rhythm brought the right issues to the right people, enabling action and releasing a multi-million pound budget.

Scottish Water · Manage Leakage

Raise team performance, not headcount

To tackle new challenges, we coached teams to collaborate, create transparency, and manage flow, guided by the principle of Stop Starting, Start finishing.

Scottish Water · Improving Urban Waters

Get to site faster

The situation
A capital programme addressing 108 agreed storm overflow needs by December 2027, delivered by an enterprise alliance of five partners: around 150 people and more than 30 skill sets.
What was in the way
The partners were contractually aligned, but work still moved in a relay of hard handoffs, driving delay, rework and cost.
What we did
Working with the unit owner and every partner’s teams, we coached the alliance towards integrated, cross-functional teams, helped them build a shared, live view of the work across all five organisations, and made joint reviews part of the working rhythm. We stayed until they could sustain it without us.
What came of it
Projects now get to site in a third of the time and leave site up to 50% faster, so the same people deliver more of the programme.
Recognition
Partnership of the Year, Water Industry Awards 2025. Now Scottish Water’s reference model for SR27.
Shared visibility enabled faster decisions, unlocking millions in budget and avoiding hundreds of thousands in future costs.

Scottish Water · Treated Water Storage

Use capital budget more effectively

The situation
A complex, multi-site capital programme delivered through several construction partners and teams across the organisation. Progress on it feeds straight into regulatory reporting.
What was in the way
Projects were blocked and progress was stalled. Funding remained allocated to work that was no longer needed.
What we did
We introduced Kanban boards to create a shared live view of the work. We quantified the cost of delay and created a repeatable approach to unblocking projects, bringing the right people together to make faster decisions and address the underlying issues.
What came of it
Millions of pounds of budget unlocked from jobs no longer required, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of future blocked-job cost avoided.

Scottish Water · Manage Leakage

Raise team performance, not headcount

The situation
Nine operational area teams finding losses you cannot see, right across Scotland. A decade of success had already taken out the easy leakage, so the challenge was better hidden every year.
What was in the way
Each area used its own spreadsheets, which limited shared visibility and coordination. It was difficult to track work consistently, and investigations that found no leak were sometimes deprioritised as new work began.
What we did
We formalised the informal groups into cross-functional teams and worked together on a planning rhythm that pools what people know about an area before anyone commits field days to it. Then we visualised the work across the areas and country in a common tool to enhance decisions and share learning.
What came of it
More investigations find a real leak, and time to resolution fell, on a network already worked hard for a decade.

Free paper

Building to Collaborate

How people and organisations on capital programmes can work together to get to site faster, with fewer surprises. Leave your details and we’ll send you a copy.

Cover of the Calba thought paper Building to collaborate: addressing the delivery system gap in multi-organisation infrastructure programmes

Come and talk to us

Want to bounce some ideas around?

Tell us where your work gets stuck. We will tell you honestly whether it is something we can help with.

Email hello@calba.com
Stand
320 · IWA World Water Congress
Email
hello@calba.com
Web
calba.com