Imperial Projects supported Imperial's contribution to the COVID Testing Alliance.
The testing facility, based at Imperial's St Mary’s Campus, comprised of the UKAS accredited Molecular Diagnostic Unit (MDU), led by Professor Myra McClure, and Professor Paul Freemont's high-throughput robotic platform for RNA extraction.
At the time, this facility created more than fifty new positions (some filled by graduates of Imperial’s MSc in Molecular Biology and Pathology of Viruses) and formed part of the Department of Health and Social Care's partnership with the London Testing Alliance, brought together by life science cluster MedCity in December 2020. It was part of the Health Service Laboratories - which included UCL, King’s Health Partners, and Queen Mary University of London - and helped increase COVID-19 testing capacity by 20,500 per day during the pandemic.
Imperial Projects provided project management support including:
- Contractual management and negotiations (with the main agreement running to 124 pages)
- Business continuity plan (13 pages)
- Project implementation
- Financial management - and high volume invoicing
- Procurement (over 300 POs)
- Coordinating input from multiple parties and running weekly meetings between representatives from all relevant departments
- Management tools including actions table, risk & issue register, RACI matrix
- Provision of templates
- Reporting to internal and external stakeholders