The future of Construction Project Delivery

Michelle Lowe, Qandor member and founder of Redshell Consulting, writes about the stagnation in the construction industry.

Construction project delivery, well, it’s a tricky business, isn’t it? Having been on the front line of construction project delivery for over 25 years, it has become clear that the challenges we face on every single project are always the same. It frustrates the hell out of me, and I’m sure it frustrates the hell out of you too.

Our project delivery can be clunky at best, and all out warfare at worst.

The Construction Industry matters, it really does. It generates some £110 billion per annum to the UK economy, employing more than 10% of our workforce — more than 3 million people each year. Our industry has an impact that stretches much, much further than the financial. The built environment underpins our very environment, our health, our facilities and affects ourselves, our families, our neighbours and our souls. In both positive and negative ways. The industry is so fundamental and yet, sometimes, so inherently flawed.

So just how can we get our act together?

The inherent challenges we face on every project are particular to the industry, of course they are. But it’s high time we stopped accepting the challenges and difficulties as part of the process and looked at ways of overcoming these and taking our industry into the future.

Projects are stand-alone, in the main. Projects are far and wide. Now, the site and location of the project isn’t necessarily the problem here. The real challenges come with the logistics, coordination, carbon footprint and everything else that arises when every single independent piece of the project, the resource, the labour, the plant, the materials has to independently be transported, arranged and delivered to the project, causing huge logistics, coordination and time risk. We know just how much time we lose here.

Human involvement in any project causes problems, human error, human judgement, and sometimes even downright human corruption.

These continued underlying themes cause our project delivery to stutter, to stumble, to fail. Our reputation is in tatters, our projects are delivered late and over budget, our quality and product suffer. It’s a massive waste of time and resource, of energy, of cost and time.

Interestingly, or worryingly, I came across the following fact recently. The construction industry has seen a productivity improvement of just 1% pa. over the last 20 years. Just 1%. Let’s just let that sink in. Despite our BIM, despite our modelling, despite our partnering agreements. Our industry hasn’t moved on a jot. We are lagging far far behind and it’s a real shame.

So just how do we drive this industry of ours forward. What can be done. We need to change how we deliver our projects in a fundamental way. The movement towards modular, MMC, panel build, and volumetric construction is not news, but it is so fundamental in eradicating so many of the inherent challenges we face on every project. The logistics, the coordination, the movement — if every single element required for the delivery can be reduced if and when we use off-site manufacture and systemise even a part of our build.

The project at Croydon has received a huge amount of press, and rightly so. It is currently the worlds’ largest and tallest modular project, and it’s right here on our doorstep. A whopping 1546 modular units have created 526 new homes in a staggering 35 weeks. The delivery has been nothing short of incredible and we have many lessons to learn here. Just consider all of the issues that have been eradicated from the process by moving towards this type of delivery.

Collaborative technologies. Again, a massive movement towards the inclusion of technological solutions to manage our projects has started. I’ve come across many in recent times and the issue I see is that many only deal with part of the process. As we know, project delivery is a huge holistic effort of many different moving parts, what we need is a single app, a single platform that takes the full project delivery from all sides into consideration.

Fonn Construction have developed something that goes some way towards this. A single source of truth, in real time, live information, sharing and collaboration. Now, this is a game changer. We all know how much time, energy and resource goes into unpicking the truth during project delivery, and steering the project back on track. This would really help drive us forward.

We are not just moving towards collaborative technologies and modular construction because it’s bang on trend at the moment; as Mark Farmer has been telling us, it’s time to modernise or die. We need to move our project delivery forward simply because it’s the right thing to do. It’s for the good of the project and for the good of our industry. And wouldn’t we all benefit from that?

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