New British Standard - BS 8534 Construction Procurement

After more than a year of work, coordinated by Constructing Excellence, the
draft for public comment is finally available for the new British Standard on Construction Procurement. The full title is "BS 8534 Construction procurement policies, strategies and procedures – Code of practice". This is designed to complement the recently published ISO 10845 on construction procurement, which focuses more on the procedures of tendering and selection. The British Standard is intended to provide an approach for developing a strategic procurement framework, taking advantage of the opportunity to codify and develop the many recipes for good construction practice that have emerged in recent years.

Here is an extract from the foreword: "In May 2006 a strategic workshop was held to establish what drives value in the construction industry. It and a subsequent series of specialist workshops were sponsored by the then Department of Trade and Industry and its successor, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, under the heading “Rethinking Standards in Construction” and organized by BSI and Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment. The main conclusion from the “Infrastructure” workshop was that there was definite potential for a new standard on procurement, provided it used the Office of Government Commerce process as a baseline."

Now is your chance to get involved! The Draft for Public Comment is available for you to download from the BSI website, at http://drafts.bsigroup.com/Home/Details/679. You will need to register on this site and choose a username and password, because the BS secretariat would like to know who is commenting, and they may want to get back to people for clarification.

Please, take the time to engage in this public consultation, because this new standard may soon be shaping the way that construction projects are organized!

Academics vs practitioners?

In discussing the opportunities for involving practitioners as authors in Construction Management and Economic a friend of mine challenged me because he got the impression that I was wanting to work in isolation from industry in case "they contaminated our minds and data"! I felt that he was misunderstanding my motives. Of course it would be disastrous if academics worked in isolation, I agree 100%. Our research is rightly grounded in the construction sector. It certainly is not the case that I think that practitioners contaminate our minds and data. I agreed 100%. "They" ARE our data! They are the source of the problems that we study, they may sometimes be the source of solutions that we seek to understand and, frequently, they are the very people that we study. No, there is no sense of isolation there.

My point was that our data subjects are not authors. It was to do with ensuring that our message is tailored to suit our audience. If the findings of our research are meaningful for industry, then we must, of course, present them to industry. But in the journal, we are academics talking to academics, in a fairly structured way guided by conventions that may not be appropriate for a wider audience. In the journal, we are focusing on theory-testing and/or theory-building, but not on the dissemination of our results to a wider audience. That is the crucial characteristic of an archival research journal like ours - to record advances in research. Other media already exist for recording and disseminating advances in practice. I think that is right, and it is helpful for everyone to have this distinction.

So, yes, it is precisely because practitioners define our field by their practices that I am interested in their contributions. But not because of their ability to carry out research projects with us. Of course, there are people who have a foot in both camps and I do come across practitioners who have done "proper" research that is reportable in our pages. But then they are generally writing as researchers, not as practitioners. So the boundary is blurred. The acid test for a research paper is simply this question: does it test or develop theory? If the answer is "yes", then we are interested. If it is "no", then we are not.

And, I also acknowledge that although this is the editorial policy now, it may not be the editorial policy forever, and it was not the policy many years ago. Everything is open to challenge and change!

Which construction procurement method is most popular?

This is a question that I am asked quite frequently. There are some surveys about this, too, but most of the stats are meaningless, because they sample such a very small proportion of the population. Given that there are literally hundreds of thousands of construction projects each year in the UK, sampling a few tens or even hundreds of them is never going to reveal much of a trend. Worse, the terms used to describe procurement routes are confusing and interchangeable. So you cannot even be sure that practitioners are ticking the correct boxes on the poorly-designed surveys that are used to ascertain these things. I do not think that it is a worthwhile exercise trying to figure out what is more or less popular. The reason I say this is that different procurement routes serve different purposes. To put it metaphorically, custard is not the same as gravy; it has a different function, even though both are sauces. Knowing whether custard or gravy is used more frequently is really not interesting or relevant. Construction projects are not all the same as each other, so it is more important to understand how to organize the work than it is to try to figure out what is more popular. It is also important to understand that the way that risks are allocated will vary along with the economic climate. Contractors will turn away risky business if they have plenty of work, but will take on high-risk contracts when they are hungry.

In the current economic climate, what is the most likely area that construction can deliver more for less?

I was asked this question by a journalist, and found it difficult to give a straight answer, but on reflection, came up with this:

Construction can indeed deliver more for less. The sector always has done. It has always been possible to cut corners and substitute good materials with low quality substitutes. Apart from substituting poor materials for good ones, we are also routinely de-skilling and de-professionaling the design and construction processes in every way possible to respond to clients who are not willing or able to pay for a good job. In the current economic downturn, it is inevitable that construction quality and social responsibility will be low on most agendas. But this does not provide more for less, in the long run. Perhaps what we need is a concerted attempt to persuade our clients of the medium to long-term benefits of good design and construction?

House of Commons

It was quite a kick jumping into a taxi and requesting "House of Commons, please". But the traffic around Westminster slowed to a useless crawl, so I walked the last part. The occasion was the launch of a report, wittily titled, "Never waste a good crisis".

After a couple of glasses of wine and a few nibbles, Nick Raynsford was introduced to us. A very good speaker, of course, being an MP. Good eye contact, engaging, and clear points. He drew our attention to one graph in the report and told us how the best construction projects had done really well, but the rest had a long way to go. He shared with us his vision for an improved industry focused on value, and congratulated Andrew Wolstenhulme and his team on a great piece of work. Andrew then gave us an overview and, like a true gentleman, diverted the spotlight to the team rather than himself. One strange point that he made was that for every pound spent on deign, ten are spent on building, a hundred on operating and the benefit is a thousand. Yes, I know, almost impossible to figure out what it can mean, but the last incarnation of this kind of ratio was 1:5:200, a ratio that claimed that for every pound of building there are five of maintenance and 200 of operating. Clearly nonsense, otherwise construction would be half a percent of GDP. We debunked that myth in a conference paper (click here if you want to read it). I was happy with the idea of construction being pitched at roughly 10% of GDP and design being roughly 10% of construction. These are near enough in terms of orders of magnitude. But I had no idea how we could get £1,000 of "benefit" from £10 of construction. All very bizarre, but worryingly typical in this kind of gathering.

Then Vaughan Burnand, Chairman of CE enjoined us to keep the faith and continue to believe in the change agenda. By this time I was wondering if I'd stumbled into some strange kind of church gathering.

I had been involved in one of the multidisciplinary workshops that were part of the background work for this report, I was interested in meeting those participants again, and in seeing what the team had made of our input. Of course, few from our group had made it. And it was hard to recognise our words in the report. Shortly after our workshop, I received a draft nine-page summary of all we'd said, and I remember being satisfied that most of what we'd said had been captured. Perhaps it was not sufficiently "on-message" to have made it into the final report. Or, more likely, perhaps there was just too much of it! The section on industry structure in the report picks up a few of the main points and makes good use of them, so I am pleased with the impact of this. The report is available for download here. It was good to meet up with so many friends and colleagues from the industry, and catch up, and it was particularly good to see reports aobut how we organize ourselves being launched in the House of Commons. Have a look at the report, and post your comments here - it would be interesting to see what others make of it.

Political leaders from construction professions

In the Co-operative Network for Building Researchers, an international e-mail list of people in the same field as me, a question was raised by Leonhard Bernold: "...our profession lacks direct connections into the political sphere, despite our crucial roles everywhere you look. How many politicians are there in the country you live with an engineering education?"

That got me thinking, and I started to make a list, to which others then added, so (probably a pointless exercise) this is a place where I can maintain and edit a list of construction professionals who achieved political influence:

• Boris Yeltsin, became president of Russia


• Osama bin Laden is sometimes said to be have qualified as a civil engineer, but it is not too clear


• Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), Palestinian Leader


• Heberto Castillo Martinez, 68, Leftist Political Leader in Mexico


• Ismail Abu Shanab: prominent leader, co-founder of Hamas


• Hundreds of engineers and architects are challenging the official 9/11 Commission Report


• Herbert Macaulay (1864-1945) was a Nigerian political leader. One of the first leaders of the Nigerian opposition to British colonial rule, he was also a civil engineer, journalist, and accomplished musician.


• Mohamed Ahmad Mahgoub, Sudanese political leader, very interesting life. A poet, a lawyer, and a very active politician at the centre of the Suez crisis in 1956.


• Robert Stephenson (1803-1859) Conservative Member of Parliament for Whitby 1847-59


• Lee Myung-bak (b1941) President of South Korea since 2008. Although he ran Hyundai Construction, his University education was Business Administration, so maybe this does not count.


• Ernest Marples, UK Minister of Transport


• Sir Keith Joseph, Director of Bovis, UK Member of Parliament 1956-87, Secretary of State for Social Services 1970-4, Secretary of State for Industry 1979-81, Secretary of State for Education and Science 1981-6.


• Paul Channon, UK Member of Parliament 1959-97,Minister for the Arts 1981-3, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1986–7, Secretary of State for Transport 1987–9.


• Nick Ridley (1929-93), UK Member of Parliament 1959-92, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1981–3, Secretary of State for Transport 1983–6, Secretary of State for the Environment 1986–9, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry 1989–90.


• John Gilbert (b1927), UK Member of Parliament 1970-97, Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1974-5, Minister for Transport 1975-6, Minister of State for Defence 1976-9


• Nasir El Rufai (b.1960) Director General of The Bureau of Public Enterprises, and former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja from 16 July 2003 to 29 May 2007. Member of the ruling People's Democratic Party.


• President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran - A civil engineer with a PhD in civil engineering and traffic transportation planning. Also a lecturer and member of faculty at Iran University of Science and Technology.

We could go on and on with this, but I think the point is made that there are senior politicians all over the place who are engineers! What I don't understand is why people jump to conclusions like this without attempting to find out the truth of the matter first.

Profound misunderstandings

I came across some notes I had made at a meeting with some industry people back in 2005. The purpose of the meeting was a launch of some research these business people had done which was about the construction sector. Interestingly, one of the opening statements was that they had interviewed people from 50 major private sector organizations, which by anyone's reckoning (because of the collective spending power of these organizations) made it a major study. Should I have been pointing out how many papers we had published in CM&E that has larger samples? They were confident that no one had done such a significant study before or since. I remember thinking that they were so confident, they did not need to do a literature search in order to ascertain this for sure.

Another speaker declaimed that if you do not know what kind of health care you need 25 years from now, then you should not let a 25 year PFI contract. And if you do not know how we will be educating children in ten years' time, then do not let a 25-year PFI contract. I wondered what he thought of 999-year leases on land. I wondered if he had a 25 year mortgage on his own house, even though he did not know what his lifestyle would be like ten years from now, or where he would be working. I wondered if he knew what it meant for a business to own real estate, and then I wondered how he had become so important in our industry.

He went on to talk about "value", a word that still makes me squirm. Why does it make me squirm? It is indefinable because it means all things to all people, and it usually is introduced into conversations about the impoverished nature of the kind of objectives that business set themselves for their "key performance indicators". This guy defined value as what you wake up worrying about in the morning. Ha! What wonderful mumbo-jumbo.

The session included some e-voting opportunities where each audience member had a little device to select from options that were presented to them. Fascinating. Questions appeared on the screen, with 4-5 options to choose from. Often, the last option would be "other", and the speaker clearly had not wanted this, because in putting each question to us, he described this option as being there for those who could not make up their minds between the specific options he had listed. We could see the collective choices being counted on the screen in real time. The speaker knew what he wanted us to answer, because whenever the majority chose the option that he favoured, he used the phrase "finally being honest"! What was even worse, he then told us that he was going to use this as "data" to inform the policy for the organization he represented. I despaired.

There were many other presentations that day, from a series of industrial captains, many of whom had been involved in the preparation of the reports being launched. There were some interesting points that I took away from the meeting. One speaker asked why people were so preoccupied about capacity when efficiency (productivity) was so low. Surely we should first improve productivity, before trying to increase the capacity of such an inefficient sector. Another questioned the tone of the rhetoric surrounding partnering in the industry. He said that driving improvements from the client side is not as effective as equal partnership. Even radical change can be made step-by-step. But it is rare to find partnering agreements that are genuinely equal in terms of commitment.

As is often the case, I wondered about how we could bring industry and academia closer together. This was five years ago. I think we are making progress.

The Interventionists

I am extraordinarily lucky to have team of researchers working on various aspects of construction procurement. We meet most Thursday mornings to discuss progress and share ideas. As you can see, we are a diverse bunch who originate from many parts of the world: Ghana, China, Taiwan, Nigeria, England, Iran, Italy and Germany. Because they work on different projects, we needed a name for the group that was not associated with any one source of funding or any single research project. Since we want our research to make a difference, The Interventionists emerged as the name for the group. This constantly reminds us that, in the long run, we seek to create interventions that have an impact, whether in theory-building, teaching or practice.